A black and white postcard of Brewery Gulch. The Franklin School can be seen center left. The front caption on the bottom in white reads: “Brewery Gulch – Bisbee, Arizona C-39.” The postcard is unused and was published by the L.L. Cook Company, Milwaukee on Kodak paper. Thomas N. Foster Collection.

The Franklin school was founded for Bisbee’s Mexican students. It was built in Brewery Gulch and was completed in late September 1920. The public-school instruction was innovated by the superintendent C.F. Philbrook. Philbrook’s wife, Eva L. Philbrook served as the school’s principal in the 1922 before moving on to the Lowell School. The school building was tended to over the summer break by Professor J.C. South who moved in from the YWCA. The Franklin School cost $78,300 including $9,000 (about 1,061,000 and 122,000 in 2021) for the site it was built on. On September 11th, 1920 playground equipment was ordered for the Franklin School. In early December of same year of the school’s opening the Bisbee Drug company displayed the sewing and dresses created by the schoolgirls that semester. Their sewing teacher was Anna Streed. One of the notable pupils from the Franklin School was Herlinda Tafoya who worked as a bailiff, librarian, and interpreter in Superior Court . She later became the chief librarian at the Cochise County Courthouse in 1977. She also was one of the founders of Head Start in Bisbee for disadvantaged students. She entered the Franklin school in 1928 and left after the third grade to join Central School as part of the first integrated classrooms. The late 1920’s was a period when the Black and Hispanic students were segregated from white students. - Brewery Gulch got its name due to Albert Sieber, a Swiss immigrant who built the first brewery in the gulch in a white adobe building. After he decided on the name, he gave out free alcohol to the residents to celebrate and a brawl eventually broke out. It should be noted that water was scarce in Bisbee before burro delivery and infrastructure development, so when the miners wanted to quench their thirst alcohol was often their main option. During Bisbee’s growth as a profitable mining camp, the Gulch came to host fifteen saloons. Those establishments along with a handful of houses of prostitution gave a area a sordid reputation. The Copper Queen Mining Company wanted to attract more reliable, family-oriented workers instead of the transient miners who wandered from mine to mine. So after the formation of City Council, several ordinances were put in place to end the worse of the Gulch’s vices. One of the most notable establishments in Brewery Gulch was The Brewery that was built in 1905 by Swiss entrepreneur Joseph Muheim. Despite the name, the building never housed a brewery outright instead three saloons and when the era of Prohibition was enforced in Bisbee the building housed the Stock Exchange instead of alcohol. With his successful enterprises, he built a beautiful home on Youngblood Hill for his family who had immigrated to America after an agricultural crisis in Switzerland that destroyed farmers livelihood. On September 1st, the Muheim house was entered in the National Register of Historic Places, the first home in Bisbee to do so. After the Bisbee Council on the Arts and Humanities restored the building and interior to be a glimpse in time to the towns heyday. In 1980, it opened as a museum as the Muheim Heritage House.

2020.18.10