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Abandoned mines › Georgia
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Walker County, Georgia

Walker County, Georgia has 120 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1935–1983, including 5 mine openings (shafts, adits and air shafts). OSMRE's abandoned mine land inventory lists 11 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 Walker 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)
120
Mine openings
5
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
1
MSHA mines marked abandoned
11
0 features carry a name0 prospect pits13 quadrangle maps, published 1935–1983 11 OSMRE problems, 10 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
    13 9.9%
  2. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    86 65.6%
  3. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    29 22.1%
  4. Dumps, tailings, spoil and gob
    what mining left above ground
    1 0.8%
  5. Other reclamation problems
    highwalls, subsidence, polluted or clogged water, fires, slides and gases in OSMRE's inventory
    2 1.5%
OSMRE abandoned mine land problems11 on inventory
Problem area Problem Status
Boshears Mine Opening P1 Portals Reclamation Completed
Durham P2 Dangerous Highwalls Reclamation Completed
Durham P2 Vertical Openings Reclamation Completed
Durham P3 Gobs Reclamation Completed
Gillen P2 Portals Reclamation Completed
N.e. Durham P2 Subsidence Reclamation Completed
N.e. Durham P2 Vertical Openings Reclamation Completed
Ne Ascalon P2 Portals In Reclamation
Thompsonville P2 Portals Reclamation Completed
Thompsonville P2 Vertical Openings Reclamation Completed
West Durham P2 Vertical Openings 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. Daniels Mine
    Underground coal · Daniels Enterprises Inc · MSHA ID 0900960
    Abandoned and Sealed
  2. Durham Pit
    Surface coal · Brown Brothers Coal Company Inc · MSHA ID 0900947
    Abandoned
  3. General Shale-Georgia Pits
    Surface metal/non-metal · General Shale Products Corp · MSHA ID 0900138
    Abandoned
  4. Gilbreath Creek No 1
    Surface coal · Gilbreath Creek Coal Company Inc · MSHA ID 0900837
    Abandoned
  5. Linda Lee
    Underground coal · Brown Brothers Coal Company Inc · MSHA ID 0900954
    Abandoned and Sealed
  6. No 1 Strip
    Surface coal · Brown Brothers Coal Company Inc · MSHA ID 0900860
    Abandoned
  7. No 9 Strip
    Surface coal · Snake River Mining Corp · MSHA ID 0900871
    Abandoned
  8. Rossville Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Old Castle Materials · MSHA ID 0900305
    Abandoned
  9. Snake Pit
    Surface coal · Luma Inc · MSHA ID 0900930
    Abandoned
  10. Sumiton Pit
    Surface coal · C M & C Coal Company Inc · MSHA ID 0101742
    Abandoned
  11. WALKER COUNTY QUARRY
    Surface metal/non-metal · Vulcan Construction Materials, L.P. · MSHA ID 0900317
    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
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 58
Strip Mine 14
Gravel Pit 14
Strip Mine 8
Quarry 6
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 6
Adit 5
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 5
P2 Vertical Openings 4
P2 Portals 3
Quarry 2
P2 Dangerous Highwalls 1
P2 Subsidence 1
P3 Gobs 1
Coal Mine 1
Sand Pit 1
P1 Portals 1
Other counties in GeorgiaAll 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.