Bisbee historic downtown
— — a copper town the canyon never let go of.
Not only on a wall.
“Along Tombstone Canyon and Brewery Gulch in the Mule Mountains of southeastern Arizona, Bisbee's historic downtown is the survivor of an early-twentieth-century copper boom that once made it the largest city between St. Louis and San Francisco. Victorian commercial buildings climb the canyon walls in tiers, narrow stairways stitching them together. The Copper Queen Hotel has operated a block off the main street since 1902.
Bisbee historic downtown, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Bisbee sits at about 5,538 feet in the Mule Mountains of Cochise County, southeastern Arizona, roughly twenty-four miles south of Tombstone and ten miles north of the Mexican border at Naco. The historic downtown follows the narrow floors of Tombstone Canyon and Brewery Gulch, with Main Street threading the canyon bottom and side streets climbing the walls in switchbacks and stone stairways. Bisbee has served as the seat of Cochise County since 1929, when the county offices moved here from Tombstone.
The downtown's commercial core is largely Victorian and Edwardian, built between roughly 1880 and 1915 in brick, local stone, and pressed tin during the copper boom led by the Copper Queen and Phelps Dodge mining operations. The Copper Queen Hotel opened in 1902, the Pythian Castle followed in 1904, and the Cochise County Courthouse on Quality Hill in 1931. The Bisbee Historic District was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980 and remains one of the most intact mining-era streetscapes in the American West.
Bisbee's copper years ran from the 1880s to 1975, when Phelps Dodge closed the Lavender Pit and the underground works. Population peaked above 20,000 in the 1910s and fell to around 5,000 by the late seventies. Artists, retirees, and shopkeepers moved into the cheap Victorian housing through the eighties and nineties, and the town now runs largely on heritage tourism, mine tours, and a year-round arts and festival calendar. The Bisbee 1000 stair climb routes through the canyon's historic public stairways each October.