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Abandoned mines › North Carolina
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Rowan County, North Carolina

Rowan County, North Carolina has 55 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1962–1987. MSHA's register carries 24 mines in the county with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps covering Rowan 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)
55
Mine openings
0
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
0
MSHA mines marked abandoned
24
0 features carry a name0 prospect pits6 quadrangle maps, published 1962–1987 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
    4 7.3%
  2. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    51 92.7%
MSHA-registered mines with status Abandoned24 on register
  1. BALFOUR QUARRY
    Surface metal/non-metal · Balfour Quarry Inc · MSHA ID 3102091
    Abandoned
  2. Clearwater
    Surface metal/non-metal · Taylor Clay Products · MSHA ID 3101296
    Abandoned
  3. DUNNS QUARRY
    Surface metal/non-metal · Dunns Mountain Pink Granite Company · MSHA ID 3102110
    Abandoned
  4. East Spencer Mine And Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · Hammill Construction Company Inc · MSHA ID 3100143
    Abandoned
  5. Grants Creek Sand Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Carolina Sand, Inc. · MSHA ID 3102265
    Abandoned
  6. Grinding Plant
    Facility metal/non-metal · Taylor Clay Products · MSHA ID 3101394
    Abandoned
  7. Herman Pink Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · L S Starrett Company · MSHA ID 3100193
    Abandoned
  8. IRISA GRANITE QUARRY
    Surface metal/non-metal · Irisa Granite Quarrying Company Inc · MSHA ID 3102136
    Abandoned
  9. Panther Point Mine
    Surface metal/non-metal · Hammill Construction Company Inc · MSHA ID 3100539
    Abandoned
  10. Pink Salisbury
    Surface metal/non-metal · Rowan Granite Quarry Inc · MSHA ID 3100011
    Abandoned
  11. ROCKWELL
    Surface metal/non-metal · Rockwell Granite Company · MSHA ID 3102101
    Abandoned
  12. Rowan County Mines
    Surface metal/non-metal · N C Dept Of Transportation-Div Of Highways · MSHA ID 3100301
    Abandoned
  13. Rowan County Mines
    Surface metal/non-metal · Rea Construction Company · MSHA ID 3101517
    Abandoned
  14. ROWAN PINK
    Surface metal/non-metal · Nasco-North American Stone Corp Llc · MSHA ID 3102079
    Abandoned
  15. Rowan Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Vulcan Construction Materials, LLC · MSHA ID 3102103
    Abandoned
  16. Salisbury Plant and Pits
    Surface metal/non-metal · General Shale Brick, Inc. · MSHA ID 3102350
    Abandoned
  17. Salisbury Shop
    Facility metal/non-metal · Martin Marietta Materials Inc · MSHA ID 3101235
    Abandoned
  18. Silvertone Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Comolli Granite Company · MSHA ID 3101894
    Abandoned
  19. Solar White Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Rowan Granite Quarry Inc · MSHA ID 3102054
    Abandoned
  20. Stalite Coal
    Facility coal · Carolina Stalite Company · MSHA ID 3102032
    Abandoned
  21. Star Pink Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Dixie Quarrying Inc · MSHA ID 3101913
    Abandoned
  22. Thomas Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Hammill Construction Company Inc · MSHA ID 3101755
    Abandoned
  23. White Camellia Granite Company
    Surface metal/non-metal · White Camellia Granite Company · MSHA ID 3102077
    Abandoned
  24. Withrow
    Surface metal/non-metal · Corriher Sand & Stone Inc · MSHA ID 3102041
    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
Quarry 44
Quarry 3
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 3
Clay Pit 2
Disturbed Surface 1
Gravel Pit 1
Sand 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.