The Town that Copper Built

It was the dawning of the Age of Electricity. It too was a “wireless” world, if only because most homes and businesses didn’t have any. But a future of a global society of instant energy, mass production, and nonstop innovation beckoned. Over a century ago, the small mountainside town of Bisbee heeded the call.

In its heyday as a mining metropolis, Bisbee was one of the largest towns between St. Louis and San Francisco, a copper smelter of ethnicities and religions. Its immigrant citizens were citizens of the world, each one in search of the American dream. Many found and lived it here. Bisbee: Urban Outpost on the Frontier, is an in-depth look at the depths – and heights – to which miners and settlers went to dynamite a community and a living out of solid rock.

Bisbee is a town that copper built – Urban Outpost tells this story. A stroll through the exhibit returns grandparents to a bygone era; today’s tech-driven youth will be transported to a distinctly dissimilar place and time – a time when there was no substitute for a strong back, a stronger will, and a long shift in an underground office surrounded by walls of metal-rich rock.