Mining Incidents
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Crittenden County, Kentucky

Crittenden County, Kentucky has 289 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1921–1958, including 87 mine openings (shafts, adits and air shafts) and 70 prospect pits; 79 of the features carry a name on the map. MSHA's register carries 9 mines in the county with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps covering Crittenden 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)
289
Mine openings
87
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
0
MSHA mines marked abandoned
9
79 features carry a name70 prospect pits16 quadrangle maps, published 1921–1958 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
    87 30.1%
  2. Prospect pits and trenches
    shallow exploration diggings that never became a mine
    70 24.2%
  3. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    115 39.8%
  4. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    9 3.1%
  5. Dumps, tailings, spoil and gob
    what mining left above ground
    7 2.4%
  6. Mills, tipples and facilities
    processing plants and hazardous structures
    1 0.3%
Named features on the maps79 named · from the USGS compilation
Name on map Feature
Ada Florence Mine Open Pit Mine
Atlas Mine Mine Shaft
Bebout Mine Mine Shaft
Ben Belt Mines Mine Shaft
Ben Belt Mines Mine Shaft
Big Four Mine Mine Shaft
Blue Mine Mine Shaft
Butler Mines Mine Shaft
Butler Mines Mine Shaft
Butler Mines Mine Shaft
Clement Mine Mine Shaft
Columbia Mine Mine Shaft
Commodore Mine Mine Shaft
Corn Mine Open Pit Mine
Crystal Mines Open Pit Mine
Davenport Mine Mine Shaft
Dell-High Mine Mine Shaft
Eagle-Babb Mine Mine Shaft
Eva Tanguay Mine Open Pit Mine
Franklin Mine Open Pit Mine
Franklin Mines Open Pit Mine
Franklin Mines Open Pit Mine
Glendale Mines Mine Shaft
Gray Mine Open Pit Mine
Haffaw Mine Open Pit Mine
Hickory Cane Mine Open Pit Mine
Hodge Mine Open Pit Mine area
Holly Mine Mine Shaft
Horse Lot Mine Open Pit Mine
Jim Belt Mine Mine Shaft
John Belt Mines Mine Shaft
Keystone Mine Open Pit Mine
Keystone Mine and Fluorite Flotation Mill Mine Shaft
King Mine Mine Shaft
KK Mines Mine Shaft
KK Mines Mine Shaft
KK Mines Mine Shaft
KK Mines Mine Shaft
La Rue Mine Open Pit Mine
Mary Belle Mines Mine Shaft
Mary Belle Mines Mine Shaft
Mary Belle Mines Mine Shaft
Mary Belle Mines Mine Shaft
Mary Helen Mine Mine Dump area
Mary Helen Mine Open Pit Mine
Mary Helen Mine Open Pit Mine
Matterds Prospects Prospect Pit
Matterds Prospects Prospect Pit
Matterds Prospects Prospect Pit
Matterds Prospects Prospect Pit
Memphis Prospect Area Mine Shaft
Memphis Prospect Area Open Pit Mine
Memphis Prospect Area Open Pit Mine
Memphis Prospect Area Open Pit Mine
Memphis Prospect Area Open Pit Mine
Memphis Prospect Area Prospect Pit
Memphis Prospect Area Prospect Pit
Memphis Prospect Area Prospect Pit
Memphis Prospect Area Prospect Pit
Memphis Prospect Area Prospect Pit
Miller Mines Mine Shaft
Miller Mines Open Pit Mine
Nine Acre Mine Open Pit Mine
Old Jim Mine Open Pit Mine
Penn Salt Fluorite Mill Mill Site
Pigmy Mines Open Pit Mine
Red Mine Open Pit Mine
Red Mine Open Pit Mine
Red Mine Open Pit Mine
Reiter Mine Mine
Reiter Mine Mine Shaft
Riley Mine Open Pit Mine
Riley Mine Open Pit Mine
Silver Star Mine Open Pit Mine
SIlver Star Mine Open Pit Mine
Spring Mine Mine Shaft
Sumner Mine Mine Shaft
Tabb No 1 Mine Mine Shaft
Wilson Quarry Quarry area

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.

MSHA-registered mines with status Abandoned9 on register
  1. Babb Barnes
    Facility metal/non-metal · Triple M Mining Corp · MSHA ID 1505162
    Abandoned
  2. Babb-Barnes
    Underground metal/non-metal · Frontier Spar Corp · MSHA ID 1505161
    Abandoned
  3. Conceptual Stone Inc.
    Surface metal/non-metal · Conceptual Stone Inc. · MSHA ID 1519398
    Abandoned
  4. Crittenden No 1
    Surface coal · Jim Smith Contracting Company Inc · MSHA ID 1513215
    Abandoned
  5. Lafayette Wash Plant
    Facility metal/non-metal · Triple M Mining Corp · MSHA ID 1516961
    Abandoned
  6. Marion Mine & Mill
    Underground metal/non-metal · Rogers Group Inc · MSHA ID 1500003
    Abandoned
  7. Marion Quarry - Crittenden
    Surface metal/non-metal · Rogers Group Inc. · MSHA ID 1519629
    Abandoned
  8. Paddy's Bluff Crushed Stone
    Surface metal/non-metal · Grogan Properties, LLC · MSHA ID 1519723
    Abandoned
  9. Piney Creek
    Surface coal · T K Jessup Inc · MSHA ID 1514210
    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
Mine Shaft 85
Prospect Pit 69
Open Pit Mine 59
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 50
Quarry 5
Open Pit Mine 4
Mine Dump 4
Quarry 3
Tailings - Undifferentiated 3
Adit 2
Mine 2
Prospect Pit 1
Mill Site 1
Gravel Pit 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.