Remembering Dore Pile Grounds

Land usage changes through the years. The small patch of ground located along the highway south of the Dore elevator served as a sugarbeet pile grounds for many years until sugar factory officials closed it in 1996. During that time, residents saw a lot of heavy truck traffic in and out of the pile grounds during harvest. Today, that same piece of ground now stores tanker rail cars for the movement of crude oil and residents see a tremendous amount of truck traffic all year long, not just during harvest.

Randy Jones, Sidney Sugars, remembers the Dore pile grounds that served 26 growers and stored 3000 acres of beets at harvest. Jones worked as an agriculturist at the time and handled the Dore pile grounds as part of his responsibilities. “The scale house was just south of the Dore elevator, and we piled the beets to the south,” Jones says. “It was a terrible pile ground. It was narrow, we always had long truck lines, and it was very busy and very bad for trucks. We had one piler that we had to move after five or six dumps, so it was slow going.”

He adds, “We could only have five trucks in line at the scale house at one time because there was no more room.”

To add insult to injury, computers had not yet arrived on the scene, so the wait at the scale house resulted in part because everything had to be calculated by hand. “The paperwork really held up the process,” Jones remarks.

To make life easier for everyone, growers who hauled to Dore worked out a delivery system that included the pile ground at Fairview. All growers with fields to the south of a designated line hauled beets to Dore, while growers with fields to the north of the line took the beets to Fairview. Growers with fields on both sides of the line got together and worked out a system so half of the growers first harvested fields bound for Dore while the other half first harvested beets delivered to the Fairview pile grounds. When both sides had finished their respective fields, they switched with neighbors and harvested their fields on the other side of the line. “This system worked well,” Jones says. “Approximately 15 growers would haul to Dore at any one time which helped to relieve the congestion.”

Grower Terry Cayko remembers this system very well. He hauled beets to Dore as a youngster and as an adult, and he participated in this method of delivery. “We had our own system and it worked very well,” Cayko says. “We figured it out so we didn’t all harvest beets on one side of the line all at the same time.”

Cayko recalls long waits at the Dore pile grounds, but he also says that this provided time to visit with neighbors and to have a little fun. “There was usually about an hour’s wait when we dumped at Dore,” Cayko remarks. “Trucks came in and lined up at the scale. If there were a lot of trucks in the area, we were packed in like sardines.”

“However,” he continues, “being in line so long, we had a game we’d play. There was a railing against a storage house and we’d toss nickels and dimes to see if we could land the coins on the railing ledge. We played for the coins. Anyone who landed a coin on the ledge won. It was a fun way to pass the time, and it provided good camaraderie with other growers who were waiting.”

Because of the narrowness of the grounds, the crowded conditions, combined with North Dakota road restrictions, the sugar factory decided to combine the Dore, Marley and Fairview pile grounds into one super station. “It was more economical to combine the three stations into one,” Jones says. “We built the super pile ground, Sugar Valley, at Fairview, to make more room and to speed up the process. 1996 was the last year we used Dore; we opened Sugar Valley and used it for the first time in 1997.”

The piler used at the Dore receiving station now sits at the Sugar Valley station. Dore, now used as a crude oil storage and transfer facility, still sees a lot of truck traffic, not just at harvest time but year round. Increased traffic on Highway 58 convinced many growers to use gravel roads to travel to and from Sugar Valley while delivering this year’s crop of beets.