A color postcard of Bisbee looking west. The front caption on the top left reads: “8695-Bisbee, Arizona”. The postcard is unused, and the publisher is unknown. Roy Nelson Collection.

In 1877, the Copper Queen Mine began with the Jack Dunn’s discover of a blue and green stain on the side of the Mule Mountains that indicated the presence of malachite, azurite and copper. Development of the Copper Queen started in 1880 when Benjamin Williams, Lewis Williams and Judge DeWitt Bisbee purchased a number of mining claims including the Copper Queen. DeWitt Bisbee invested a large amount of money to build the towns first proper smelter. The town was named Bisbee in his honor. The Copper Queen Mine produced 20 million pounds of copper along with 80 thousand tons of malachite, azurite and cuprite. The richest of the copper ore contained 30% copper and it was mined out by 1884. There was a desperate search for another ore body which was struck, the downside was that the same ore body had been found by the Atlanta mine. To avoid legal battles, the Atlanta Mining company and the Copper Queen merged into the Copper Queen Consolidated Mining Company. This was taken as a subsidiary of Phelps Dodge after fifteen years of operation. In 1975, after Phelps Dodge ended mining operations in Bisbee, Mayor Eads and former miners came together to create a mine tour. Today the Copper Queen Mine Tour operates giving visitors a glimpse of the former operations in a small section of the former mine. ----- 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. 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 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.

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