Bisbee Mining &
Historical Museum

Admission:
Adults $4.00
Seniors $3.50
Children Free
Group Rates Available



5 Copper Queen Plaza
Bisbee, AZ 85603
(520)432-7071

Coming into Bisbee takes you back to the turn of the century. Situated in southeastern Arizona near the Mexican border, Bisbee gained prominence as a mining center in the late 19th century. Today's Bisbee preserves this atmosphere, offering a variety of lifestyles set in a matrix of the West's once extensive copper kingdom.

As you walk amidst the solid, stately brick buildings downtown, you can feel the wealth generated by the city's copper mines that were founded to answer the call of the Age of Electricity.

As you drive the narrow, twisting streets or walk endless flights of stairs, you will marvel at the early residents' ingenuity in adapting their lives to the steeply sloping canyons.

As you pass their dwelling places, whether the elegant homes where "society" once gathered to determine the fate of this person or that issue, or the tiny miner's cabin perched on a terrace hewn from sold rock, added to as each new family member came along, you will relive the vitality that vibrated through this once cosmopolitan city: this "Urban Outpost on the Frontier."

Once you've walked the sidewalks and stairways, entered the still-solid, still-stately buildings that line the business district, craned your neck to look up and down the red hills, discussed what it must have been like to live in this house, up oh-so-many steps, and work in that mine, down a thousand feet under the surface, then stop by the Bisbee Mining & Historical Museum.

After you've seen Bisbee, let us bring to life the ghosts of the past. Our major exhibit - put together by experts from around the country with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities - conducts you through an explanation of why Bisbee came about, what life was like a century ago, who the residents were, where they came from, and what they did for entertainment in their everyday lives.

You'll see how the people of that day reacted to the social issues of the time, and how their responses helped shaped the city and the nation.

You'll see what it was like working underground, and how technology made that work easier and safer.

You'll begin to understand the times that your parents or grandparents recall so fondly, and so harshly.

A warning, though - after you've been through the Bisbee Mining & Historical Museum, you'll want to walk the town again to see if that boarding house is still standing; you'll want to climb a few stairs to find out how difficult the delivery of wood and water way up their really was; you'll want to poke into that old storefront on the Gulch one more time, just in case a faro game is still going on....