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Abandoned mines › Arkansas
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Scott County, Arkansas

Scott County, Arkansas has 24 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1958–1987, including 1 mine openings (shafts, adits and air shafts). OSMRE's abandoned mine land inventory lists 6 problems in the county, 1 of them not yet reclaimed. MSHA's register carries 11 mines in the county with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps covering Scott County, every OSMRE abandoned mine land problem in the county, and every MSHA-registered mine here with status Abandoned. Named features are listed below; unnamed ones are counted by type. Locations are deliberately not shown: this page says what abandoned workings are in the county, not where to find them. They are dangerous and should not be entered.

Mapped mine features (USGS)
24
Mine openings
1
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
1
MSHA mines marked abandoned
11
0 features carry a name0 prospect pits10 quadrangle maps, published 1958–1987 6 OSMRE problems, 5 reclaimed 2 MSHA mines abandoned and sealed
What the features are
  1. Mine openings
    shafts, adits, air shafts, portals and vertical openings: the ways into underground workings
    1 3.3%
  2. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    4 13.3%
  3. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    18 60.0%
  4. Dumps, tailings, spoil and gob
    what mining left above ground
    1 3.3%
  5. Other reclamation problems
    highwalls, subsidence, polluted or clogged water, fires, slides and gases in OSMRE's inventory
    6 20.0%
OSMRE abandoned mine land problems6 on inventory
Problem area Problem Status
Kings Creek P2 Dangerous Impoundments Reclamation Completed
Kings Creek P2 Hazardous Water Bodies Reclamation Completed
Shadley Creek P1 Surface Burning Reclamation Completed
Shadley Creek P2 Dangerous Highwalls In Reclamation
Shadley Creek P2 Hazardous Water Bodies Reclamation Completed
Shadley Creek P2 Industrial/Residential Waste Reclamation Completed

Problem types carry OSMRE's priority prefix: P1 and P2 are threats to health, safety and property, P3 is environmental. A problem area is a cluster of problems reclaimed as one project; several rows can share one location.

MSHA-registered mines with status Abandoned11 on register
  1. Bates Mine
    Facility coal · Bandera Enterprizes Inc · MSHA ID 0301605
    Abandoned
  2. Bates No 1
    Surface coal · H & H Coal Company Inc · MSHA ID 0301523
    Abandoned and Sealed
  3. Lookout Gap Mine
    Surface coal · Bohmar Mining Corp · MSHA ID 0301461
    Abandoned and Sealed
  4. Mine #2
    Surface coal · Russ & Sons Inc · MSHA ID 0301719
    Abandoned
  5. Ouro Preparation Plant
    Facility coal · Ouro Mining, Inc. · MSHA ID 0302079
    Abandoned
  6. Scott Branch H E S
    Facility coal · Paramount Corp · MSHA ID 0301758
    Abandoned
  7. Scott County Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Scott County Road Department · MSHA ID 0301397
    Abandoned
  8. SCS LLC.
    Surface metal/non-metal · SCS LLC. · MSHA ID 0301972
    Abandoned
  9. Silver Streak
    Surface metal/non-metal · Silver Streak · MSHA ID 0301878
    Abandoned
  10. Site #1
    Facility coal · Miller Mining Company · MSHA ID 0301518
    Abandoned
  11. Sunburst Mining Corporation Lab #1
    Facility metal/non-metal · Sunburst Mining Corp · MSHA ID 0301764
    Abandoned

Status and date are as reported to MSHA by the operator. Each mine's own page carries its accident, citation and inspection record.

By source vocabularythe publishers' own terms
Feature type Features
Shale Pit 7
Gravel Pit 4
Shale Pit 4
Strip Mine 3
P2 Hazardous Water Bodies 2
Gravel Pit 2
P2 Industrial/Residential Waste 1
Disturbed Surface - Pit 1
P2 Dangerous Highwalls 1
Tailings - Undifferentiated 1
Adit 1
P2 Dangerous Impoundments 1
P1 Surface Burning 1
Sand Pit 1
Other counties in ArkansasAll counties →
How to read these numbers

A USGS feature is a symbol on a historical topographic map, there when the map was surveyed; it may since have been sealed, reclaimed, built over or reopened as a working mine, and the map does not say which. An OSMRE row is a problem the abandoned mine land program tracks, not a mine. An MSHA mine is a registered operation whose operator reported abandonment, a record that starts in the 1970s. The three overlap and are never added together. The county is assigned from each feature's coordinates against the Census 2023 county boundaries. The full method is on the national page.

Sources
  1. USGS, Consolidated Prospect- and Mine-Related Features from 7.5- and 15-Minute Topographic Quadrangle Maps of the United States (USMIN)
    597,612 point and area features digitized from about 106,350 historical topographic maps published 1886–2006; public domain (CC0). A feature is a map symbol, not a field-verified site, and the map does not say whether it was still worked.
  2. USGS Fact Sheet 2025–3003, The Abandoned Mine Inventory of the United States
    States that as of 2025 there is no comprehensive national inventory of abandoned mine features, and that the detailed national database now being built will not be published.
  3. OSMRE, Abandoned Mine Land Inventory System (e-AMLIS), public Problems layer
    One row per abandoned mine land problem in a problem area, with its type, funding program and reclamation status; mostly coal mined before the 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act. Coordinates are the problem area's.
  4. MSHA, Mines dataset (Mine Data Retrieval System)
    Every mine registered with MSHA since the 1970s; a mine reads Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed when its operator reported that status. Refreshed weekly.
  5. US Census Bureau, 2023 cartographic county boundaries (1:500,000)
    Each feature's county is assigned by its coordinates against these boundaries, not copied from the source file.
  6. GAO-20-238, Abandoned Hardrock Mines (March 2020)
    Federal agencies had identified at least 140,000 abandoned hardrock mine features on federal land and estimated more than 390,000 more not yet captured in their databases.
  7. Abandoned Hardrock Mine Reclamation (AHMR) Program, US Department of the Interior
    The program the USGS inventory is compiled for. Its appropriations and the 674,000 field-confirmed feature count on this page were provided by the program manager, Office of Environmental Policy and Compliance, and are cited with permission (2026-09-08).
  8. IMCC-NAAMLP Hardrock AML Report
    Page 48 carries the two figures this page leans on: USGS estimates 633,181 of the 725,690 mine features it recorded from historic topographic maps, 87 percent, are hardrock; and state and federal agencies have submitted more than 724,000 AML features to the national database being built, already more than the historic maps hold. Year-by-year AHMR funding is on page 35.