Trivia

Bisbee’s old high school, located on eponymous School Hill, is a four-story building, with each floor having a ground-level entrance.

Though at times early in the 20th century Bisbee had the largest amount of bank deposits and the largest assessed valuation of any city in the state, it never was the most populous.

Unlike No Name City in “Paint Your Wagon,” which collapsed into the tunnels dug beneath it (and unlike in Tombstone, where the street fell into a mine tunnel just a few years back), Bisbee isn’t built over the mines.  The Dividend fault, which runs roughly along Highway 80, limited the ore, so all the mining took place south of the fault and the city was built to the north.

The mines of Bisbee produced some 8 billion pounds of copper in a bit less than a century of operations.

About the same time that Arizona Highways was making Indian jewelry of silver and turquoise popular in the 1960s, a major body of extremely high-quality turquoise was being mined in the Lavender pit.

Top Bisbee turquoise is arguable the finest in the world.

The Lavender pit has nothing to do with color, but is named for the Phelps Dodge engineer and executive who made it happen, Harrison M. Lavender.

Bisbee’s underground mines took in some 2,200 miles of workings, including shafts and drifts (tunnels), as well as other types of excavations.

The first mammoth bones found in southern Arizona were discovered near Naco in the late 1940s.

Hills with big letters on them, like Bisbee’s “B” Hill, were originally an aid to aerial navigation in the era before electronic or even radio assistance to pilots.

Bisbee’s municipal airport was dedicated in 1931, the same year that natural gas arrived in the town.

Just after the turn of the 20th century, when water service was first available in hilly Bisbee, a hookup was $1 a month.  Add another $1 if you had a bathtub and still another if you had a horse.

Bisbee is in the Mule Mountains, originally called the Mule Pass Mountains.

Tombstone Canyon, the winding main street up through Old Bisbee, got its name sometime in the 1890s.  It originally was Mule Gulch, then Bisbee Canyon, before taking its current name.

In the early years of the Mexican Revolution, Pancho Villa frequently would hang out in Bisbee.

In the 1970s and 1980s, John Wayne would hang out here.  Today, there is a room in the Copper Queen Hotel named in his honor.

The Warren Ballpark, in the lower end of the district, is the oldest major-league-size field in the nation, dating to 1909.

Bisbee once had a streetcar system linking the various parts of the district.  It got under way in 1908 and had carried 1 million passengers within the first 9 months of operation.

The ballpark was built at the lower end of the district to ensure sufficient ridership to pay the cost of building the streetcar line.  In retrospect, the streetcar company didn’t need to build it.

During World War II, many older men and men with families were drafted from around the nation to work in the mines in Bisbee and elsewhere.  Many of these soldier-miners remained after the war.

Bisbee’s elevation is at about 1 mile above sea level.  It sometimes snows in the winter, but it rarely outlasts the next day’s sun, except on the northern slopes of the hills and in the mountains around the city.  Cold air rolls off, so it’s usually not as cold in the hills as it is in the surrounding valleys.  Though some folks in the Valley of the Sun are afraid to head south in the summer, Bisbee is typically about 10 degrees cooler than Tucson and 15-20 degrees cooler than Phoenix during that time.

Many homes in Bisbee’s hills don’t have even evaporative coolers, rely on natural air currents to keep them cool.  Air conditioning is a rarity, though there are a few days each year it would be nice to have.

Though the numbers vary somewhat year-to-year, Bisbee gets about 16 inches of rain annually, with some coming in January and most in the rainy season, late June through early September.  There are occasional rains at other times.

There are probably more “art cars” per capita in Bisbee than anywhere else in the world.

Bisbee hosts an annual 5K event in October that takes in 1,000 stairs: That’s why it’s called the Bisbee 1000.  There’s far more than 1,000 stairs in town, however.

Each year since 2000, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has selected 12 vacation destinations across the United States that offer an authentic visitor experience by combining dynamic downtowns, cultural diversity, attractive architecture, cultural landscapes and a strong commitment to historic preservation and revitalization. Bisbee was given the honor in 2005, the first city in Arizona to be selected.  Prescott made the list the next year.