In 1888, Claus Spreckels, so long a prominent figure in the sugar world, established a beet factory at Watsonville, Santa Cruz county, in the rich Pajaro valley. At first its capacity was 300 tons of beets per day, and, the result of the operations being favorable, this was increased from time to time until it reached 1000 tons of beets per day. The Watsonville factory developed into the largest beet plant in America and remained so until 1898, in which year Mr. Spreckels erected a modern 3000-ton plant at Salinas, fifteen miles distant. Since then the new factory has sliced all of the beets grown in that territory and the old one has been dismantled. The capacity of the Salinas plant now is greater than that of any other beet factory in the United States, being 4000 tons per day. The Oxnard brothers, Henry T., Benjamin, James G. and Robert, with J. G. Hamilton, W. Bayard Cutting and R. Fulton Cutting, organized the Oxnard Beet Sugar company in 1889, and in December of that year broke ground for a beet-sugar factory of 350 tons slicing capacity at Grand Island, Nebraska. In 1891 they built two more, one at Norfolk, Nebraska, and one at Chino, California, both of the same size as the Grand Island plant. The machinery for the first two factories was bought in France and that for the last one came from Germany. Toward the end of 1897, construction at Oxnard was begun, and in 1899 a consolidation of all these factories was effected under the corporate title of the American Beet Sugar company. At the close of 1890, sixty years after the first experiment at Philadelphia, there were only three beet-sugar factories in operation in America; those at Alvarado, Watsonville and Grand Island. The total capacity of the three plants was eight hundred tons of beets a day, or ten thousand tons of sugar a year. France in the same period increased her production from 5000 to 770,000 tons a year through favorable legislation providing for the payment of bounties. In the United States, whenever beet-sugar enterprises have been started, there has generally been some legal provision for payment by the state of bounty on the quantity of sugar produced. The story of how this responsibility was evaded is hardly a pleasant one. In Nebraska, for example, three different legislatures enacted laws providing for bounty on beet sugar, but in each case the following legislature either repealed the act or failed to make appropriations for the necessary funds. In the early nineties, Michigan passed a bounty law which resulted in several beet factories being established in that state, but when the claims for bounty were presented for payment, the state auditor refused to honor them, and his action was upheld by the state supreme court on the ground of unconstitutionality. A similar condition arose in Idaho. Minnesota paid bounties in 1890 and 1899, after which the law was declared unconstitutional.