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Abandoned mines › North Carolina
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Moore County, North Carolina

Moore County, North Carolina has 34 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1957–1982. OSMRE's abandoned mine land inventory lists 1 problems in the county, all of them reclaimed. MSHA's register carries 18 mines in the county with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps covering Moore 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)
34
Mine openings
0
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
0
MSHA mines marked abandoned
18
0 features carry a name0 prospect pits11 quadrangle maps, published 1957–1982 1 OSMRE problems, 1 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
    1 2.9%
  2. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    9 25.7%
  3. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    25 71.4%
OSMRE abandoned mine land problems1 on inventory
Problem area Problem Status
Jones Pit P2 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 Abandoned18 on register
  1. ABERDEEN MINE
    Surface metal/non-metal · Lee Paving Company · MSHA ID 3101272
    Abandoned
  2. Blues Y Siding
    Surface metal/non-metal · Aberdeen Sand & Gravel Company Inc · MSHA ID 3100402
    Abandoned
  3. Eagle Springs Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Riley Paving Inc · MSHA ID 3101775
    Abandoned
  4. Evans Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Riley Paving Inc · MSHA ID 3101910
    Abandoned
  5. Glendon Open Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Standard Mineral Company Inc · MSHA ID 3100234
    Abandoned
  6. Glendon Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Glendon Pyrophyllite Inc · MSHA ID 3100227
    Abandoned
  7. Hammill West End Sand Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Hammill Construction Company Inc · MSHA ID 3102076
    Abandoned
  8. HARRIS PIT
    Surface metal/non-metal · Johnny Harris Trucking Inc · MSHA ID 3102140
    Abandoned
  9. Lobelia Sand & Gravel Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · G S Materials Inc · MSHA ID 3102066
    Abandoned
  10. Moore County Mine
    Surface metal/non-metal · Cherokee Sanford Group Inc · MSHA ID 3100126
    Abandoned
  11. Moore County Mines
    Surface metal/non-metal · N C Dept Of Transportation-Div Of Highways · MSHA ID 3100971
    Abandoned
  12. Robbins Open Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Standard Mineral Company Inc · MSHA ID 3100686
    Abandoned
  13. Smith Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Riley Paving Inc · MSHA ID 3101704
    Abandoned
  14. W B Brower Sand Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · W B Brower Sand · MSHA ID 3101242
    Abandoned
  15. Ward Mine
    Surface metal/non-metal · Glendon Pyrophyllite Inc · MSHA ID 3100689
    Abandoned
  16. Williams Sand Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Thompson-Arthur Paving Company · MSHA ID 3101923
    Abandoned
  17. Wilson Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Don Thomas Construction & Trucking Inc · MSHA ID 3101718
    Abandoned
  18. Wilson Pit
    metal/non-metal · Don Thomas Construction & Trucking INC · MSHA ID 3102274
    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
Sand Pit 10
Disturbed Surface 8
Gravel Pit 6
Sand and Gravel Pit 4
Quarry 3
P2 Vertical Openings 1
Clay Pit 1
Open Pit Mine 1
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 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.