Bisbee Historic District

About this property

The Bisbee Historic District is a historic district located in Bisbee, Arizona, and has all the essential features of a prosperous, early twentieth century mining town. It has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. The district has 80 contributing buildings, with various architectural styles including Colonial Revival, Mission Revival/Spanish Revival, and Italianate architecture. The Historic District's history is tied with that of the Phelps Dodge Company, one of the great industrial corporations of the 20th century. Once the company began operations in the Bisbee area, it dominated the town's economy, as well as the town's physical and social development. The District mirrors this fact, being an example of an early twentieth-century mining company town. Prior to the arrival of Phelps Dodge, the area was a hub for mining activity. Rich veins of ore were discovered by the U. S. Army in the nearby Mule Mountains in 1877, with the Copper Queen Mine being founded that year. The following year the town saw its first smelter, and financial capitalists from both the east and west coast began to invest heavily in the area. The mining camp developed into a town by 1880, and was named Bisbee, after Judge DeWitt Bisbee, who was a heavy investor in the area. While the town was still small, the mining activity in it and nearby Tombstone, Arizona, focused most of the territory's population into these remote areas. The formation of Cochise County soon followed in 1881, with Tombstone as the county seat. In 1881, James Douglas of the Phelps Dodge Company convinced his company to purchase the claims adjoining the Copper Queen Mine. They began operations, with Douglas in charge of the site. It was the beginning of a highly successful mining operation, which resulted in over $2 billion worth of ore being produced in the area around Bisbee, the majority of it in properties owned by Phelps Dodge. One of the largest issues with the location was transportation. Supplies had to be brought in by wagon, and ore and to be sent the same way to the nearest railhead in Benson. Production increased, and in 1886, new, larger smelters were built, and eventually rose to over 100 tons of freight per day. The Southern Pacific railway refused to build a line from Bisbee to Benson, so in 1894 Phelps Dodge built its own rail line to Benson. By 1900 the new smelters could no longer keep up with production, but lack of water prevented larger ones from being built in Bisbee, so a new smelter town sprang up near the Mexico-United States Border, Douglas, named so after James Douglas.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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