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Abandoned mines › Texas
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Brewster County, Texas

Brewster County, Texas has 205 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1923–1983, including 83 mine openings (shafts, adits and air shafts) and 56 prospect pits; 5 of the features carry a name on the map. OSMRE's abandoned mine land inventory lists 19 problems in the county, 1 of them not yet reclaimed. MSHA's register carries 23 mines in the county with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps covering Brewster 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)
205
Mine openings
83
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
1
MSHA mines marked abandoned
23
5 features carry a name56 prospect pits37 quadrangle maps, published 1923–1983 19 OSMRE problems, 18 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
    99 44.2%
  2. Prospect pits and trenches
    shallow exploration diggings that never became a mine
    56 25.0%
  3. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    6 2.7%
  4. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    60 26.8%
  5. Other reclamation problems
    highwalls, subsidence, polluted or clogged water, fires, slides and gases in OSMRE's inventory
    3 1.3%
Named features on the maps5 named · from the USGS compilation
Name on map Feature
Bissett Mine Open Pit Mine
Colquitt - Tigner Mine Mine Shaft
Lone Star Mine Mine Shaft
Mariscal Mine Adit
Mariscal Mine Adit

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 problems19 on inventory
Problem area Problem Status
Adobe Walls P2 Vertical Openings Reclamation Completed
Big Bend National Park P1 Portals Reclamation Completed
Big Bend National Park P1 Vertical Openings Reclamation Completed
Big Bend Resort P2 Vertical Openings Reclamation Pending
Little Thirty-Eight P1 Vertical Openings Reclamation Completed
Lone Star/Mariposa Phase 1 P2 Portals Reclamation Completed
Lone Star/Mariposa Phase 1 P2 Vertical Openings Reclamation Completed
Lone Star/Mariposa Phase 2 P2 Portals Reclamation Completed
Lone Star/Mariposa Phase 2 P2 Vertical Openings Reclamation Completed
Lone Star/Mariposa Phase 3 P2 Portals Reclamation Completed
Lone Star/Mariposa Phase 3 P2 Vertical Openings Reclamation Completed
No. 248 Mine P2 Subsidence Reclamation Completed
No. 248 Mine P2 Vertical Openings Reclamation Completed
Study Butte P2 Subsidence Reclamation Completed
Study Butte P2 Vertical Openings Reclamation Completed
Study Butte P2 Vertical Openings Reclamation Completed
Terlingua P1 Portals Reclamation Completed
Terlingua P1 Vertical Openings Reclamation Completed
Terlingua P3 Other 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 Abandoned23 on register
  1. 242 #1 Mine
    Surface metal/non-metal · Valley Land & Cattle Ltd · MSHA ID 4102875
    Abandoned
  2. Alpine Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · U S Clay L P · MSHA ID 4104009
    Abandoned
  3. American Bentonite
    Surface metal/non-metal · American Bentonite · MSHA ID 4104766
    Abandoned
  4. Bailey Fluorspar Company Plant
    Facility metal/non-metal · Bailey Fluorspar Company Inc · MSHA ID 4101501
    Abandoned
  5. Bentonite Venture
    Surface metal/non-metal · Dick Baker Drilling Company Inc · MSHA ID 4103233
    Abandoned
  6. Coral Ranger Mine
    Underground metal/non-metal · Coral Petrofenix Inc · MSHA ID 4103567
    Abandoned
  7. Dgm Gel Products
    Facility metal/non-metal · Dick Baker Drilling Company Inc · MSHA ID 4103232
    Abandoned
  8. INDIAN HILLS PLANT
    Surface metal/non-metal · Columbia Western Clay Company Llc · MSHA ID 4103897
    Abandoned
  9. Kimball Quarry And Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Kimball Krushers · MSHA ID 4101666
    Abandoned
  10. LAJITAS MATERIALS LLC
    Surface metal/non-metal · Lajitas Materials Llc · MSHA ID 4104260
    Abandoned
  11. Marathon Plant
    Facility metal/non-metal · Delhi Foundry Sand Company · MSHA ID 4101667
    Abandoned
  12. Marathon Terminal Plant
    Facility metal/non-metal · E I Du Pont De Nemours & Company Inc · MSHA ID 4102559
    Abandoned
  13. MI SWACO-Alpine
    Surface metal/non-metal · M I L.L.C. · MSHA ID 4104829
    Abandoned
  14. NATURAL MINING INT'L
    Facility metal/non-metal · Natural Mining International · MSHA ID 4104211
    Abandoned
  15. Not Yours But Mine
    Surface metal/non-metal · Basecamp Terlingua LLC · MSHA ID 4105611
    Abandoned
  16. Paisano Mine
    Surface metal/non-metal · Machaca Resources Inc · MSHA ID 4102558
    Abandoned
  17. Paisano Mines
    Underground metal/non-metal · Machaca Resources Inc · MSHA ID 4101500
    Abandoned
  18. Portable Crusher #1
    Surface metal/non-metal · Herzog Contracting Corp · MSHA ID 4103292
    Abandoned
  19. Portable Crusher #1
    Surface metal/non-metal · Kiewit Texas Construction LP · MSHA ID 4103778
    Abandoned
  20. Portable Screening Plant #1
    Surface metal/non-metal · Jarratt Dirt Work and Paving, Inc. · MSHA ID 4104876
    Abandoned
  21. PRODUCTION MINERALS INC
    Facility metal/non-metal · Production Minerals Inc · MSHA ID 4103647
    Abandoned
  22. Superior 07 & 18
    Surface metal/non-metal · Superior Minerals, LLC · MSHA ID 4103312
    Abandoned
  23. The Ranch Pit And Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Kimball Krushers · MSHA ID 4101927
    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
Prospect Pit 56
Mine Shaft 50
Gravel Pit 38
Adit 33
Gravel Pit 14
P2 Vertical Openings 8
Quarry 7
Open Pit Mine 6
P1 Vertical Openings 3
P2 Portals 3
P2 Subsidence 2
P1 Portals 2
Quarry 1
P3 Other 1
Other counties in TexasAll 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.