Abandoned mines in Peoria County, Illinois

1. Mine openings

   shafts, adits, air shafts, portals and vertical openings: the ways into underground workings
   53 24.9%
2. Mines and surface workings

   labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
   45 21.1%
3. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits

   construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
   65 30.5%
4. Dumps, tailings, spoil and gob

   what mining left above ground
   18 8.5%
5. Mills, tipples and facilities

   processing plants and hazardous structures
   12 5.6%
6. Other reclamation problems

   highwalls, subsidence, polluted or clogged water, fires, slides and gases in OSMRE's inventory
   19 8.9%
7. Other

   symbols outside the classes above
   1 0.5%

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.

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.

1. Banner #27 Strip

   Surface coal · Freeman United Coal Mining Company · MSHA ID 1100608
   Abandoned 1975-04-21
2. Chillicothe Sand

   Surface metal/non-metal · Martin Marietta Aggregates · MSHA ID 1101049
   Abandoned 1983-11-07
3. Edwards Mine (Strip)

   Surface coal · Midland Coal Company · MSHA ID 1100606
   Abandoned 1981-09-28
4. Elm No 1 Mine

   Surface coal · Midland Coal Company · MSHA ID 1100607
   Abandoned 1984-08-06
5. Long Rock Company

   Surface metal/non-metal · Long Rock Company · MSHA ID 1100104
   Abandoned 1984-03-30
6. Mc Knight Pit

   Surface metal/non-metal · R A Cullinan & Son Inc · MSHA ID 1102787
   Abandoned 1990-01-05
7. MLI Plant 1

   Surface metal/non-metal · Mossville Land Investments LLC · MSHA ID 1103275
   Abandoned 2019-04-16
8. Peoria Blacktop Sand Pit

   Surface metal/non-metal · Peoria Blacktop Inc · MSHA ID 1101076
   Abandoned 1979-09-19
9. R E Joos Sand Pit

   Surface metal/non-metal · R E Joos Excavating Co · MSHA ID 1102617
   Abandoned 1981-04-21
10. Riverside Materials Incorporated

    Surface metal/non-metal · Riverside Materials Inc · MSHA ID 1102723
    Abandoned 1993-08-16
11. Stevers Pit

    Surface metal/non-metal · Peoria Sand & Gravel Inc · MSHA ID 1101226
    Abandoned 1995-11-02
12. Theodore Schaer Pit

    Surface metal/non-metal · R A Cullinan & Son Inc · MSHA ID 1102711
    Abandoned 1985-04-30

Status and date are as reported to MSHA by the operator. Each mine's own page carries its accident, citation and inspection record.

• Will County 220
• LaSalle County 192
• McHenry County 191
• Winnebago County 187
• Kane County 184
• St. Clair County 136
• Hardin County 136
• Fulton County 131
• Stephenson County 127
• Williamson County 124
• Cook County 114
• Jo Daviess County 109

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.