Jasper County
What the county’s own figures say, and why they read well
MSHA records 4 employees at the Jasper Quarry, under Mulberry Limestone Quarry Co.
Those county figures are better than the state’s, and by some distance.
Jasper County and Newton County are the Missouri part of the Tri-State lead and zinc district, which worked from the 1850s until the 1950s across the corner where Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma meet, and left the largest concentration of mine waste in the region.
The ground was disturbed long before any crushed-stone operation arrived, and it is already served by rail and haul roads built for a heavier industry. So the network here is denser than a rural county rate on its own would suggest: between 253 and 313 structures inside ten miles of the district’s other sites, in a county that restricts 3.8 per cent of what it maintains.
The demand is a different shape too. A district under long-running remediation has civil works that are programme-funded rather than growth-led, which makes the year flatter than a subdivision market’s. And the Kansas and Oklahoma lines are close enough to matter.
Around the Jasper Quarry — four people on the MSHA roll, under Mulberry Limestone Quarry Co — and across Jasper County and Newton County toward Joplin and Webb City, this corner turns over a steady amount of it.
- The lead and zinc went in the 1950s; what the district leaves behind is disturbed ground, a dense road network and crushed-stone work on top of it.
Around the Jasper Quarry, and across the Tri-State ground from Joplin to Webb City, there is usually one sitting. On a county network that restricts 3.8% of what it maintains, getting it out is rarely the hard part.