Kings Mountain Mine: The Lithium Motherlode

The open pit on the south side of Kings Mountain sits inside the Carolina Tin-Spodumene Belt, the largest hard-rock lithium deposit in the United States. Mining began here in eighteen thirty-four as a gold operation and ran intermittently until the early nineteen hundreds. Then in nineteen thirty-five a prospector named L.

M. Williams found large deposits of spodumene, a lithium-bearing mineral. During the nineteen fifties, with lithium suddenly critical for nuclear weapons and pharmaceuticals, this area supplied nearly all the lithium in the world.

Production moved overseas in the nineteen eighties when lower-cost sources emerged, and the site went dormant for decades. The rise of electric vehicles changed the math again. In twenty twenty-three the U.

S. Department of Defense committed ninety million dollars to restart operations here, and the surrounding pegmatite district is now reported to hold millions of metric tons of lithium.