Bisbee Mining Museum Is One Of Best Small Museums In The Nation
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 to participate in its affiliation program. That meant that Bisbee 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 them 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 of the famous Bisbee minerals, including a crystal cave. But here was a chance to have much more space to make the local minerals the focus of a more-encompassing exhibit.
And it was to be done right 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.
More than just pretty rocks
And “Digging In” is about much 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 the world needs 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, in a sort of timeline, that use copper: telephone, radio, television, air conditioning. And perhaps she doesn’t notice the medallions that show progressively lower-grade ores that were mined in Bisbee: 40%, then 10% and finally down to less than 1%.
And perhaps she doesn’t realize when she has left the underground and it has become the 1950s in Bisbee and she’s now back in the “sunshine stope,” amidst the huge equipment used in open-pit mining.
But the message subliminally sinks in. The manniquen-men she has seen working in the exhibit 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 near the end of the exhibit, she faces a wall of appliances: toasters and vacuums and stereos and so many more that account for her use.
This tour 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 — 1877 through 1917.
About the Author
Gary Dillard is an Arizona native who researches, speaks and writes on the history of his region and the borderlands. Learn more about his subjects at westernaudiohistory.com.
Tucson Gem and Mineral Show 2010: Display Cases filmed by The-Vug.com #1
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