Cardin: The Town That Lead Poisoned Itself

Cardin, Oklahoma, was a mining town in the northeast corner of Oklahoma, near the Kansas and Missouri borders, and it was established in nineteen thirteen as a company town serving the Tri-State Mining District, one of the largest lead and zinc mining operations in American history. For decades the mines employed thousands of workers and buried the surrounding landscape in chat, the crushed waste rock left over from ore processing. Children played on the chat piles.

Dust from the piles contaminated the soil and water with toxic levels of lead and cadmium. By the late twentieth century, blood-lead screening found that children in the area had absorbed dangerous levels of heavy metals. The Environmental Protection Agency designated the Tar Creek Superfund site, one of the worst in the country, covering Cardin and neighboring towns.

In two thousand nine, Cardin was officially disestablished after a government buyout relocated its last residents. The town ceased to exist, erased by the contamination its own economy had produced.