Treece, the Town That Was Bought Out

Treece was a mining town, incorporated in nineteen eighteen to house the men who dug lead and zinc out of the ground here. During two world wars it boomed, feeding ore to the war effort. But the mining left a poisoned legacy.

Towering gray piles of mine waste, called chat, surrounded the town, the earth honeycombed with shafts and prone to collapse into sinkholes. The whole district became part of one of the largest environmental cleanup areas in the country. Testing found that local children carried dangerous levels of lead in their blood.

Finally Congress funded a voluntary buyout, and by two thousand twelve nearly everyone in Treece had sold their homes and moved away. Today the streets are emptying back into grassland, a Kansas town that the poison underneath it eventually erased from the map.