Hay Springs has nearly six hundred inhabitants, has three churches, two banks, two grain elevators, a potato market house, opera house, electric lights, water works and Beaver Valley telephone. It has the Northwestern railroad, Western Union telegraph and American express. It is on the state highway from Norfolk and Sioux City to the Black Hills, and at the junction of a state road leading south to Alliance, Scottsbluff and Denver. Several rural telephone lines radiate out from the town; to Grayson, Moomaw, and White Clay. About twenty stores and restaurants supply the mercantile requirements of thq town and surrounding country. The Niobrara river is about fifteen miles south.

Irrigation at Mirage A number of years ago, an appropriation was made from the Niobrara river, for irrigating what was called the Mirage irrigation project. The headgate was in section 26-29- 48 in Dawes county. It had two reservoir sites in Sheridan county, in section ten, 29-46, and in section six, 29-45. It crossed Pepper creek, and took in a large body of land. For some reason the matter was abandoned. In the spring of 1921, a number of the farmers and owners of land in this vicinity, made a tour of inspection of the irrigated territory in and around Scottsbluff, and so enthusiastic are they that now the project is to be revived under the name of Hay Springs Irrigation

HISTORY OF WESTERN NEBRASKA

District. The development of this idea will mean a family on each eighty acre farm under the ditch, instead of the sparse population there now, and it will mean a rapid doubling up of the land values, and earning power of the farms.