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Abandoned mines › Michigan
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Leelanau County, Michigan

Leelanau County, Michigan has 105 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1957–1983. MSHA's register carries 7 mines in the county with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps covering Leelanau 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)
105
Mine openings
0
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
0
MSHA mines marked abandoned
7
0 features carry a name0 prospect pits17 quadrangle maps, published 1957–1983 0 MSHA mines abandoned and sealed
What the features are
  1. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    19 18.1%
  2. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    86 81.9%
MSHA-registered mines with status Abandoned7 on register
  1. CEMCO VSI (Portable) #1100
    Surface metal/non-metal · Elmer's Crane and Dozer, Inc. · MSHA ID 2002954
    Abandoned
  2. DIAMOND
    Surface metal/non-metal · R W Popp Excavating Inc · MSHA ID 2003128
    Abandoned
  3. Leelanau County Road Commission Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Leelanau County Road Commission · MSHA ID 2001055
    Abandoned
  4. LRM Concrete and Excavation Services
    Surface metal/non-metal · LRM Holdings LLC · MSHA ID 2002792
    Abandoned
  5. Newman
    Surface metal/non-metal · R W Popp Excavating Inc · MSHA ID 2003272
    Abandoned
  6. Pioneer #1
    Surface metal/non-metal · Kasson Sand & Gravel Company · MSHA ID 2002755
    Abandoned
  7. WASH PLANT # 1 - # 930
    Surface metal/non-metal · Elmer's Crane and Dozer, Inc. · MSHA ID 2002915
    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 54
Sand Pit 14
Gravel Pit 11
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 11
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 8
Sand Pit 7
Other counties in MichiganAll 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.