AA-2026-F8EF41
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.
Visually related — by likeness
Family Outing in a Strip-Mine Pit, American South, 1960s. 1960–1969. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-F8EF41. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/family-outing-in-a-strip-mine-pit-american-south-1960s.
@misc{aaAA2026F8EF41,
title = {Family Outing in a Strip-Mine Pit, American South, 1960s},
year = {1960–1969},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-F8EF41},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/family-outing-in-a-strip-mine-pit-american-south-1960s}
}TY - ART TI - Family Outing in a Strip-Mine Pit, American South, 1960s PY - 1960–1969 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-F8EF41 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/family-outing-in-a-strip-mine-pit-american-south-1960s ER -
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