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Abandoned mines › Minnesota
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Lake County, Minnesota

Lake County, Minnesota has 224 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1933–1992; 6 of the features carry a name on the map. MSHA's register carries 10 mines in the county with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps covering Lake 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)
224
Mine openings
0
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
0
MSHA mines marked abandoned
10
6 features carry a name0 prospect pits38 quadrangle maps, published 1933–1992 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
    18 8.0%
  2. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    200 89.3%
  3. Dumps, tailings, spoil and gob
    what mining left above ground
    5 2.2%
  4. Mills, tipples and facilities
    processing plants and hazardous structures
    1 0.4%
Named features on the maps6 named · from the USGS compilation
Name on map Feature
Fortiers Mill Mill Site
Milepost Seven Tailings Pond Tailings - Pond area
Milepost Seven Tailings Pond Tailings - Pond area
Milepost Seven Tailings Pond Tailings - Pond area
Milepost Seven Tailings Pond Tailings - Pond area
Section Thirty Mine Mine

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 Abandoned10 on register
  1. August Seliskar Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · August Seliskar · MSHA ID 2102505
    Abandoned
  2. Fall Lake Township Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Fall Lake Township · MSHA ID 2102504
    Abandoned
  3. Fox Farm Sand & Gravel
    Surface metal/non-metal · Fox Farm Sand & Gravel · MSHA ID 2104003
    Abandoned
  4. Lake County Highway Department Pits
    Surface metal/non-metal · Lake County Highway Department-Mn · MSHA ID 2102465
    Abandoned
  5. Lake County Pit No 1
    Surface metal/non-metal · Edwin E Thoreson Inc · MSHA ID 2102811
    Abandoned
  6. Lake County Pits
    Surface metal/non-metal · Ulland Brothers Inc · MSHA ID 2102951
    Abandoned
  7. Lake Superior Green
    Surface metal/non-metal · Cold Spring Granite Company · MSHA ID 2103124
    Abandoned
  8. Lauren Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · North Shore Ready Mix · MSHA ID 2100633
    Abandoned
  9. Mesabi Nugget, LLC
    Facility metal/non-metal · Mesabi Nugget, LLC · MSHA ID 2103340
    Abandoned
  10. Schroeder Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Ulland Brothers Inc · MSHA ID 2102810
    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 145
Gravel Pit 39
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 7
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 7
Disturbed Surface - Pit 5
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 5
Tailings - Pond 5
Sand Pit 3
Quarry 3
Quarry 2
Mine 1
Mill Site 1
Sand Pit 1
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.