Tri-State District: A Century of Lead and Zinc

Beneath the rolling corner where Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri meet lies one of the most productive mining zones in American history. The Tri-State Lead and Zinc District produced ore commercially from the eighteen fifties through about nineteen seventy, a span of roughly one hundred years across two thousand five hundred square miles. At its peak, the district supplied fifty percent of United States zinc and ten percent of its lead.

During World War One alone, mines here produced more than fifty percent of the zinc and forty-five percent of the lead that the country needed to fight the war. Mining expanded from southwestern Missouri into southeastern Kansas in eighteen seventy-six and into northeastern Oklahoma in nineteen oh four. When Northeastern Oklahoma A&M College was founded in Miami in nineteen nineteen, it was specifically to train workers for this industry.

The district left behind a deep Superfund legacy: contaminated chat piles and poisoned water that communities are still addressing today.