A black and white postcard featuring a view of downtown including the Copper Queen Store, Copper Queen and Czar Mines, and Central school on the left side near edge. The caption at the bottom reads “1880 Bisbee, Arizona Centennial 1980” The back caption reads “View of Bisbee, Arizona 1895 This photograph shows Bisbee at the beginning of its mining boom years. Beyond the belching, smoking smelter is Sacramento Hill, later to be bored out to its roots to become the famous Lavender Pit.” The photograph was taken by Markey. The postcard is unused and was published by the Copper Queen Plaza Photo Gallery. Joyce Walters Bryan Collection.

Bisbee’s downtown district was the economic heart of the city. Multiple shops, hotels, restaurants, churches, library and post office provided rural Bisbee with a metropolitan lifestyle as comfortable as any bustling city back east. The most prominent among the buildings constructed were the Phelps Dodge offices for the Copper Queen Consolidated Mining Company, the Phelps Dodge Mercantile, Copper Queen Hotel, the Copper Queen Hospital the YMCA, the YWCA, Presbyterian Church, Central School and the Bisbee High School. Of the buildings lost to time, the original Williams Douglas House, The Bessemer Hotel and the Orpheum Theater were among those demolished. The area survived devastating fires and monsoon floods that tore the district apart in the early decades, testing the mettle of its residents. As the copper ore had yet to give out, they still had the resources and determination to rebuild the town. Whereas countless other Arizonan boom town went bust and vanished into ghost towns, Bisbee remains as the nature of copper mining allowed it to do so. Visitors from all over the nation can come and appreciate Bisbee’s role in providing the metal that formed the backbone of our modern era.

2010.12.20