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Abandoned mines › California
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Madera County, California

Madera County, California has 282 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1942–2004, including 90 mine openings (shafts, adits and air shafts) and 127 prospect pits; 35 of the features carry a name on the map. 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 Madera 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)
282
Mine openings
90
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
0
MSHA mines marked abandoned
11
35 features carry a name127 prospect pits38 quadrangle maps, published 1942–2004 0 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
    90 31.9%
  2. Prospect pits and trenches
    shallow exploration diggings that never became a mine
    127 45.0%
  3. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    20 7.1%
  4. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    37 13.1%
  5. Dumps, tailings, spoil and gob
    what mining left above ground
    8 2.8%
Named features on the maps35 named · from the USGS compilation
Name on map Feature
Buchanan Mine Mine Shaft
Buchanan Mine Mine Shaft
Carnation Mine Open Pit Mine
Daulton Copper Mine Prospect Pit
Daulton Mine Mine Shaft
Enterprise Mine Adit
Fresno Banner Mine Adit
Fresno Banner Mine Open Pit Mine
Granite Quarry Quarry
Hawkeye Mine Adit
Jesse Belle Shaft Mine Shaft
Lily Mine Mine Shaft
Madera Granite Quarry Quarry
Madera Quarry Quarry
McSwain Mine Prospect Pit
McSwain Mine Prospect Pit
Minaret Mine Mine Shaft
North McSwain Mine Prospect Pit
Pine Grove Mine Mine Shaft
Quartz Mine Mine Shaft
Quartz Mine Open Pit Mine
Raymond Quarry Quarry
Rich Hill Mines Adit
Rosati Shaft Mine Shaft
San Joaquin Mines Adit
San Joaquin Mines Mine Shaft
San Joaquin Mines Prospect Pit
Star Mine Adit
Star Mine Adit
Strasbaugh Mine Prospect Pit
Strawberry Mine Mine Shaft
Strawberry Tungsten Mine Mine Shaft
Texas Flat Mine Mine Shaft
Weisseman Mine Mine Shaft
Wisseman Mine Open Pit Mine area

A name is the label printed beside the symbol on the map. "First mapped" is the earliest topographic edition that shows the symbol, which bounds the feature's age from above; it is not the date it was worked. Unnamed features (most prospect pits, adits and shafts carry no label) are in the counts above but not this list.

MSHA-registered mines with status Abandoned11 on register
  1. Big Dreamer Mine And Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · Big Dreamer Mining Company · MSHA ID 0402527
    Abandoned
  2. Blackstone Pit & Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · Calaveras Materials Inc · MSHA ID 0401966
    Abandoned
  3. Hans Sumpf Pit & Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · Hans Sumpf Company Inc · MSHA ID 0400559
    Abandoned
  4. Ione Track Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Custom Crushing Industries, Inc · MSHA ID 0405367
    Abandoned
  5. KNOWLES GRANITE
    Facility metal/non-metal · Knowles Granite · MSHA ID 0405334
    Abandoned
  6. Raymond Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Outback Inc. · MSHA ID 0405578
    Abandoned
  7. San Joaquin Sand & Gravel
    Surface metal/non-metal · San Joaquin Sand & Gravel · MSHA ID 0401847
    Abandoned
  8. San Joaquin Sand & Gravel Portable Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · San Joaquin Sand & Gravel · MSHA ID 0405209
    Abandoned
  9. Strawberry Mine
    Underground metal/non-metal · Teledyne Tungsten · MSHA ID 0403143
    Abandoned
  10. Taylors Pit And Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · California Industrial Minerals Company · MSHA ID 0401015
    Abandoned
  11. Wishon Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Kiewit Infrastructure West Co. · MSHA ID 0405817
    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
Prospect Pit 127
Adit 57
Mine Shaft 33
Quarry 19
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 14
Gravel Pit 7
Open Pit Mine 5
Tailings - Pond 4
Borrow Pit 4
Tailings - Undifferentiated 3
Borrow Pit 3
Gravel Pit 2
Mine Dump 1
Open Pit Mine 1
Quarry - Rock 1
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 1
Other counties in CaliforniaAll 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.