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Abandoned mines › Washington
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Benton County, Washington

Benton County, Washington has 256 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1950–1993, including 6 mine openings (shafts, adits and air shafts) and 8 prospect pits. MSHA's register carries 34 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)
256
Mine openings
6
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
0
MSHA mines marked abandoned
34
0 features carry a name8 prospect pits40 quadrangle maps, published 1950–1993 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
    6 2.3%
  2. Prospect pits and trenches
    shallow exploration diggings that never became a mine
    8 3.1%
  3. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    4 1.6%
  4. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    238 93.0%
MSHA-registered mines with status Abandoned34 on register
  1. A & B PIT
    Surface metal/non-metal · Rockman Products Inc · MSHA ID 4503351
    Abandoned
  2. Anderson Pit & Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Country Gals Asphalt Inc · MSHA ID 4502602
    Abandoned
  3. Bedrock Specialty Stone Products LLC
    Surface metal/non-metal · Bedrock Specialty Stone Products LLC · MSHA ID 4503738
    Abandoned
  4. Benton City Wash Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · AAA Concrete, Inc. · MSHA ID 4503490
    Abandoned
  5. Black Top Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Midrock Products · MSHA ID 4502955
    Abandoned
  6. Blacktop Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · L W Vail Company Inc · MSHA ID 4500147
    Abandoned
  7. Cherry Lane Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Benton County Engineering Department · MSHA ID 4501591
    Abandoned
  8. Church Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · L W Vail Company Inc · MSHA ID 4502443
    Abandoned
  9. Clodfelter Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Mahaffey Ent. Inc. · MSHA ID 4503576
    Abandoned
  10. Court Street Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Central Pre Mix · MSHA ID 4502983
    Abandoned
  11. Crow Butte Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · George A Grant Inc · MSHA ID 4501894
    Abandoned
  12. D O E Pit No 1
    Surface metal/non-metal · Central Pre-Mix Concrete Company · MSHA ID 4501752
    Abandoned
  13. Erda Pit No 2
    Surface metal/non-metal · U S Department Of Energy · MSHA ID 4502381
    Abandoned
  14. Erda Pit No 3
    Surface metal/non-metal · Energy Research & Development Administration · MSHA ID 4502407
    Abandoned
  15. Farmers Field Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · E R Fegert Company · MSHA ID 4502446
    Abandoned
  16. Gable Mountain Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Energy Research & Development Administration · MSHA ID 4502445
    Abandoned
  17. Highway 221 Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Seubert Excavators Inc · MSHA ID 4503002
    Abandoned
  18. Holt Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Three Rivers Sand & Gravel · MSHA ID 4502239
    Abandoned
  19. Johnson Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · O L Luther Company Inc · MSHA ID 4502393
    Abandoned
  20. Matheson Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Central Pre-Mix Concrete Co. · MSHA ID 4500572
    Abandoned
  21. MATHESON PIT
    Surface metal/non-metal · Acme Materials & Construction Company · MSHA ID 4500659
    Abandoned
  22. McNary Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · AgriNorthwest Inc · MSHA ID 4503600
    Abandoned
  23. P F R 76 Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Central Pre-Mix Concrete Company · MSHA ID 4502999
    Abandoned
  24. Plant 2
    Surface metal/non-metal · C. I. Lovell, Inc. · MSHA ID 4503733
    Abandoned
  25. Portable Crusher
    Surface metal/non-metal · A & B Asphalt Inc · MSHA ID 4503044
    Abandoned
  26. Portable Crusher
    Surface metal/non-metal · J & H Crushing Inc · MSHA ID 4503125
    Abandoned
  27. Prairie Rock Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Prairie Rock Inc · MSHA ID 4502536
    Abandoned
  28. Putnam Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Inland Pacific Materials · MSHA ID 4502982
    Abandoned
  29. Sanders & Young Pit & Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Sanders & Young · MSHA ID 4502601
    Abandoned
  30. Shelby Road Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · M A Segale Inc · MSHA ID 4502597
    Abandoned
  31. State R-50 Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Washington State Department Of Highways · MSHA ID 4501595
    Abandoned
  32. Travis Quarry R-128
    Surface metal/non-metal · Benton County Highway Department · MSHA ID 4501717
    Abandoned
  33. Whitcomb Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Burlington Northern Inc · MSHA ID 4501704
    Abandoned
  34. Whitcomb Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · American Rock Products Inc · MSHA ID 4503497
    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 92
Borrow Pit 63
Gravel Pit 51
Borrow Pit 28
Prospect Pit 8
Mine Shaft 6
Sand Pit 3
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 2
Disturbed Surface 2
Quarry 1
Other counties in WashingtonAll 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.