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Abandoned mines › Pennsylvania
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Berks County, Pennsylvania

Berks County, Pennsylvania has 162 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1905–1999, including 1 mine openings (shafts, adits and air shafts); 3 of the features carry a name on the map. OSMRE's abandoned mine land inventory lists 3 problems in the county, 3 of them not yet reclaimed. MSHA's register carries 21 mines in the county with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps covering Berks 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)
162
Mine openings
1
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
3
MSHA mines marked abandoned
21
3 features carry a name0 prospect pits22 quadrangle maps, published 1905–1999 3 OSMRE problems, 0 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 0.6%
  2. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    98 59.4%
  3. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    63 38.2%
  4. Mills, tipples and facilities
    processing plants and hazardous structures
    1 0.6%
  5. Other reclamation problems
    highwalls, subsidence, polluted or clogged water, fires, slides and gases in OSMRE's inventory
    2 1.2%
Named features on the maps3 named · from the USGS compilation
Name on map Feature
Crystal Cave Adit
Grace Mine Mine
Silt Basin Disturbed Surface area

A name is the label printed beside the symbol on the map. "First mapped" is the earliest topographic edition that shows the symbol, which bounds the feature's age from above; it is not the date it was worked. Unnamed features (most prospect pits, adits and shafts carry no label) are in the counts above but not this list.

OSMRE abandoned mine land problems3 on inventory
Problem area Problem Status
New Kernsville Dam P1 Hazardous Equip & Facilities Reclamation Pending
New Kernsville Dam P1 Hazardous Water Bodies In Reclamation
New Kernsville Dam P2 Clogged Streams In Reclamation

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 Abandoned21 on register
  1. 70007
    Surface metal/non-metal · CH+N Site Construction · MSHA ID 3610420
    Abandoned
  2. E J Breneman Incorporated
    Surface metal/non-metal · E J Breneman Inc · MSHA ID 3603434
    Abandoned
  3. Fleetwood Quarry & Sand Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · No 1 Contracting Corp · MSHA ID 3604373
    Abandoned
  4. Gabel Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Martin Stone Quarries Inc · MSHA ID 3603458
    Abandoned
  5. Grace Mine
    Underground metal/non-metal · Bethlehem Mines Corp · MSHA ID 3602620
    Abandoned
  6. Grings Quarry Sandstone Operation
    Surface metal/non-metal · Grings Quarry · MSHA ID 3600102
    Abandoned
  7. Kutztown II Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · New Enterprise Stone & Lime Co., Inc. · MSHA ID 3604372
    Abandoned
  8. Kutztown Quarry And Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · No 1 Contracting Corp · MSHA ID 3604283
    Abandoned
  9. Leesport Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Stoudts Ferry Preparation Co Inc · MSHA ID 3605947
    Abandoned
  10. Lower Heidelberg
    Surface metal/non-metal · Glen-Gery Corporation · MSHA ID 3600625
    Abandoned
  11. Mellott-Oley Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Mellott Company · MSHA ID 3609562
    Abandoned
  12. MORGANTOWN PLANT
    Facility metal/non-metal · Independance Construction Materials · MSHA ID 3603461
    Abandoned
  13. Oley #2
    Surface metal/non-metal · Lehigh Cement Company LLC · MSHA ID 3604849
    Abandoned
  14. Oley No 1 Quarry
    Facility metal/non-metal · Lehigh Cement Company LLC · MSHA ID 3600186
    Abandoned
  15. Oley Quarry
    Facility metal/non-metal · Berks Products Corp · MSHA ID 3603444
    Abandoned
  16. Oley Quarry #112
    Surface metal/non-metal · New Enterprise Stone and Lime Co. · MSHA ID 3600065
    Abandoned
  17. Richmond NO 5 Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Lehigh Cement Company LLC · MSHA ID 3604407
    Abandoned
  18. Robesonia Quarry And Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · Tulpehocken Stone Inc · MSHA ID 3600126
    Abandoned
  19. South Temple Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Berks Products Corp · MSHA ID 3604138
    Abandoned
  20. Stoudts Ferry Preparation Plant
    Facility coal · Stoudt'S Ferry Preparation Company Inc · MSHA ID 3602011
    Abandoned
  21. Temple Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Highway Materials Inc · MSHA ID 3603138
    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
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 40
Disturbed Surface 25
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 18
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 15
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 10
Disturbed Surface - Pit 10
Quarry 10
Quarry 10
Gravel Pit 5
Gravel Pit 5
Strip Mine 4
Clay Pit 2
Borrow Pit 2
Sand Pit 2
P1 Hazardous Water Bodies 1
P2 Clogged Streams 1
Clay Pit 1
P1 Hazardous Equip & Facilities 1
Sand Pit 1
Mine 1
Adit 1
Other counties in PennsylvaniaAll 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.