This is part three of four articles about Dixon’s cement plant, which opened in 1907 but is set to close completely in the next few months. This part focuses on key historic events in its rise and fall.

In 1913, a major boost for Dixon’s cement plant came from the nation’s proposed Lincoln Highway. The famous project sought to build a “hard-surfaced road” that stretched from coast to coast. The new thoroughfare, which came through the heart of Dixon, would facilitate faster transportation for the emerging automobile industry, replacing bumpy dirt roads that turned to mud after each rain.

The Sandusky Portland Cement Company, which owned the Dixon plant, saw the long-term business benefits of building roads made of concrete. Since some highway planners thought cement would be too expensive, the company donated thousands of barrels of cement for “seedling miles” for the Lincoln Highway.

The incentive plan worked. These “seedling miles” inspired thousands of miles of concrete roads across America. The Lincoln Highway sparked enormous growth for the Dixon cement plant, and the road put Dixon on the map of transcontinental commerce, travel and tourism.

Defeating the Depression

Employment at the Dixon cement plant reached its peak during its first three decades when its workforce included 250 to 300 locals. Even during the Great Depression (1929-1939) when many Americans were thrown out of work, the plant kept Dixonites employed at high-paying jobs with only a few brief stoppages.

National unemployment peaked at 26% in 1933, but the Dixon cement plant kept the local economic engine churning 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. In 1929, the plant’s annual payroll exceeded $456,000, which equates to about $8.5 million today. As the Telegraph then reported, practically all of that payroll was spent with Dixon merchants.

Dixon responded by granting major projects to its cement plant. Emerging from the Depression in 1939, contractors used Dixon-made cement to construct the new Galena Avenue bridge, the new Loveland Community Building and the addition to the Reynolds Wire plant, now known as Commerce Towers.

More support came from the Lee County board, which insisted on using Dixon-made cement in all county highway improvements and bridges. In 1942, the Dixon cement plant received its “largest single unit order” to date to build the Green River Ordnance Plant, between Dixon and Amboy, for the war effort. The project required about 100,000 barrels of Dixon cement.

Acquiring more land

When the cement plant opened in 1907, it owned about 300 acres of land that was expected to provide enough prime limestone rock for 100 years. In 1962, the Telegraph reported that the Dixon plant had excavated about 3,820,000 square feet of land to an average depth of 36 feet. That’s the equivalent cubic feet occupied by 5.4 Sears (Willis) Towers.

In the 1990s, the company greatly expanded its acreage, which was then projected to have enough quality limestone to last 500 years. Expansion efforts reached a peak by 2015, when the company owned about 2,000 acres stretching from the main plant on Route 2 to White Oak Estates on the north, to Sink Hollow Road on the east and to Rock River on the west.

But after the company suspended manufacturing operations in 2018, it began selling off its property. By the end of 2025, the company expects to have sold all the land except about 40 acres in the immediate area around the plant. Those 40 acres will likely go to the next owner of the property.

Changing hands

The cement plant has had only five owners in its 118-year history. Sandusky Portland Cement Company, which became known as Medusa Portland Cement Company around 1930, was the only owner from its beginning in 1907 to 1980.

Lone Star Industries owned it from 1980 until 1984, when it sold the plant to Dixon-Marquette Cement. Cemex Central Plains Cement bought it in 2003 but then sold it in 2005 to St. Marys Cement, a subsidiary of Votorantim Cimentos of Sao Paulo, Brazil, one of the largest cement producers in the world.

Winding down

Even though the Dixon cement plant employed about 300 workers for most of its first 30 years, its total workforce dropped below 200 after 1960. After 2000, the company generally employed fewer than 100. Those numbers dropped to 20 in 2018. Today, only three employees remain, and they expect to complete their employment sometime in 2026.

The plant’s iconic 300-foot smokestack was demolished in early August 2025. Plant manager Paul Biggerstaff said that most of the remaining buildings will be demolished by year’s end. Demolition efforts, he said, seek to maximize the property’s appeal to the next owner and to minimize the possibility of a cement competitor buying the property.

On July 29, Biggerstaff, a long-time Dixonite and 40-year plant employee, led me on a 3-hour tour of the facility and its vast acreage. Throughout the property, he noted the company’s extensive efforts to clean the land, plant trees and to “prepare the property for something else useful.”

“I live here too,” he explained.

Reason for closing

The primary reason for closing the plant has little to do with the diminished limestone resources, labor costs or any concerns about EPA issues. Rather, the real problem with the Dixon plant’s viability involves transportation.

Most St. Marys plants are along the Great Lakes or major waterways that can ship its product by barges, which can carry 100 times more cement than a truck. The Dixon plant also lost its connection to the railroad around 1985.

“The real thing that killed us,” said Biggerstaff, “was mass transportation.”

In our final installment to be published Sept. 12, we will tell the heart-rending story of the 1957 cement plant tragedy that made national news.

• Dixon native Tom Wadsworth is a writer, speaker and occasional historian. He holds a Ph.D. in New Testament.