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Abandoned mines › Ohio
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Licking County, Ohio

Licking County, Ohio has 59 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1958–1985. OSMRE's abandoned mine land inventory lists 1 problems in the county, all of them reclaimed. MSHA's register carries 14 mines in the county with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps covering Licking 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)
59
Mine openings
0
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
0
MSHA mines marked abandoned
14
0 features carry a name0 prospect pits12 quadrangle maps, published 1958–1985 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 1.7%
  2. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    10 16.7%
  3. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    48 80.0%
  4. Dumps, tailings, spoil and gob
    what mining left above ground
    1 1.7%
OSMRE abandoned mine land problems1 on inventory
Problem area Problem Status
Toboso South P1 Portals 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 Abandoned14 on register
  1. Alexandria Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Shelly Materials Inc · MSHA ID 3304334
    Abandoned
  2. Alexandria Sand & Gravel
    Surface metal/non-metal · Lancaster Asphalt Company · MSHA ID 3301381
    Abandoned
  3. Beckco No 4 Strip
    Surface coal · Becko Construction Co · MSHA ID 3303338
    Abandoned
  4. Farm Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Dry Creek Crushed Gravel Company · MSHA ID 3303045
    Abandoned
  5. Hanover
    Surface metal/non-metal · Bowerston Shale Company · MSHA ID 3300538
    Abandoned
  6. Hoskinson Pit And Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · Newark Asphalt Company · MSHA ID 3303046
    Abandoned
  7. Newark Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Newark Materials LLC · MSHA ID 3304384
    Abandoned
  8. Newark Plant #214
    Surface metal/non-metal · American Aggregates Corp · MSHA ID 3301386
    Abandoned
  9. Prior
    Surface coal · Eastern Fuel Services Inc · MSHA ID 3303771
    Abandoned
  10. Rockport Sand & Gravel Company Incorpora
    Surface metal/non-metal · Rockport Sand & Gravel Company Inc · MSHA ID 3303818
    Abandoned
  11. Toboso Ag
    Surface metal/non-metal · Toboso Ag · MSHA ID 3304768
    Abandoned
  12. Vanatta Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Olen Corp · MSHA ID 3301452
    Abandoned
  13. York Road Gravel Company
    Surface metal/non-metal · York Road Gravel Company · MSHA ID 3304068
    Abandoned
  14. Zanesville No 1 Strip
    Surface coal · Ohio Valley Mining Inc · MSHA ID 3303732
    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 21
Gravel Pit 19
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 8
Disturbed Surface 7
Strip Mine 3
Tailings - Pond 1
P1 Portals 1
Other counties in OhioAll 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.