Drive Highway 2 through the Sandhills lakes country and you’ll pass odd concrete ruins in the middle of nowhere, as if a small industrial city melted into the prairie. That’s Antioch — or what became of it. When WWI cut off German potash imports, the alkaline lakes here were found to hold the stuff, and by spring 1918 five reduction plants were running near the railroad.
Antioch went from a village of a few hundred to a boomtown of over 2,000 almost overnight, on the back of a wartime price spike and a state land-leasing scandal that the Alliance paper gleefully debunked. When European imports resumed in 1921, the whole industry died in months. The machinery was scrapped, the buildings salvaged, and Antioch shrank back to fewer than 25 people.
The ruins were added to the National Register in 1979, and a historical marker sits along Highway 2 just west of town. It’s a pull-off-and-look stop, not a tour — read the marker, imagine 2,000 people and five factories where there’s now grass, and keep driving the Sandhills Journey Byway.