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Abandoned mines › Kentucky
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Caldwell County, Kentucky

Caldwell County, Kentucky has 61 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1954–1967, including 16 mine openings (shafts, adits and air shafts) and 9 prospect pits; 10 of the features carry a name on the map. OSMRE's abandoned mine land inventory lists 1 problems in the county, 1 of them not yet reclaimed. MSHA's register carries 16 mines in the county with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps covering Caldwell 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)
61
Mine openings
16
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
1
MSHA mines marked abandoned
16
10 features carry a name9 prospect pits7 quadrangle maps, published 1954–1967 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
    16 25.8%
  2. Prospect pits and trenches
    shallow exploration diggings that never became a mine
    9 14.5%
  3. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    19 30.6%
  4. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    12 19.4%
  5. Dumps, tailings, spoil and gob
    what mining left above ground
    5 8.1%
  6. Other reclamation problems
    highwalls, subsidence, polluted or clogged water, fires, slides and gases in OSMRE's inventory
    1 1.6%
Named features on the maps10 named · from the USGS compilation
Name on map Feature
Black Sulphur Mines Mine Shaft
Crowder Mines Open Pit Mine
Fredonia Valley Quarry Quarry
Morse Quarry Quarry
Senator Mine Open Pit Mine
Tyrie Mines Mine Shaft
Tyrie Mines Mine Shaft
Walker Mine Open Pit Mine
Walker Mine Open Pit Mine
Williamson Mines Mine Shaft

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.

OSMRE abandoned mine land problems1 on inventory
Problem area Problem Status
Tyrie Shaft P2 Hazardous Water Bodies 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 Abandoned16 on register
  1. Bennett Mine
    Surface coal · W O Bennett Coal Company · MSHA ID 1510974
    Abandoned
  2. Byrd Mine
    Surface coal · Darnell Mining Company · MSHA ID 1513493
    Abandoned
  3. Crystal I
    Surface coal · Crystal River Energy Inc · MSHA ID 1515435
    Abandoned
  4. Dekoven No 1
    Surface coal · Rickey S Winn Construction · MSHA ID 1517138
    Abandoned
  5. Donaldson Creek Mine No 1
    Surface coal · Donaldson Creek Mining Company Inc · MSHA ID 1512152
    Abandoned
  6. Donaldson Creek Surface #3
    Surface coal · Donaldson Creek Mining Company Inc · MSHA ID 1516807
    Abandoned
  7. Guess Trucking Mine No 2
    Surface coal · Belt Excavating Company · MSHA ID 1510473
    Abandoned
  8. Hago No 1
    Surface coal · Hago Corp · MSHA ID 1515461
    Abandoned
  9. Herring Mining Inc
    Surface coal · Herring Mining Inc · MSHA ID 1511930
    Abandoned
  10. Pam-Car
    Surface coal · Pam Car Venture Inc · MSHA ID 1513596
    Abandoned
  11. Princeton No 2 Mine
    Surface metal/non-metal · Kentucky Stone Company · MSHA ID 1505123
    Abandoned
  12. Princeton Quarry And Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · Rogers Group Inc · MSHA ID 1516739
    Abandoned
  13. Princeton Specialty Products
    Facility metal/non-metal · Rogers Group Inc. · MSHA ID 1517075
    Abandoned
  14. Rickey S Winn No 1 Mine
    Surface coal · Rickey S Winn Construction · MSHA ID 1514491
    Abandoned
  15. Skip Strip
    Surface coal · Dawn Coal Company · MSHA ID 1510526
    Abandoned
  16. WKY Portable Plant #2
    Surface metal/non-metal · Rogers Group Inc. · MSHA ID 1519628
    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 17
Mine Shaft 13
Quarry 9
Prospect Pit 9
Tailings - Undifferentiated 5
Adit 3
Quarry 2
P2 Hazardous Water Bodies 1
Gravel Pit 1
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 1
Strip Mine 1
Other counties in KentuckyAll 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.