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← Abandoned mines, all states · Mining incidents in New Hampshire
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in New Hampshire

New Hampshire has 2,250 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1921–1998, including 10 mine openings (shafts, adits and air shafts), across 10 counties. MSHA's register carries 236 New Hampshire mines with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps of New Hampshire, every OSMRE abandoned mine land problem, and every MSHA-registered mine with status Abandoned, by county. Each county page lists the named features and links every MSHA mine to its own record.

Mapped mine features (USGS)
2,250
Mine openings
10
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
0
MSHA mines marked abandoned
236
10 counties with mapped features6 features carry a name0 prospect pitsmaps published 1921–1998 0 MSHA mines abandoned and sealed
By countyranked by mapped USGS features
County USGS features Openings OSMRE problems MSHA abandoned
Hillsborough County
535 0 0 37
Rockingham County
361 2 0 43
Merrimack County
294 0 0 36
Grafton County
287 6 0 26
Carroll County
166 0 0 15
Coos County
164 0 0 13
Strafford County
142 0 0 22
Cheshire County
109 2 0 14
Belknap County
108 0 0 21
Sullivan County
84 0 0 9
What the features are
  1. Mine openings
    shafts, adits, air shafts, portals and vertical openings: the ways into underground workings
    10 0.4%
  2. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    249 11.1%
  3. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    1,990 88.4%
  4. Mills, tipples and facilities
    processing plants and hazardous structures
    1 0.0%
By source vocabularythe publishers' own terms
Feature type Features
Gravel Pit 751
Sand Pit 336
Gravel Pit 276
Sand Pit 237
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 217
Disturbed Surface 160
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 52
Sand and Gravel Pit 45
Sand and Gravel Pit 42
Quarry 32
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 31
Open Pit Mine 22
Borrow Pit 10
Open Pit Mine 7
Adit 7
Borrow Pit 6
Disturbed Surface - Pit 4
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 4
Mine Shaft 3
Quarry 3
Quarry - Rock 2
Tipple 1
Clay Pit 1
Clay Pit 1
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, and the map does not say which. An OSMRE row is a problem the abandoned mine land program tracks, not a mine, and several problems make one problem area (PAD), which is the unit a state program counts and reports; the public extract can also hold more problem areas than a state's live inventory, because areas since merged or ruled ineligible stay in the published file, so a state figure that differs from this one is not a contradiction. An MSHA mine is a registered operation whose operator reported abandonment, a record that starts in the 1970s; that is a regulatory status rather than a physical one, and it also holds operations merely between jobs, portable crushers above all, which is why over a thousand mines carrying it have been inspected in the last two years. The three overlap and are never added together. Counties are assigned from each feature's coordinates against the Census 2023 county boundaries. The full method and every source are 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.