Bisbee Mining & Historical Museum

The museum occupies the Phelps Dodge General Office Building, a two-story red-brick building on Copper Queen Plaza in the middle of Old Bisbee. From 1896 to 1961 it was the headquarters of Phelps Dodge, which through its subsidiary, the Copper Queen Consolidated Mining Company, became the dominant force and eventually the sole operator in the Bisbee mining district. The building faces south toward Tombstone Canyon Road near its junction with Howell Avenue. Afterward it housed county offices and for a time the post office, and in 1971 the city adapted it as a museum. The building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1983 for Phelps Dodge's role in the growth of the American Southwest.

Look at the outside before you go in. The front has a pair of projecting two-story bay windows, round-arched windows and a central entrance under an arched portico on square brick posts. Inside, several rooms have been restored to their period appearance and the rest hold galleries.

The museum is a Smithsonian Affiliate, and its theme is a western copper town's part in the industrialization of America: why copper mattered, how it was found and mined here, and how the town grew around it. That story includes the hard parts. Bisbee's mines were dangerous, and in July 1917 about 1,300 striking miners, supporters and bystanders were rounded up and deported by train to New Mexico in the Bisbee Deportation. It also includes the minerals: specimens of azurite, malachite and other minerals from Bisbee's mines are held in collections worldwide, and Bisbee Blue turquoise came from the copper workings.

The museum's website also offers "A Walk on the Wild Side", a self-guided walking tour of Brewery Gulch. The Copper Queen Mine Tour is a short distance away, and seeing both gives you the office view and the underground view of the same mine.