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Abandoned mines › Florida
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Hillsborough County, Florida

Hillsborough County, Florida has 178 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1943–1998; 1 of the features carry a name on the map. MSHA's register carries 20 mines in the county with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps covering Hillsborough 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)
178
Mine openings
0
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
0
MSHA mines marked abandoned
20
1 features carry a name0 prospect pits26 quadrangle maps, published 1943–1998 0 MSHA mines abandoned and sealed
What the features are
  1. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    71 39.9%
  2. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    67 37.6%
  3. Dumps, tailings, spoil and gob
    what mining left above ground
    40 22.5%
Named features on the maps1 named · from the USGS compilation
Name on map Feature
Peat Pit Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 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 Abandoned20 on register
  1. Aaron Long Shell Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Aaron Long Excavating · MSHA ID 0801017
    Abandoned
  2. Big Bend Terminal
    Facility metal/non-metal · Agrico Chemical Company · MSHA ID 0800790
    Abandoned
  3. BIG FOUR
    Surface metal/non-metal · Imc-Agrico · MSHA ID 0800871
    Abandoned
  4. Caloosa Shell Corporation
    Surface metal/non-metal · Caloosa Shell Corporation · MSHA ID 0800872
    Abandoned
  5. Cargill Salt Terminal
    Facility metal/non-metal · Cargill Inc · MSHA ID 0800837
    Abandoned
  6. Delta Soils Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Delta Soils Inc · MSHA ID 0800882
    Abandoned
  7. Florida Agglite
    Facility metal/non-metal · Florida Agglite Corp · MSHA ID 0800549
    Abandoned
  8. Four Corners Mine
    Surface metal/non-metal · W R Grace & Company · MSHA ID 0800962
    Abandoned
  9. Hillsborough Mines
    Surface metal/non-metal · Crystal Construction Company · MSHA ID 0800824
    Abandoned
  10. INDEP. AGG. RATTLESNAKE PT. TERM
    Facility metal/non-metal · Independent Aggregates · MSHA ID 0801149
    Abandoned
  11. LONESOME
    Surface metal/non-metal · Mosaic Phosphates Company · MSHA ID 0801054
    Abandoned
  12. Lonesome Mine & Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · Brewster Phosphates · MSHA ID 0800832
    Abandoned
  13. PORT SUTTON
    Facility metal/non-metal · Imc-Agrico · MSHA ID 0800551
    Abandoned
  14. Shell Materials Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Shell Materials Inc · MSHA ID 0800880
    Abandoned
  15. Sun City Shell
    Surface metal/non-metal · Sun City Shell Inc · MSHA ID 0801130
    Abandoned
  16. Tampa Bay Shell Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Chapman Contracting Company · MSHA ID 0801003
    Abandoned
  17. Tampa Groves Mine
    Surface metal/non-metal · Tampa Groves Mining LLC · MSHA ID 0801369
    Abandoned
  18. Tampa Plant
    Facility metal/non-metal · National Gypsum Company · MSHA ID 0800167
    Abandoned
  19. TAMPA SALES YARD
    Facility metal/non-metal · Vulcan Construction Materials, LLC · MSHA ID 0801194
    Abandoned
  20. Tampa Salt And Service Center
    Facility metal/non-metal · Diamond Crystal Salt Company · MSHA ID 0800886
    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 - Pond 38
Strip Mine 34
Disturbed Surface 33
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 26
Sand Pit 20
Sand Pit 5
Borrow Pit 4
Gravel Pit 4
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 3
Gravel Pit 2
Tailings - Undifferentiated 2
Quarry 2
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 2
Borrow Pit 2
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 1
Other counties in FloridaAll 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.