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Abandoned mines › Iowa
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Clay County, Iowa

Clay County, Iowa has 89 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1966–1982. 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 Clay 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)
89
Mine openings
0
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
0
MSHA mines marked abandoned
12
0 features carry a name0 prospect pits11 quadrangle maps, published 1966–1982 0 MSHA mines abandoned and sealed
What the features are
  1. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    89 100.0%
MSHA-registered mines with status Abandoned12 on register
  1. Braunschweig Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Clay County Highway Department · MSHA ID 1301807
    Abandoned
  2. Carlson Brothers Gravel
    Surface metal/non-metal · Carlson Brothers · MSHA ID 1300924
    Abandoned
  3. Crusher Plant No 1
    Surface metal/non-metal · W Hodgman & Sons Inc · MSHA ID 1302084
    Abandoned
  4. Diamond Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Diamond Concrete & Construction, Inc. · MSHA ID 1302468
    Abandoned
  5. Douglas Rutter
    Surface metal/non-metal · Douglas Rutter · MSHA ID 1302326
    Abandoned
  6. Lachner Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Clay County Highway Department · MSHA ID 1301803
    Abandoned
  7. Newquist Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Clay County Highway Department · MSHA ID 1301805
    Abandoned
  8. Sassman's Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Abel Drainage & Excavating, Inc · MSHA ID 1302458
    Abandoned
  9. Scharnberg Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Clay County Highway Department · MSHA ID 1301804
    Abandoned
  10. Sieh Sand & Gravel
    Surface metal/non-metal · Sieh Farm Drainage Inc · MSHA ID 1301626
    Abandoned
  11. Stellish Pit Or Clay County Pits
    Surface metal/non-metal · Clay County Highway Department · MSHA ID 1301802
    Abandoned
  12. Wernimont Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Weaver Construction Company · MSHA ID 1301890
    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
Gravel Pit 58
Gravel Pit 30
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 1
Other counties in IowaAll 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.