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Abandoned mines › Kansas
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Shawnee County, Kansas

Shawnee County, Kansas has 59 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1952–1983. OSMRE's abandoned mine land inventory lists 1 problems in the county, 1 of them not yet reclaimed. MSHA's register carries 26 mines in the county with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps covering Shawnee 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)
59
Mine openings
0
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
1
MSHA mines marked abandoned
26
0 features carry a name0 prospect pits11 quadrangle maps, published 1952–1983 1 OSMRE problems, 0 reclaimed 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
    1 1.7%
  2. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    38 63.3%
  3. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    21 35.0%
OSMRE abandoned mine land problems1 on inventory
Problem area Problem Status
Silver Lake P2 Vertical Openings Reclamation Pending

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 Abandoned26 on register
  1. 998 Topeka Shop
    Surface metal/non-metal · Martin Marietta Aggregates · MSHA ID 1400597
    Abandoned
  2. Big Springs Quarry #27106
    Surface metal/non-metal · Martin Marietta Materials, Inc. · MSHA ID 1400184
    Abandoned
  3. Brier Rd River Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Victory Sand Mining & Dredging LLC · MSHA ID 1401691
    Abandoned
  4. Castle-Lindenmeyer
    Surface metal/non-metal · Martin Marietta Aggregates · MSHA ID 1401108
    Abandoned
  5. Consumers East Pit And Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Consumers Sand Company Inc · MSHA ID 1400880
    Abandoned
  6. Dover Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · N R Hamm Quarry Inc · MSHA ID 1401376
    Abandoned
  7. Elmont Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · N R Hamm Quarry Inc · MSHA ID 1400088
    Abandoned
  8. Green Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Martin Marietta Aggregates · MSHA ID 1401093
    Abandoned
  9. Hurlburt-Hamm Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · N R Hamm Quarry Inc · MSHA ID 1401193
    Abandoned
  10. Kansas Sand Plant #2
    Surface metal/non-metal · Kansas Sand & Concrete Inc · MSHA ID 1400473
    Abandoned
  11. Lister Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · N R Hamm Quarry Inc · MSHA ID 1401343
    Abandoned
  12. Mc Queen Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Martin Marietta-Construction Aggregates Division · MSHA ID 1400855
    Abandoned
  13. MEIER'S READY MIX INC
    Surface metal/non-metal · Meiers Ready Mix Inc. · MSHA ID 1400879
    Abandoned
  14. Meiers Ready Mix Inc.
    Surface metal/non-metal · Meiers Ready Mix Inc. · MSHA ID 1401184
    Abandoned
  15. Menoken Rock & Gravel Incorporated
    Surface metal/non-metal · Menoken Rock & Gravel Inc · MSHA ID 1401431
    Abandoned
  16. Oakland East Sand
    Surface metal/non-metal · Martin Marietta Materials, Inc. · MSHA ID 1401742
    Abandoned
  17. Oakland Pit / Plant #19
    Surface metal/non-metal · Victory Sand Mining & Dredging, LLC · MSHA ID 1401599
    Abandoned
  18. PLANT #14 - TOPEKA
    Surface metal/non-metal · Victory Sand Mining & Dredging, LLC · MSHA ID 1401509
    Abandoned
  19. Plant #855
    Surface metal/non-metal · Martin Marietta Aggregates · MSHA ID 1401454
    Abandoned
  20. PORTABLE #872
    Surface metal/non-metal · Martin Marietta Aggregates · MSHA ID 1401567
    Abandoned
  21. River Sand Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Consumers Sand Company Inc · MSHA ID 1400435
    Abandoned
  22. Schmidtlein Excavating
    Surface metal/non-metal · Schmidtlein Excavating · MSHA ID 1401370
    Abandoned
  23. Topeka Sand And Gravel Pit And Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Topeka Sand Company · MSHA ID 1400546
    Abandoned
  24. Valencia Sand Pit #1
    Surface metal/non-metal · Kansas Sand & Concrete Inc. · MSHA ID 1400503
    Abandoned
  25. Victory Sand & Gravel Incorporated
    Surface metal/non-metal · Victory Sand & Gravel Inc · MSHA ID 1400551
    Abandoned
  26. Wendel Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Martin Marietta Aggregates · MSHA ID 1400698
    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
Disturbed Surface - Pit 35
Quarry 10
Quarry 3
Gravel Pit 3
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 3
Gravel Pit 2
Disturbed Surface 2
P2 Vertical Openings 1
Strip Mine 1
Other counties in KansasAll 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.