Le Hunt

The story

Le Hunt was built to make cement. In 1905 the United Kansas Portland Cement Company bought 1,500 acres northwest of Independence, Kansas, put up a large plant, and laid out a company town for its workers, naming it for Leigh Hunt, head of the engineering firm that built the works. Within a year more than a thousand people lived there — and, briefly, the town marshal was a young cowboy named Tom Mix, before he became a movie star.

The cement business proved shaky. The plant closed for repairs in 1913, the company went bankrupt in 1914, and after passing through a series of owners it shut for good around the end of the First World War. The equipment was sold off and many of the houses were physically moved elsewhere, leaving little for the woods to reclaim.

Today the plant's tall concrete ruins stand in the trees along the eastern shore of Elk City Lake — one of the more striking industrial ghosts in Kansas. Local legend says a worker fell into a wall of wet concrete and was entombed there, his name scratched into the setting cement; it makes a good story among the ruins, whatever the truth of it.

What remains today

The concrete ruins of the cement plant in the woods along Elk City Lake, plus foundations of the vanished company town.