Treece, Kansas

The flat ground along the Kansas-Oklahoma state line where Treece once stood is one of the most complete erasures of a human community in American environmental history. Treece was a lead and zinc mining town that boomed alongside the Tri-State Mining District in the early twentieth century. At its peak it housed several hundred residents.

When the mines closed in the nineteen seventies, what they left behind was toxic beyond recovery: chat piles saturated with lead and cadmium, sinkholes from collapsed underground tunnels, and groundwater that carried heavy metals into every well. The population drained away over decades. By two thousand ten, fewer than one hundred forty people remained.

In two thousand nine, Congress authorized the Environmental Protection Agency to buy out those final residents and relocate them. The town was disincorporated in two thousand twelve. The buildings were demolished.

Today it is empty land, being slowly remediated.