growing operations had shifted to the Salinas Valley, so he built the 42-mile narrow-gauge Pajaro Valley Consolidated Railroad to ship his sugar beets from the fields near Salinas to Watsonville. In 1899, Spreckels opened an even larger factory closer to the main sugar-beet fields. He named the new factory Spreckels Sugar Company. A company town grew up around the plant, and still exists as Spreckels, California. The town and the sugar factory were important in the early life of novelist John Steinbeck, and several scenes from his novels take place there. In the 1890s, Spreckels helped found the national sugar trust and renamed his San Francisco property the Western Sugar Refinery, and continued to increase his control over the Hawaiian sugar trade. This control over the industry was irksome to Hawaiian planters not directly affiliated with Spreckels and his associates. At the end of the 1890s, they attempted to break free. In 1905, the planters established a cooperative refinery in Crockett, California, the California and Hawaiian Sugar Company (C&H). The Spreckels dominance in sugar was broken, but the Western Sugar Refinery continued operation in San Francisco until 1951. Spreckels was the president of the San Francisco and San Joaquin Valley Railroad¹ from 1895 until it was sold to the Santa Fe Railway in 1901. The railroad built a line that competed with the Southern Pacific through the San Joaquin Valley between Richmond and Bakersfield. The railroad was welcome competition for shippers who were strangled by Southern Pacific's monopoly on shipping rates in the valley. Today, this route is BNSF's main route to Northern California. In Hawaii Spreckels' interest in Hawaii's sugar industry began in 1876. Prior to that time, Spreckels had opposed the Reciprocity Treaty of 1875, which increased the Kingdom of Hawaii's access to the American sugar market, because he feared that the low tariffs on Hawaiian sugar would hurt his business. However, Spreckels eventually decided to establish his own plantations in Hawaii and traveled there one year later. In 1878, Spreckels founded Spreckelsville, a company town along the northern shore of Maui. To do so, he purchased and leased of land. By 1892, Spreckelsville was the largest sugarcane plantation in the world and employed thousands of immigrant farm laborers from Japan, Korea, China, and other countries. Spreckels then incorporated the Hawaiian Commercial and Sugar Company (HC&S) with Hermann Schussler. Spreckels became friends with Walter M. Gibson, adviser to