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oming into Bisbee takes you back to the turn of the century. Situated in southeastern Arizona near the Mexican border, Bisbee gained prominance 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 which were founded to answer the call of the Age of Electricity.

As you drive the narrow, twisting streets or walk the endless flights of stairs, you will marvel at the early resident's 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 decide the fate of this person or that issue, or the tiny miner's cabin, perched on a terrace hewn out of solid 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, when you've finished craning your neck to look up and down the red hills, after you've wondered what it must have been like to live in that house, up oh-so-many steps, and to have worked in that mine, those miles of dark and dangerous passages a thousand feet under the surface, now is the time to stop in at The Bisbee Mining & Historical Museum.

Copper Queen Smelter, 1898
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fter you've taken a look at wonderful old Bisbee, stop in at the Museum and let us bring back to life the spirits of the past, ghosts & angels alike. 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, in words, pictures and artifacts, of why Bisbee came about, what life here was like a century or more ago, who the residents were, where they came from, and what they did, both for work and for entertainment in their everyday lives.

Here at the Bisbee Mining & Historical Museum, itself a great part of the history of Bisbee, you'll see what it was like working the copper deposits underground, and how technology continually made that hard work easier and safer.

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

A word of warning though... after you've been through the museum, you'll want to walk the town all over again, to see if that boarding house is still standing; you'll want to climb a few more stairs to see just how difficult the delivery of food and water way up there really was; you'll want to poke your head into that old storefront on Brewery Gulch one more time, just in case a faro game is still going on...