In the 1890s, the Dutch beet sugar industry was reaching north. Frisian farmers grew good beets, but shipping them south to the sugar factories of Brabant ate the margins. A local factory could buy the beets at a lower price and keep the freight money in the region. The Frisian Society for Agriculture studied a cooperative in the early 1890s and concluded the demand was there but the capital was not - too few farmers willing to put up the shares. Groningen and Westerkwartier industrial societies ran soil experiments confirming the local clay would grow beets. When the cooperative plan failed to convince local farmers, industrialists picked it up and founded the Noord-Nederlandsche Beetwortelsuikerfabriek in 1896. The terrain they chose was a triangular plot at Vierverlaten, a hamlet just west of Hoogkerk, named for a lock in the Hoendiep canal that connected it to Groningen and Leeuwarden.

Construction began in September 1896 and continued through the night. The site required 2,500 piles driven into the soft Groningen ground for a solid foundation. The factory itself was built by Braunschweigische Maschinenbauanstalt - the firm of Brunswick, deep in beet country - and turned operational on 1 October 1897 at a total cost of 1.2 million guilders. The main building was 130 metres long, 22 wide, 23 high. Inside, the beets travelled vertically. They were flushed in by water, weighed and sliced into cossettes at the top, sent through a 28-boiler diffusion battery that drew sugar out into hot water, then pressed for pulp. The juice climbed through carbon-dioxide and sulfurous-acid saturations, then through two quadruple-effect evaporators with 2,200 square metres of heated surface, then through filter towers and vacuum boilers - and finally, in the suikerhuis at the heart of the works, into centrifuges a metre in diameter that flung the crystals clear of the syrup. Thirteen Cornwall boilers, two 45-metre chimneys, and a pair of dynamos kept the entire choreography in motion.

The factory's defining feature was its waterfront. One long side of the triangular site ran 500 metres along the Hoendiep, and barges could moor the whole length. Channels had been dug all along the quay so that, after offloading, beets could be shoved into the water and flushed by current straight to the washing station. An automated 64-metre transporter loaded beet pulp - what remained after the sugar had been pulled out - back into the same barges for return delivery to farms as cattle feed. The Aduarderdiep connected Vierverlaten to north Groningen and north-east Friesland; the Harlingen-Nieuweschans railway ran along the third side of the triangle. The factory could be reached three ways. Through the 1940s, more beets came by water than by any other means.

When ice closed the canals in December 1921 and the Friesch-Groningsche factory in Groningen city was forced to halt its campaign, the news singled out who would lose their work: 400 beet skippers, 100 beet weighers, and 200 bietenvletters. The skippers were professional inland sailors who commanded a binnenschip, a freight barge with one or two masts and, increasingly, an engine. The bietenvletters were different - laborers, not sailors, who rented prams to move beets over canals too small for the bigger barges. A pram was a dumb barge, a flat-bottomed boat with no propulsion of its own that had to be towed or poled. Mr. Zwerver and his family were typical: a brickyard worker for nine months of the year, a hand-towing waterman for three, living on his rented boat with his wife at the tiller, always hurrying so he could squeeze in one more freight before the campaign ended. The factory ran on these people. When the last small harbour at Minnertsga sent its last shipment of beets in 1970, an entire seasonal economy ended.

The Wester Suikerraffinaderij of Amsterdam quietly bought a majority of Noord-Nederlandsche shares in early May 1918 at 265 percent of nominal value, beating out a competing offer of 290 percent from the cooperative Friesch-Groningsche. In October 1919 the Wester combined with two other firms to create the Centrale Suiker Maatschappij (CSM), which became one of the largest companies in the Netherlands. Vierverlaten became a CSM daughter. The interwar years were brutal. Sugar dropped from 40.10 guilders in 1919 to 17.30 in 1921, and the next season's beet acreage collapsed. The Great Depression turned the 1930/31 campaign into a catastrophe - in a single year the factory lost a third of its value. In 1935 CSM wrote off 60 percent of its share capital. After the war, the picture was steadier but no less competitive. CSM closed factory after factory: Sas van Gent, Oud Beijerland, Steenbergen, eventually Breda in 2005. In 2006 CSM sold its sugar division to Cosun Beet Company - its only Dutch competitor - which then closed its own Friesch-Groningsche factory and kept Vierverlaten. Today only two beet sugar factories remain in the Netherlands. Vierverlaten is one of them.

Road transport overtook water in 1956. By the early 1970s, over 80 percent of beets arrived at Vierverlaten by lorry. In 1972 a hydraulic bridge that tilted lorries to 42 degrees turned unloading into a near-instant operation - the truck simply dumped its load onto the factory grounds. But Vierverlaten never quite gave up the water. After the Puttershoek sugar factory closed in 2004, it became the last sugar factory in the Netherlands still receiving part of its beet by barge. The beets from the island of Texel are shipped from Oudeschild and unloaded directly onto factory grounds. Limestone, used in the saturation process, still arrives by barge as well. The 2015 expansion, timed to the end of European sugar quotas, gave the factory more capacity for the open market. The two 32-metre concrete silos completed in 1965 - and the 40-metre one finished in 1976 - still rise above the flat fields. From a distance they look like all the other industrial silos of agricultural northern Europe. They contain about 80,000 tonnes of white sugar.