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Abandoned mines › California
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Stanislaus County, California

Stanislaus County, California has 186 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1915–1976, including 39 mine openings (shafts, adits and air shafts) and 18 prospect pits; 9 of the features carry a name on the map. MSHA's register carries 12 mines in the county with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps covering Stanislaus 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)
186
Mine openings
39
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
0
MSHA mines marked abandoned
12
9 features carry a name18 prospect pits31 quadrangle maps, published 1915–1976 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
    39 21.0%
  2. Prospect pits and trenches
    shallow exploration diggings that never became a mine
    18 9.7%
  3. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    14 7.5%
  4. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    44 23.7%
  5. Dumps, tailings, spoil and gob
    what mining left above ground
    71 38.2%
Named features on the maps9 named · from the USGS compilation
Name on map Feature
Adobe Mine Mine Shaft
Adobe Mine Open Pit Mine
Bald Eagle Mine Adit
Bald Eagle Mine Mine
Buckeye Mines Adit
Buckeye Mines Open Pit Mine
French Pit Open Pit Mine or Quarry
Phoenix Mine Open Pit Mine
Western 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 Abandoned12 on register
  1. CREE RANCH PIT
    Surface metal/non-metal · Western Stone Products · MSHA ID 0405161
    Abandoned
  2. Empire Plaster Sand Company
    Surface metal/non-metal · Empire Plaster Sand Company · MSHA ID 0401687
    Abandoned
  3. GREEN PIT
    Surface metal/non-metal · West Coast Aggregates Inc · MSHA ID 0405460
    Abandoned
  4. Hickman Pit And Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · Charles D Warner & Son Inc · MSHA ID 0401724
    Abandoned
  5. Modesto Mill
    Facility metal/non-metal · F M C Corp Industrial Chemic · MSHA ID 0401631
    Abandoned
  6. PORTABLE FINLEY
    Surface metal/non-metal · TMT ENTERPRISES, INC. · MSHA ID 0405768
    Abandoned
  7. PORTABLE NORBERG
    Surface metal/non-metal · TMT Enterprises, Inc. · MSHA ID 0405787
    Abandoned
  8. Portable Plant #1106
    Surface metal/non-metal · Teichert Aggregates · MSHA ID 0405386
    Abandoned
  9. Reeves Pit & Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · George Reed Inc · MSHA ID 0404389
    Abandoned
  10. WATERFORD PIT & MILL
    Surface metal/non-metal · Santa Fe Aggregates Inc · MSHA ID 0401846
    Abandoned
  11. Waterford Pit And Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · George Reed Inc · MSHA ID 0402082
    Abandoned
  12. Westside Aggregates
    Facility metal/non-metal · Westside Aggregates · MSHA ID 0404473
    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
Tailings - Undifferentiated 60
Adit 31
Gravel Pit 28
Prospect Pit 18
Tailings - Dredge 11
Clay Pit 10
Mine Shaft 8
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 6
Open Pit Mine 5
Quarry 4
Gravel Pit 2
Disturbed Surface - Pit 1
Mine 1
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 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.