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Abandoned mines › North Dakota
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Mercer County, North Dakota

Mercer County, North Dakota has 99 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1948–1981. OSMRE's abandoned mine land inventory lists 18 problems in the county, 14 of them not yet reclaimed. MSHA's register carries 7 mines in the county with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps covering Mercer 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)
99
Mine openings
0
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
14
MSHA mines marked abandoned
7
0 features carry a name0 prospect pits24 quadrangle maps, published 1948–1981 18 OSMRE problems, 4 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 0.9%
  2. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    31 26.5%
  3. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    68 58.1%
  4. Dumps, tailings, spoil and gob
    what mining left above ground
    1 0.9%
  5. Mills, tipples and facilities
    processing plants and hazardous structures
    2 1.7%
  6. Other reclamation problems
    highwalls, subsidence, polluted or clogged water, fires, slides and gases in OSMRE's inventory
    14 12.0%
OSMRE abandoned mine land problems18 on inventory
Problem area Problem Status
Bauer P2 Subsidence Reclamation Pending
Beulah P1 Subsidence Reclamation Completed
Beulah P1 Surface Burning Reclamation Completed
Beulah P2 Dangerous Highwalls Reclamation Pending
Beulah P2 Dangerous Highwalls In Reclamation
Beulah P2 Portals Reclamation Pending
Beulah P2 Subsidence In Reclamation
Beulah P2 Subsidence In Reclamation
Beulah P3 Spoil Area Reclamation Pending
Dakota Star P2 Dangerous Highwalls In Reclamation
Dakota Star P2 Hazardous Equip & Facilities Reclamation Completed
Dakota Star P2 Subsidence Reclamation Pending
Hazen West P2 Dangerous Highwalls In Reclamation
Manhaven P2 Subsidence Reclamation Pending
Nd - Mercer - Fea P1 Gases: Hazardous/Explosive In Reclamation
Nd - Mercer - Fea P1 Subsidence Reclamation Completed
Scheid P2 Hazardous Equip & Facilities Reclamation Pending
Scheid P2 Subsidence Reclamation Pending

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 Abandoned7 on register
  1. Asgard Mobile Washplant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Asgard Resources · MSHA ID 3201085
    Abandoned
  2. C-7 HEWITT ROBINS 2142 JAW
    Surface metal/non-metal · Gravel Products Inc · MSHA ID 3200668
    Abandoned
  3. Glenharold Mine
    Surface coal · Basin Cooperative Services · MSHA ID 3200042
    Abandoned
  4. Indian Head Mine
    Surface coal · Bellaire Corp · MSHA ID 3200044
    Abandoned
  5. Knell Trucking
    Surface metal/non-metal · Knell Trucking · MSHA ID 3200872
    Abandoned
  6. Leesmine
    Surface metal/non-metal · LeeRoy Fischer Construction LLC · MSHA ID 3200998
    Abandoned
  7. Pit 1
    Surface metal/non-metal · Antelope Creek Trucking, Inc. · MSHA ID 3200949
    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 53
Strip Mine 25
Scoria Pit 7
P2 Subsidence 6
Gravel Pit 6
P2 Dangerous Highwalls 4
Open Pit Mine 4
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 2
P1 Subsidence 2
P2 Hazardous Equip & Facilities 2
P3 Spoil Area 1
P1 Surface Burning 1
Strip Mine 1
P1 Gases: Hazardous/Explosive 1
P2 Portals 1
Coal Mine 1
Other counties in North DakotaAll 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.