Yocemento: The Town That Named Itself After the Thing That Killed It

There was once a town in Ellis County called Yocemento. The name combined the surname of founder I. M. Yost with the thing he and Erasmus Haworth planned to produce there: cement. They formed the United States Portland Cement Company in nineteen oh six, platted a townsite in nineteen oh seven, and had the plant operating by mid-nineteen oh eight. The workforce was largely Hungarian immigrants. The post office opened. Yocemento was a real place with real residents.

By nineteen seventeen it was gone. The cement plant had been losing money and went into bankruptcy. Equipment was sold to a competitor in Denver. The post office closed on February fifteenth, nineteen seventeen. Most of the Hungarian population left immediately. A few German and Russian families stayed in the surrounding countryside, but the town itself vanished. Yocemento is now classified as a ghost town, remembered mainly for the unusual distinction of having named itself after the industry that eventually abandoned it.