Antioch: Potash Boom-Town

Sheridan County's own history of the boom names the plaque's two graduates as John Show and Carl Modisett, who began testing the lakes for potash in 1910; a mineral claim on Jesse Lake followed in 1912. The first plant was not at Antioch but at Hoffland, where the Potash Reduction Company piped brine about three miles from Jesse Lake and owned the entire town of some 600 people, barracks, laundry and the A-Muse-U Theater included. History Nebraska keeps a 1955 photograph of its ruin. Hoffland outlasted Antioch: it shipped its last carloads on October 12, 1922, and never reopened.

What the plaque says

Antioch: Potash Boom-Town For a few years, the Antioch vicinity was one of the most important potash-producing regions in the nation. Antioch grew from a small village to a town of about 2,000. When the First World War broke out, the United States was cut off from European sources of potash, which was a component of fertilizer used in the cotton belt. Two University of Nebraska graduates in chemistry developed a method for separating potash from the alkaline lakes of the Nebraska Sand Hills. Large-scale production began in 1916. The potash-producing brine was pumped from the lakes to reduction plants near the railroads. By the spring of 1918, five plants were in operation in this vicinity. Nebraska potash was used in the manufacture of fertilizer, epsom salts, soda, and other products. With the end of the war, importation of foreign potash resumed. Because French and German potash could be produced more cheaply than the Nebraska product, the Nebraska potash boom collapsed. The last Antioch plant closed in 1921. Today, the ruins of reduction plants and pumping stations bear mute testimony to the activity which once made Antioch a major potash production center. Sheridan County Historical Society Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Carhenge — 14 mi
  A son's memorial to his father on the family farm north of Alliance: Stonehenge copied to scale in old American cars sprayed gray, dedicated at the 1987 summer solstice.

More markers nearby

• Alliance Army Air Field — 12 mi
• Burlington Locomotive 719 — 15 mi
• Spade Ranch — 16 mi
• Japanese Balloon Bombs — 23 mi