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Abandoned mines › North Carolina
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Mitchell County, North Carolina

Mitchell County, North Carolina has 165 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1934–1990, including 24 mine openings (shafts, adits and air shafts); 16 of the features carry a name on the map. MSHA's register carries 27 mines in the county with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps covering Mitchell 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)
165
Mine openings
24
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
0
MSHA mines marked abandoned
27
16 features carry a name0 prospect pits5 quadrangle maps, published 1934–1990 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
    24 14.5%
  2. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    138 83.6%
  3. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    3 1.8%
Named features on the maps16 named · from the USGS compilation
Name on map Feature
Chalk Mine Strip Mine area
Chestnut Flats Mine Adit
Deer Park Mine Strip Mine area
Hootowl Mine Open Pit Mine
Hootowl Mine Strip Mine area
Pink Mine Open Pit Mine
Sink Hole Mine Mine Shaft
Sink Hole Mine Mine Shaft
Sink Hole Mine Mine Shaft
Spread Eagle Mine Adit
Spread Eagle Mine Open Pit Mine
Spread Eagle Mine Open Pit Mine
Wiseman Mine Adit
Wiseman Mine Adit
Wolfden Mine Open Pit Mine
Wolfden Mine Open Pit 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 Abandoned27 on register
  1. Bear Creek Mica Plant
    Facility metal/non-metal · The Quartz Corp USA · MSHA ID 3101928
    Abandoned
  2. Big Crabtree Mine
    Underground metal/non-metal · Crabtree Emerald Mine Inc · MSHA ID 3100679
    Abandoned
  3. Black Mine
    Surface metal/non-metal · Appalachian Stone Company · MSHA ID 3102323
    Abandoned
  4. Boone Quarries No 1 And Yard
    Surface metal/non-metal · Boone Stone Company · MSHA ID 3100254
    Abandoned
  5. BUTNER QUARRY AND YARD
    Surface metal/non-metal · Tri-County Stone Company · MSHA ID 3101896
    Abandoned
  6. CHALK MOUNTAIN MINE
    Surface metal/non-metal · Feldspar Corp · MSHA ID 3100100
    Abandoned
  7. Crabtree
    Surface metal/non-metal · Crabtree · MSHA ID 3102226
    Abandoned
  8. Crystal Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Sibelco North America, Inc. · MSHA ID 3102012
    Abandoned
  9. Downtown Clay Operation
    Facility metal/non-metal · Unimin Corp · MSHA ID 3101077
    Abandoned
  10. Gem Mountain
    Surface metal/non-metal · Gem Mountain · MSHA ID 3102235
    Abandoned
  11. Henredon Quarry And Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Williams Sand & Gravel Company · MSHA ID 3101729
    Abandoned
  12. Kona Mill
    Facility metal/non-metal · Applied Industrial Materials Corp (Aimcor) · MSHA ID 3100674
    Abandoned
  13. Ledford'S Mines
    Surface metal/non-metal · Mineral City Mining Company · MSHA ID 3101929
    Abandoned
  14. Mitchell County Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Rogers Group Inc. · MSHA ID 3102295
    Abandoned
  15. Mitchell Stone
    Surface metal/non-metal · Earl Ponder Trucking · MSHA ID 3102346
    Abandoned
  16. Nanney Mine
    Surface metal/non-metal · Deneen Mica Company Inc · MSHA ID 3101879
    Abandoned
  17. Pine Mountain
    Surface metal/non-metal · Mayland Stone Company Inc · MSHA ID 3100363
    Abandoned
  18. Pink Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Boone Stone Company · MSHA ID 3101378
    Abandoned
  19. Plant 2
    Facility metal/non-metal · Unimin Corporation · MSHA ID 3101416
    Abandoned
  20. PLANT NO.2
    Facility metal/non-metal · Feldspar Corp · MSHA ID 3100793
    Abandoned
  21. Poplar Mine
    Surface metal/non-metal · Horizon 30 LLC · MSHA ID 3102365
    Abandoned
  22. Sibelco Red Hill IOTA
    Facility metal/non-metal · Sibelco North America, Inc. · MSHA ID 3102119
    Abandoned
  23. Spruce Pine Mill
    Facility metal/non-metal · Diamond Mica Company · MSHA ID 3100639
    Abandoned
  24. Steel Gray
    Surface metal/non-metal · Buechel Stone Corp. · MSHA ID 3102315
    Abandoned
  25. Steel Gray Mine A and B
    Surface metal/non-metal · Steel Gray Stone · MSHA ID 3102216
    Abandoned
  26. Unimin/The Quartz Corp
    Surface metal/non-metal · Tri-County Co Inc · MSHA ID 3102324
    Abandoned
  27. Wise Mine
    Surface metal/non-metal · Spruce Pine Olivine Company · MSHA ID 3101909
    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
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 90
Strip Mine 21
Adit 19
Open Pit Mine 17
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 9
Mine Shaft 5
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 2
Open Pit Mine 1
Clay Pit 1
Other counties in North CarolinaAll 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.