What is now the museum, in center foreground in this 1918 photo, was once surrounded by commercial buildings when Bisbee sought to use every possible foot of flat land
Visitors are amazed to find a facility like the Bisbee Mining & Historical Museum in rural Arizona. And they should be surprised. It’s not your typical small town facility.
A few years ago, the Bisbee museum became the smallest institution to ask the Smithsonian Institution to participate in its affiliation program. That meant our community would get access not only to the fabulous Smithsonian collections, but also to its expertise at creating exhibits, which is the best in the world.
The Bisbee museum, led by executive director Carrie Gustafson, went to the Smithsonian with a clear-cut plan: Bisbee’s mines produced some of the finest mineral speciments in the world, and the community wanted not only to get some of the back, but to showcase them in a manner they deserved.
The Smithsonian did far more than just say okay — it jumped on board with great enthusiasm. By any standard, Bisbee has spectacular minerals, and the opportunity to show them off was inviting to the exhibit designers. The Smithsonian’s own National Museum of Natural History displays many Bisbee stones, including a crystal cave. But here was a chance to have much more space to make the minerals the focus of a more-encompassing exhibit.
And it was to be done in the community whose copper mines were the source of the minerals; it was to be much more than just a distant look at another piece of nature’s art.
And “Digging In” is certainly more than just pretty rocks. It weaves together several stories beyond the minerals: the work lives of the men who mined them, the advances in technology that demanded more copper and advances that allowed the mining of lower and lower grades of ore and, finally, why we need so much copper.
As a visitor passes through the exhibit, starting “underground” and working her way toward the open pit, perhaps she doesn’t notice the progression of devices, as if on a timeline, that use copper: telephone, radio, television, air conditioning. And perhaps she doesn’t notice the medallions that show progressively lower-grade ores: 40%, then 10% and finally down to less than 1%.
And perhaps she doesn’t realize that she has left the underground and it has become the 1950s in Bisbee and she’s now back in the sunshine, amidst the huge equipment used in the open pit.
But the message subliminally sinks in. The men she has seen working have managed to squeeze ever-more copper out of ever-poorer rock, and in the end she sees a pile of rock that represents just how much ore it take just to care for her personal demand for the metal. And she faces a wall of appliances: toasters and vacuums and stereos and so many more that account for her use.
This turn through a century of mining in Bisbee is only half the story, however. Another exhibit downstairs, just recently brought up to date, shows daily life of the citizens of a copper mining town over its first 40 years.
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