page_title: Yocemento, Kansas
section_title: U.S. Portland Cement Company
hierarchical_section_title: Yocemento, Kansas / History / U.S. Portland Cement Company
caption_attribution_description: English: Limestone on the edge of Cedar Bluff State Park, Kansas, USA.
context_page_description: Yocemento is an unincorporated community in Big Creek Township, Ellis County, Kansas, United States. The settlement lies across the banks of Big Creek where the seasonal stream meanders against the base of bluffs capped by massive limestone blocks, in which lies the 20th-century origin of the community.
  The original settler name for the location was Hog Back, with a railway station first established there with that name in 1881. Hog Back was the local name for the high limestone and chalk ridge that runs from just west of old Fort Hays to Ellis. These bluffs are the local outcrop of the Fort Hays Limestone. Founded in 1906 by business partners Erasmus Haworth, the first state geologist of Kansas, and I. M. Yost, leading businessman and miller of Hays, Yocemento is one of the several communities around the outskirts of the High Plains that were founded to use Fort Hays Limestone to manufacture Portland cement.
context_section_description: The United States Portland Cement Company was founded by partners Erasmus Haworth and I. M. Yost:
  Erasmus Haworth was the first state geologist of Kansas, working out of the Kansas Geological Survey at the University of Kansas. He previously had been frustrated in Ellis County, unable to dissuade the 1890s gold rush hoax in the adjoining southern corners of Ellis and Trego Counties about 12 miles (19 km) south and west of present Yocemento (see Smoky Hill City and Chetolah). Accurately predicting the discovery of oil at the Yocemento site, he was later known as the "father of oil" in western Kansas.
  I. M. Yost was a long-standing miller in Hays; a leading businessman not only of that community, but of early 1900s western Kansas. In the 1870s, he built the first of the flour mills that dotted the "Great American Desert" by the first decades of the 20th century.
  In 1906, Erasmus Haworth was revising and enlarging his first geological map of Kansas and sought a guide for the area, saying years later, "I had heard of Ike Yost, I wanted to meet the man. I knew he had been in Hays many years and thought he would give me some pointers on topography of the country.
  Together, the two climbed the high bluff on a south bend of Big Creek and took in the scene. Riding back to Hays, Haworth pitched the idea of a cement plant at that bluff. He thought this could be the site of the most profitable cement mill in the state; only gravity would be needed to move the limestone from the top of the bluff to a mill in the valley. Yost saw that with no capital investment ample water was to be found in the creek and the transcontinental railroad passing through the site could bring in fuel and ship out cement as far as either coast without freight transfer. Yost also observed that they could leverage the largest industry in western Kansas by founding an adjoining town and selling the lots.
  The partners soon founded the United States Portland Cement Company and began selling stock, Yost selling a third of the shares. The town of Yocemento (a portmanteau of Yost and cement) was platted in 1907. A post office opened that same year.
  Construction of the mill began in 1907. Freeborn Engineering and Construction Co. of Kansas City, Mo. were the engineers and contractors for the plant. First, a gravity-worked cable lift and then a trolley were installed to lower limestone from the quarry to the mill. By mid-1908, the mill was operational, and the town included a general store, hotel, and restaurant. Many local residents employed at the mill were ethnic Hungarians who had constructed a Catholic church at the site.
  The mill initially operated at a small profit and the product's test strength was as good as any of the best cements. Cement produced in Yocemento was used to build the Kansas City Union Station (then second-largest in the country) and to pave the Denver Tramway.
  Sale of cement to these projects was in competition with the established cement syndicates of Kansas City and Denver. It was locally perceived that these concerns then "ganged up" on the Yocemento mill to force it out of business. In particular, the Denver interests (Boettcher Company) pressured the Union Pacific to not service Yocemento with Colorado coal.
  Denied affordable coal, the plains cement mills were able to make use of oil, newly produced in eastern Kansas and Oklahoma. A penny postcard photograph shows three large oil tanks at the Yocemento cement mill.
  Missouri cement plants undercut market prices and railroads applied surcharges to the plains cement mills. In 1911, U. S. Portland Cement Co. filed complaint with the ICC for relief from a perceived arbitrary rail freight surcharge of around 3 cents per hundredweight of cement compared to the lower cement shipping rates charged to manufactures in Missouri (between Kansas City and St. Louis). This complaint was joined by several other cement manufactures in the open plains of Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Montana, Texas, and Utah. However, the ICC ruled no evidence of overt shipping overcharge except in t
caption: Fort Hays Limestone
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