Family Outing in a Strip-Mine Pit, American South, 1960s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Family Outing in a Strip-Mine Pit, American South, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

An interpretation of depth — not a measured reconstruction

Depth is precomputed and interpretive — the scene falls back to the flat image where a browser can't render it.

Family Outing in a Strip-Mine Pit, American South, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1960–1969

AA-2026-F8EF41

The Archivist

Ask about this image

Archivist

Step into the scene

Off by default. Turning it on lets the image respond to your cursor with a shallow sense of depth, rebuilt from a depth map computed when the image was catalogued. It is an interpretation for looking, not a measured 3D model — and it falls back to the flat image where the browser can't render it.

On the image

Nine people stand at the bottom of a stripped-out mine pit as though they have wandered onto the surface of the moon and are waiting for someone to plant a flag. The pink-orange spoil hills rise around them in the neat conical piles that draglines leave behind, proof that in the 1960s reclamation law had not yet caught up with the idea that a landscape, once gutted, ought to be put back together.

One man has taken his shirt off entirely, the universal signal that this was meant to be a pleasant afternoon rather than a geology lecture. The rest stand around in church-picnic clothes, a small boy included, all of them looking down at something in the sand the camera does not quite explain, likely a fossil, a shark's tooth, or simply a hole worth pointing at. Kaolin and phosphate country across the Southeast was riddled with pits like this, and locals treated the moonscape less as an environmental scar and more as free Sunday entertainment.

Nobody here seems bothered that the trees in the distance mark where the actual ground used to be. That was simply how mining was done then: dig, pile, move on, and let the neighbours use what's left as a picnic ground.

From the community

Identifications, corrections, and discussion from readers — reviewed by a librarian before appearing here.

No notes yet — be the first to add what you know about this image.

Visually related — by likeness

Limestone quarry with water-filled pit, 1950s

1950–1959

Limestone Quarry with Turquoise Water, circa 1940s

1938–1952

Archaeological Excavation with Visitors, 1950s

1950–1959

Gravel Pit Excavation with Dragline Crane, 1960s

1960–1969

Forestry Officials at a Longleaf Pine Stand, Florida or Southeast, 1940s

1940–1950

Stone Quarry Worker in Rock Dust, 1960s

1960–1969

Geology Field Party on an Eroded Bluff, 1960s

1960–1969

Geology Field Survey, Chalk Bluff Outcrop, 1950s

1950–1959

Granite Riprap and Spillway Pool, 1960s Dam Construction Site

1960–1969

Flooded Quarry Face with Crawler Loader, 1960s

1960–1969

Stone Quarry Cutting Face with Rising Dust, USA, 1960s

1960–1969

Granite Quarry Inspection Party, New England, 1960s

1960–1969 · New England granite quarry