Sugar Beet Park, San Cristo Street, Fort Collins, CO
Located at the southwest corner of Vine Drive and Ninth Street, the sugar beet park features a playground, picnic shelter, turf field, pollinator garden and basketball hoops. The playground is built around a 12-foot-tall wooden sugar beet structure.
The 5.3-acre park site also features a zip line swing, trellis and rolling benches that can be pushed across miniature railroad tracks.
The park is central to Fort Collins’ Tres Colonias neighborhoods and seeks to honor the history of the area, which was historically home to sugar beet fields farmed by migrant laborers from Mexico and Germans from Russia who started immigrating to Northern Colorado at the turn of the 20th century.
Sugar beets were once grown all over northern Colorado, forming the root of a key agricultural industry that attracted both people and money to this region for decades. Fort Collins joined the “beet boom” in 1903 when Great Western Sugar Company opened a sugar factory along East Vine Drive.
Sugar beets are finicky; they require precise planting, thinning, and harvesting, and thus a large labor force. Great Western Sugar actively recruited people to Northern Colorado to work the beet fields, including Germans from Russia and peoples from the Southwestern United States and Mexico. Many of these workers lived in Buckingham, Andersonville, and Alta Vista. These three neighborhoods (Las Tres Colonias) near Vine Drive and Lemay Avenue still retain many unique historic features.
Learn more about the history of the sugar beet industry in Fort Collins: “Silver Wedge: The Sugar Beet Industry in Fort Collins”
Tourism Information
The park features a picnic pavilion, playground, open turf field, pollinator garden, and more.
Accessibility
Visitors Welcome; ADA accessible
Directions
Sugar Beet Park is located on the southwest corner of East Vine Drive and 9th Street.
