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Abandoned mines › Minnesota
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Nicollet County, Minnesota

Nicollet County, Minnesota has 83 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1951–1991. 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 Nicollet 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)
83
Mine openings
0
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
0
MSHA mines marked abandoned
9
0 features carry a name0 prospect pits15 quadrangle maps, published 1951–1991 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
    1 1.2%
  2. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    79 95.2%
  3. Dumps, tailings, spoil and gob
    what mining left above ground
    3 3.6%
MSHA-registered mines with status Abandoned9 on register
  1. CEDER RAPIDS
    Surface metal/non-metal · Thompson Construction · MSHA ID 2103040
    Abandoned
  2. Courtland Sand & Gravel Company
    Surface metal/non-metal · Courtland Sand & Gravel Company · MSHA ID 2102964
    Abandoned
  3. Judson Sand Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · North Star Concrete Company · MSHA ID 2101120
    Abandoned
  4. Kohn Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Komatz Construction Inc · MSHA ID 2101279
    Abandoned
  5. Kuester Pit 1
    Surface metal/non-metal · Ground Zero Services LLC · MSHA ID 2103819
    Abandoned
  6. Kuester Pit 2
    Surface metal/non-metal · Ground Zero Services LLC · MSHA ID 2103820
    Abandoned
  7. Kuester Pit 3
    Surface metal/non-metal · Ground Zero Services LLC. · MSHA ID 2103858
    Abandoned
  8. Nicollet County Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Ed Swartout Inc · MSHA ID 2100662
    Abandoned
  9. St Peter Shop
    Surface metal/non-metal · Northern Con-Agg Inc · MSHA ID 2101355
    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 45
Gravel Pit 26
Sand Pit 6
Tailings - Pond 3
Quarry 1
Disturbed Surface - Pit 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.