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Abandoned mines › Minnesota
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Brown County, Minnesota

Brown County, Minnesota has 134 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1964–1992. MSHA's register carries 14 mines in the county with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps covering Brown 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)
134
Mine openings
0
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
0
MSHA mines marked abandoned
14
0 features carry a name0 prospect pits12 quadrangle maps, published 1964–1992 0 MSHA mines abandoned and sealed
What the features are
  1. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    134 100.0%
MSHA-registered mines with status Abandoned14 on register
  1. Acolite Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Acolite Inc · MSHA ID 2102369
    Abandoned
  2. BRN/1 PIT
    Surface metal/non-metal · Minnesota Valley Minerals Inc · MSHA ID 2103180
    Abandoned
  3. Hoffman Portable Screener
    Surface metal/non-metal · Hoffman Construction Company · MSHA ID 2103699
    Abandoned
  4. Mack Pit & Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · Wallner Construction Company Inc · MSHA ID 2101278
    Abandoned
  5. Meine Pit And Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · Carlson Brothers Inc · MSHA ID 2102583
    Abandoned
  6. P Schnieder
    Surface metal/non-metal · Carlson Brothers Inc · MSHA ID 2102677
    Abandoned
  7. Portable #1
    Surface metal/non-metal · Mathiowetz Construction Company · MSHA ID 2103177
    Abandoned
  8. Portable I
    Surface metal/non-metal · Hoffman Construction Company Inc · MSHA ID 2103225
    Abandoned
  9. Portable Screener
    Surface metal/non-metal · M.R. Paving & Excavating, Inc. · MSHA ID 2100644
    Abandoned
  10. Schumacker Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Carlson Brothers Inc · MSHA ID 2100980
    Abandoned
  11. Solonek Concrete
    Surface metal/non-metal · Salonek Concrete Inc · MSHA ID 2102585
    Abandoned
  12. Springfield Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Acme-Ochs Brick and Stone Inc · MSHA ID 2100154
    Abandoned
  13. Veenstra & Son LLC
    Surface metal/non-metal · Veenstra & Son LLC · MSHA ID 2103692
    Abandoned
  14. WASH PLANT
    Surface metal/non-metal · Central Concrete, Inc. · MSHA ID 2103099
    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 96
Gravel Pit 34
Clay Pit 2
Clay Pit 2
Other counties in MinnesotaAll 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.