Bisbee

History The Copper Queen claims were developed from 1880, and in 1885 Phelps Dodge merged its neighboring property with the Copper Queen to form the Copper Queen Consolidated Mining Company. The town incorporated in 1902 and grew suburbs such as Warren, Lowell and San Jose. Open-pit mining began in 1917 to meet wartime demand for copper.

The same year brought the event Bisbee is still reckoning with. Beginning on July 12, 1917, a deputized posse working with Phelps Dodge and the Cochise County sheriff rounded up about 1,300 striking miners, their supporters and bystanders, held them at the ballpark, and shipped them in cattle cars on a 16-hour journey through the desert to Tres Hermanas, New Mexico. This was the Bisbee Deportation.

The population fell from 9,205 in 1920 to 3,801 by 1950. The Lavender Pit, opened in 1950, swallowed most of the Lowell townsite and produced copper until 1974. When the underground mines closed in the summer of 1975, the mayor pushed to turn part of the Copper Queen into a tour, and volunteers cleared thousands of tons of fallen rock and re-timbered the old workings. Falling house prices, the climate and the scenery drew artists and members of the counterculture from the 1960s on.

What to See Start underground. The Copper Queen Mine Tour puts you in a hard hat and headlamp and takes you about 1,500 feet into the mountain on a mine train. The Bisbee Mining & Historical Museum, a Smithsonian Affiliate, occupies the former Phelps Dodge General Office Building on Copper Queen Plaza in the center of Old Bisbee. Southeast of the old town, the Lavender Pit is 900 feet deep and covers 300 acres.

Beyond those, the town is the sight. The old four-story high school is built into the hillside so that every floor has a ground-level entrance. Warren, Arizona's first planned community, has a collection of Arts and Crafts bungalows and Warren Ballpark, built in 1909. In Lowell, only a short stretch of Erie Street survives from the old townsite. The Central School, built in 1905, is now an art center. The Bisbee 1000 Stair Climb, a five-kilometer run, follows 1,034 of the town's stairs.

The mines also produced minerals that ended up far from Arizona. Specimens of azurite, malachite, cuprite and wulfenite from Bisbee are in museum collections around the world, and a high-quality turquoise sold as Bisbee Blue came out as a by-product of copper mining.

Getting There State Route 80 runs through Bisbee: 23 miles northwest to Tombstone, 47 miles to Benson and 26 miles east to Douglas. From Tucson, the mine tour gives the route as Interstate 10 east to exit 303, then about 49 miles on Highway 80, roughly 90 miles in all. Streets in Old Bisbee are narrow, and Discover Bisbee lists paid public parking at St. Patrick Parish, 100 Quality Hill Road. The Cochise Connection bus links Douglas, Bisbee and Sierra Vista.

When to Go At about 5,540 feet, Bisbee is higher than Tombstone. The monsoon brings the wettest season from July to September, often with severe thunderstorms, and winter can bring occasional snow, though winter days are usually mild. Since 2015 a blues festival has been held in the second week of September.