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Abandoned mines › Tennessee
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Benton County, Tennessee

Benton County, Tennessee has 92 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1936–1987. MSHA's register carries 16 mines in the county with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps covering Benton 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)
92
Mine openings
0
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
0
MSHA mines marked abandoned
16
0 features carry a name0 prospect pits8 quadrangle maps, published 1936–1987 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
    84 91.3%
  2. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    8 8.7%
MSHA-registered mines with status Abandoned16 on register
  1. Benton County Highway Gravel Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Benton County Highway Department · MSHA ID 4002273
    Abandoned
  2. BIG SANDY MINE
    Surface metal/non-metal · North Benton Gravel Llc · MSHA ID 4003136
    Abandoned
  3. Camden
    Surface metal/non-metal · Tri-State Sand Company · MSHA ID 4000820
    Abandoned
  4. Camden Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Covia Solutions LLC · MSHA ID 4000793
    Abandoned
  5. CAMDEN PLANT
    Surface metal/non-metal · Unimin Corp · MSHA ID 4000792
    Abandoned
  6. Cypress Creek Mine
    Surface metal/non-metal · Wright Gravel Co. LLC · MSHA ID 4000803
    Abandoned
  7. Flowers Mine And Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · B L Flowers Gravel Company · MSHA ID 4002263
    Abandoned
  8. Holladay North
    Surface metal/non-metal · Vulcan Construction Materials, LLC · MSHA ID 4003039
    Abandoned
  9. Limestone Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Benton County Highway Department · MSHA ID 4002723
    Abandoned
  10. M & M Gravel, LLC
    Surface metal/non-metal · M & M Gravel, LLC · MSHA ID 4002955
    Abandoned
  11. MRS INC., CAMDEN TN PILOT PLANT
    Surface metal/non-metal · Mineral Recovery Systems Inc · MSHA ID 4003160
    Abandoned
  12. No 3 Strip
    Surface coal · Dixie Pine Coal Company Inc · MSHA ID 4000937
    Abandoned
  13. North Benton
    Surface metal/non-metal · Norwood Construction, Inc. · MSHA ID 4003257
    Abandoned
  14. O'Neal Melton & Sons, Inc.
    Surface metal/non-metal · O'Neal Melton & Sons, Inc. · MSHA ID 4003188
    Abandoned
  15. River Bend Chert
    Surface metal/non-metal · Rocky Point Rock, Inc. · MSHA ID 4003414
    Abandoned
  16. Tennessee Silica Division
    Surface metal/non-metal · Jesse S Morie & Son Inc · MSHA ID 4001316
    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 43
Disturbed Surface 23
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 18
Gravel Pit 4
Quarry 4
Other counties in TennesseeAll 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.