The mining industry of New Jersey dates back to the 1600's when copper was first mined by Dutch settlers along the Delaware River in Warren County.  One of the first iron mines in the United States was located, around 1710, in the Mt. Hope section of Rockaway Township, Morris County. There are approximately 450 underground mines in New Jersey, all of which are now abandoned.  In many cases, very little information was compiled regarding the mines. The New Jersey Geological Survey (NJGS) has scanned the mine maps in its collection and acquired other maps making them available for download as Adobe ™ PDF documents. The maps in this collection are from mines in the northern half of the state in 9 of the 10 counties where all of the undergound mining activities in New Jersey took place. The counties represented in this collection are Sussex, Warren, Morris, Bergen, Hunterdon, Passaic, Middlesex, Somerset and Union . There are no maps from Essex County in this collection. Mine maps can be important in the remediation of any subsidence or collapse events, pollution tracking and remediation, historical research, land development and open space purchases.

Currently, in the Survey archives, there are 622 published and unpublished mine maps that date from around 1867 to 1983. These maps of the mines include plan views of surface and subsurface workings as well as profiles of  the workings.  Some of the maps contain magnetic surveys, boring locations and or boring information and may depict local geology and ore seams.  Some show cultural features and land holdings in the area of the mines. Many are copies of original maps of varying dates. The information contained on the maps may or may not be accurate or to scale (Information Disclaimer).  

Images of the mine maps have been created by scanning the maps on a large format scanner at a resolution of 300 dpi using RGB color to tiff images. The tiff images were then converted to Adobe™ PDF documents. These mine maps are available for download from the list below.  Many other mine maps were originally published as parts of NJGS reports.  These reports are available as online Adobe™ PDF documents. The mine maps in these reports can be accessed through links to the reports. Source information for many of the scanned mine maps is also available in this list. (Additional Map Links and Reference Information).