There’s something about Bisbee. Something magical. How do you put a finger on it? Where does it come from? These are fun question to play with, but the answers are
elusive.
Take the Highway 80 exit off I-10 east of Tucson, and you’ll pass through Tombstone, the “Town Too Tough to Die” on your way to mile-high Bisbee, once called the “Town Too High to Care.”
Me, I call it the “Town Too Big for its Britches.” That’s a Southern idiom suggesting conceit but as a companion to Tombstone’s motto it fits just as well. Besides, it ain’t bragging if it’s true. The Bisbee that time and circumstance built endures as an edifice almost out of place in its grandeur. Bisbee punches well above its weight in so many ways. If this town is too big for its britches, it ought to be said the latter were already sizeable. Maybe this is one key to understanding Bisbee’s magic.
The superlatives ooze out of Bisbee, like seep springs gleaming off the sun-kissed Mule Mountains after a good monsoon. It’s been often said it was “once the largest city between St. Louis and Los Angeles.” Bisbee was a stop on one of the first coast-to-coast auto routes, the Dixie Overland Highway (1925). It’s got a claim to the oldest baseball field in the USA (1909) and Arizona’s first planned community (Warren, 1905). Its home to Electric Brewing, Arizona’s first micro-brewery (1988). Built during the golden age of American fraternal organizations, it might have the highest density of lodge buildings anywhere. And it’s the smallest town in the USA to host a Smithsonian affiliate museum.
And even with all that going on, one can stand on Main Street at night and see the Milky Way.
It was destiny—a combination of geography, loads of copper, and timing—that built Old Bisbee in the arms of Tombstone Canyon and Brewery Gulch. The houses and buildings are nestled in the warm embrace of the canyon walls. Unlike so much of modern America’s bland, sprawling suburban landscapes, Bisbee wants to be walked. To be taken in, savored, at a pedestrians’ pace, hugged by these storied canyons. Bisbee’s got the sort of human-scaled geography big cities and modern times just can’t replicate.
Bisbee came up during the early copper boom, when the nation and world had just come to understand how crucial copper was for modern life. When the world was
electrifying, copper was suddenly king—or in our case, Queen. The rise of copper built this town and, nearly a century later, the collapse of copper took much of Bisbee’s population with it. But the infrastructure, the buildings, the homes and above all the character endured. And like a desert hermit crab sheltering in an art deco shell from a bygone time, Bisbee and its people persist, with a big character—a character that often seems too big for its already big britches.
Dixie Overland Highway Map
