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Abandoned mines › California
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Sonoma County, California

Sonoma County, California has 222 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1916–1993, including 17 mine openings (shafts, adits and air shafts) and 18 prospect pits; 17 of the features carry a name on the map. MSHA's register carries 29 mines in the county with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps covering Sonoma 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)
222
Mine openings
17
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
0
MSHA mines marked abandoned
29
17 features carry a name18 prospect pits30 quadrangle maps, published 1916–1993 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
    17 7.7%
  2. Prospect pits and trenches
    shallow exploration diggings that never became a mine
    18 8.1%
  3. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    65 29.3%
  4. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    118 53.2%
  5. Dumps, tailings, spoil and gob
    what mining left above ground
    4 1.8%
Named features on the maps17 named · from the USGS compilation
Name on map Feature
Buckeye Mine Adit
Bunkman Mines Headquarters Open Pit Mine
Cloverdale Mine Headquarters Prospect Pit
Contact Mine Mine Shaft
Crystal Mine Adit
Culver - Bear Mine Open Pit Mine
Eureka Mine Open Pit Mine
Laton Mine Open Pit Mine
Laton Mine Open Pit Mine
Manganese Mine Open Pit Mine
Manganese Mine Open Pit Mine
McCord Open Pit Mine or Quarry
Mericomo Quicksilver Mine Adit
Socrates Mine Open Pit Mine
Socrates Mine Open Pit Mine
Sonoma Mine Open Pit Mine
Yellowjacket Mine Open Pit Mine

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 Abandoned29 on register
  1. BCJ Mobile
    Surface metal/non-metal · BCJ Sand and Rock Inc · MSHA ID 0405704
    Abandoned
  2. Bloomfield
    Surface metal/non-metal · Piombo Corp · MSHA ID 0402305
    Abandoned
  3. Cloverdale Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Shamrock Materials Inc · MSHA ID 0404977
    Abandoned
  4. Dewitt Sand & Gravel
    Surface metal/non-metal · Jerry Dewitt Trucking Inc · MSHA ID 0404979
    Abandoned
  5. Doyle Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Syar Industries Inc · MSHA ID 0402790
    Abandoned
  6. Geyserville Aggregates
    Surface metal/non-metal · Piombo Construction Company · MSHA ID 0404130
    Abandoned
  7. Guerneville Aggregates
    Surface metal/non-metal · Piombo Corp · MSHA ID 0404298
    Abandoned
  8. Healdsburg Main Plant
    Facility metal/non-metal · Syar Industries Inc · MSHA ID 0401700
    Abandoned
  9. Healdsburg Sand & Gravel
    Surface metal/non-metal · Syar Industries Inc · MSHA ID 0401921
    Abandoned
  10. Healdsburg Sand & Gravel
    Surface metal/non-metal · Syar Industries Inc · MSHA ID 0402700
    Abandoned
  11. Irwindale Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Manning Brothers Rock & Sand Co Inc · MSHA ID 0401849
    Abandoned
  12. Lind Marine Incorporated
    Facility metal/non-metal · Lind Marine Incorporated · MSHA ID 0405003
    Abandoned
  13. Nuns Canyon Rock LLC
    Surface metal/non-metal · Nuns Canyon Rock LLC · MSHA ID 0402836
    Abandoned
  14. Petaluma Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Dutra Materials · MSHA ID 0400131
    Abandoned
  15. Portable Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Shamrock Materials Inc · MSHA ID 0405215
    Abandoned
  16. Shiloh Aggregates
    Surface metal/non-metal · Piombo Construction Company · MSHA ID 0404717
    Abandoned
  17. Soda Rock Pit And Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · H G I Sand & Gravel Inc · MSHA ID 0401922
    Abandoned
  18. Soda Rock Pit And Mill No 2
    Surface metal/non-metal · H G I Sand & Gravel Inc · MSHA ID 0404220
    Abandoned
  19. Sonoma Rock Company
    Surface metal/non-metal · Sonoma Rock Company · MSHA ID 0404988
    Abandoned
  20. Spaletta Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Spaletta Ranch · MSHA ID 0405000
    Abandoned
  21. STONY POINT ROCK QUARRY, INC.
    Surface metal/non-metal · Stony Point Rock Quarry Inc · MSHA ID 0404982
    Abandoned
  22. Trinity Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Trinity Quarries Inc · MSHA ID 0402352
    Abandoned
  23. Trinity Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Bob Ford & Son · MSHA ID 0404975
    Abandoned
  24. Trinity Rock Pit And Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · Trinity Rock Company · MSHA ID 0404210
    Abandoned
  25. Twin Bridges
    Surface metal/non-metal · Bed Rock Products Inc · MSHA ID 0402786
    Abandoned
  26. Water Shed Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Ghilotti Brothers Construction · MSHA ID 0404781
    Abandoned
  27. Windsor
    Surface metal/non-metal · Hanson Aggregates West Inc · MSHA ID 0401825
    Abandoned
  28. Windsor Plant No 3
    Surface metal/non-metal · Kaiser Sand & Gravel Company · MSHA ID 0401801
    Abandoned
  29. Zamaroni Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Zamaroni Quarry Inc · MSHA ID 0402381
    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
Quarry 66
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 40
Prospect Pit 18
Adit 16
Open Pit Mine 16
Gravel Pit 14
Borrow Pit 8
Disturbed Surface - Pit 7
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 7
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 6
Borrow Pit 4
Gravel Pit 4
Quarry 4
Mine Dump 3
Disturbed Surface 2
Sand Pit 2
Quarry - Rock 1
Tailings - Undifferentiated 1
Sand Pit 1
Shale Pit 1
Mine Shaft 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.