Bisbee Mining and Historical Museum

The museum's home is as much an exhibit as anything inside it. Phelps Dodge, the company that came to own the Copper Queen, put up this two-story Italianate office building in 1895 to run its mines from, a solid statement of red brick with projecting polygonal bays and a gabled roof, unusually grand for a young mining camp. For decades the decisions that shaped Bisbee were made in these rooms.

When copper mining ended in Bisbee in the 1970s, the building found a second life as the town's museum. It carries the formal name of the Phelps Dodge General Office Building and is listed as a National Historic Landmark, a designation reserved for places of national importance, here because of the company's central role in industrializing the Southwest. Walking its old halls, you feel the weight the company once threw around.

The story starts in 1877, when a member of an Army search party out of Fort Bowie staked the first claim in these mountains. What they had found was extraordinary: ore that in places ran nearly a quarter pure copper, some of the highest-grade ever mined. Word spread, Phelps Dodge bought in during the 1880s, and Bisbee grew from a cluster of tents into a proper city wedged into its narrow canyon, with theaters, a library, and streets that had to climb the hillsides because there was no flat ground to spare.

For a stretch in the early 1900s the Copper Queen was the most productive copper mine in Arizona, and Bisbee was among the largest towns between St. Louis and San Francisco. The museum's centerpiece exhibit, 'Bisbee: Urban Outpost on the Frontier,' walks you through that improbable rise, the daily lives of the miners and their families, and the risks people took underground to pull the metal that helped wire and plumb a modernizing nation.

For rock and mineral lovers, the draw is the mineral collection, rooted in specimens once gathered by the Douglas family who helped run the mines. The same ore body that made Bisbee rich also produced beautiful crystallized minerals, and the hall glows with them: deep-blue azurite, green malachite, and the other copper minerals that formed underground alongside the metal itself.

Bisbee is also famous for its turquoise, the rich, even blue sold under the trademarked name Bisbee blue, prized by jewelers and now hard to come by since the mines closed. The museum tells that story too, of a stone that came up almost as an afterthought in a copper mine and became one of the most sought-after turquoises in the world. It is a fine primer before you go looking for it in the town's shops and galleries.

The museum sits at 5 Copper Queen Plaza, dead center in old Bisbee, so it is easy to fold into a day of wandering the town's steep streets and long public stairways. Plan on about an hour inside, more if the minerals or the old photographs pull you in. The exhibits spread over two floors of the historic building, reached by stairs, and staff can point you toward what to see first.

Almost everyone pairs the museum with the underground mine tour a short way off, where a retired miner rides you into a real tunnel on a little train. Locals and reviewers agree on the order: do the museum first so the mine makes sense, then go underground. Between the two you come away with a genuine feel for what a copper town was, told from the ground up, in the very building where the company once called the shots.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.