Mining Incidents
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Newton County, Missouri

Newton County, Missouri has 217 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1916–1978, including 14 mine openings (shafts, adits and air shafts) and 112 prospect pits; 23 of the features carry a name on the map. OSMRE's abandoned mine land inventory lists 7 problems in the county, 1 of them not yet reclaimed. 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 Newton 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)
217
Mine openings
14
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
1
MSHA mines marked abandoned
10
23 features carry a name112 prospect pits13 quadrangle maps, published 1916–1978 7 OSMRE problems, 6 reclaimed 0 MSHA mines abandoned and sealed
What the features are
  1. Mine openings
    shafts, adits, air shafts, portals and vertical openings: the ways into underground workings
    20 8.9%
  2. Prospect pits and trenches
    shallow exploration diggings that never became a mine
    112 50.0%
  3. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    42 18.8%
  4. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    14 6.2%
  5. Dumps, tailings, spoil and gob
    what mining left above ground
    35 15.6%
  6. Other reclamation problems
    highwalls, subsidence, polluted or clogged water, fires, slides and gases in OSMRE's inventory
    1 0.4%
Named features on the maps23 named · from the USGS compilation
Name on map Feature
Chase Mine Open Pit Mine
Dungy Mine Open Pit Mine
Jolly Cave Open Pit Mine or Quarry
Mascot Mine Open Pit Mine area
Mascot Mine Open Pit Mine
Storage Tunnel Adit
Storage Tunnel Adit
Storage Tunnel Adit
Storage Tunnel Adit
Storage Tunnel Adit
Storage Tunnel Adit
Storage Tunnel Adit
Storage Tunnel Adit
Storage Tunnel Adit
Tiger Mine Open Pit Mine
Tiger Mine Open Pit Mine
Tripoli Mine Open Pit Mine area
Tripoli Mine Open Pit Mine area
Tripoli Mine Open Pit Mine area
Tripoli Mine Open Pit Mine area
Tripoli Mine Open Pit Mine area
Tripoli Mine Open Pit Mine area
Tripoli Mine Open Pit Mine area

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.

OSMRE abandoned mine land problems7 on inventory
Problem area Problem Status
Eland Road Shafts P1 Vertical Openings Reclamation Completed
Granby Shafts P1 Vertical Openings In Reclamation
Granby Shafts P1 Vertical Openings Reclamation Completed
Shoal Creek P1 Vertical Openings Reclamation Completed
Spring City P1 Vertical Openings Reclamation Completed
Spring City P2 Industrial/Residential Waste Reclamation Completed
Taylor Pb/zn Shafts P1 Vertical Openings Reclamation Completed

Problem types carry OSMRE's priority prefix: P1 and P2 are threats to health, safety and property, P3 is environmental. A problem area is a cluster of problems reclaimed as one project; several rows can share one location.

MSHA-registered mines with status Abandoned10 on register
  1. County Line Stone LLC
    Surface metal/non-metal · County Line Stone LLC · MSHA ID 2302357
    Abandoned
  2. Granby Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Missouri Materials LLC · MSHA ID 2302397
    Abandoned
  3. Hathaway Quarry And Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · 203d Engineer Batalion Mo National Guard · MSHA ID 2301615
    Abandoned
  4. Joplin Chat Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · L. G. Everist, Inc. · MSHA ID 2302261
    Abandoned
  5. Navy Bean Mine
    Surface metal/non-metal · Bed Rock Chat & Sand · MSHA ID 2302039
    Abandoned
  6. NEOSHO QUARRY
    Underground metal/non-metal · Southwest Lime Quarry Inc · MSHA ID 2300202
    Abandoned
  7. Newton County Portable Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Newton County Highway Commission · MSHA ID 2301614
    Abandoned
  8. NEWTONIA QUARRY
    Surface metal/non-metal · Fullerton Stone Company Inc · MSHA ID 2302030
    Abandoned
  9. Saginaw Quarries Incorporated
    Surface metal/non-metal · Saginaw Quarries Inc · MSHA ID 2301956
    Abandoned
  10. STANPHILL STONE
    Surface metal/non-metal · Stanphill Stone · MSHA ID 2302253
    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
Prospect Pit 111
Tailings - Undifferentiated 35
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 15
Quarry 12
Open Pit Mine 12
Open Pit Mine 11
Adit 9
P1 Vertical Openings 6
Mine Shaft 5
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 4
Quarry 2
Prospect Pit 1
P2 Industrial/Residential Waste 1
Other counties in MissouriAll 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.