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Abandoned mines › Minnesota
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Polk County, Minnesota

Polk County, Minnesota has 144 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1952–1994. MSHA's register carries 17 mines in the county with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps covering Polk 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)
144
Mine openings
0
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
0
MSHA mines marked abandoned
17
0 features carry a name0 prospect pits29 quadrangle maps, published 1952–1994 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
    5 3.5%
  2. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    139 96.5%
MSHA-registered mines with status Abandoned17 on register
  1. Black Gold Pit And Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · Thorson Inc · MSHA ID 2101646
    Abandoned
  2. Dux Aggregate Pit And Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · Dux Washed Aggregate · MSHA ID 2102762
    Abandoned
  3. East Polk County Pit And Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · Ikel Sand & Gravel Inc · MSHA ID 2102632
    Abandoned
  4. Fabtec Wash Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · J & S Gravel Inc · MSHA ID 2102894
    Abandoned
  5. Gray Screen
    Surface metal/non-metal · Garry Gravel · MSHA ID 2103542
    Abandoned
  6. Lloyd Bruce Pit & Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · Donarski Brothers Inc · MSHA ID 2102551
    Abandoned
  7. Mac Adams Pit & Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · Spring Gravel Company · MSHA ID 2102690
    Abandoned
  8. Plant 2
    Surface metal/non-metal · Ottesen Sand and Gravel Inc · MSHA ID 2103785
    Abandoned
  9. Polk County Pits
    Surface metal/non-metal · Anderson Brothers Construction Company · MSHA ID 2102907
    Abandoned
  10. Portable 1
    Surface metal/non-metal · Evenson Gravel LLC · MSHA ID 2103823
    Abandoned
  11. Power Screen
    Surface metal/non-metal · Lindberg Enterprises, LLC · MSHA ID 2103706
    Abandoned
  12. Ruben Olson Pit & Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · Donarski Brothers Inc · MSHA ID 2102521
    Abandoned
  13. Sam Taylor Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Wm D Scepaniak Inc · MSHA ID 2102858
    Abandoned
  14. Spring Gravel Wash Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Spring Gravel Company · MSHA ID 2100618
    Abandoned
  15. Thorson Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Bakken Trucking · MSHA ID 2102649
    Abandoned
  16. Weberg Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Erling Olson Trucking · MSHA ID 2101644
    Abandoned
  17. Weberg Pit And Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · Marlin Hammer Company · MSHA ID 2101450
    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 80
Gravel Pit 54
Disturbed Surface - Pit 5
Sand and Gravel Pit 2
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 1
Clay Pit 1
Quarry 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.