In 2019 Library Journal named Bisbee’s Copper Queen Library the best small library in America, and the library, founded in 1882, is described as the oldest continuously operating library in Arizona. The Copper Queen Library is printed on this map of Bisbee, along with the Bisbee Woman’s Club Clubhouse, the Bisbee Restoration Museum, Bisbee High School and Lowell Junior High School, from the Old Bisbee Historic District out to Warren, with School Hill, Castle Rock and Morales Creek. You’ll find the Central School Project Center for the Arts there too.
Bisbee is the county seat of Cochise County, 11 miles north of the Mexican border at Naco.
KNOWOL made this map in 2026 and gave it the look of an old atlas. The shaded relief of School Hill and Castle Rock comes from United States Geological Survey elevation data, and the streets were drawn from Census Bureau files. State Route 80 runs through the city, northwest to Tombstone and east to Douglas, and Bisbee covers 5.2 square miles. Bisbee had 4,923 people at the 2020 census.
The Copper Queen
The United States Army found rich veins of ore in the Mule Mountains in 1877, and the Copper Queen Mine was founded that year. By 1880 the mining camp had become a town, named for Judge DeWitt Bisbee, one of the mine’s financial backers. In 1881 James Douglas of Phelps Dodge persuaded his company to buy the claims next to the Copper Queen, the start of a mining operation that produced more than $2 billion worth of ore around Bisbee. Bisbee was incorporated in 1902, and that year Main, Howell and Brewery streets were paved with bricks. By 1910 it had 9,019 people, the third-largest population in the territory, and in 1917 open-pit mining began, to meet the demand for copper during World War I. The county seat moved here from Tombstone in 1929. A fine turquoise sold as Bisbee Blue came out of the copper mines too, and minerals from the area’s mines sit in museum collections around the world.
Phelps Dodge stopped mining at Bisbee in 1975. Mayor Chuck Eads, working with the company, set out to open part of the Copper Queen Mine to visitors, and volunteers cleared tons of fallen rock and put new timbers in the old workings. The Queen Mine Tour opened on February 1, 1976, and more than a million people have since ridden its underground train. In 1970 the artist Stephen Hutchison and his wife Marcia bought the Copper Queen Hotel from the company and began restoring it and other buildings downtown, and in the years that followed Bisbee drew artists from across Arizona and California.
Quality Hill
The Copper Queen Library began in 1882, when company executives set up a lending library of 400 donated books in the company store. Its present building on Main Street, designed by Frederick C. Hurst and finished in 1907, has the post office on the ground floor and the library on the top floor. By 1908 its post office had more rented lock boxes than any other in the country, and the nation’s only all-female postal staff. In 2024 the library received the National Medal for Museum and Library Service.
The Bisbee Woman’s Club was organized on October 24, 1900, with 21 charter members, and in 1902 it built its clubhouse on Quality Hill, also designed by Hurst. Its National Register nomination calls it the oldest continually used women’s clubhouse in Arizona and says no other women’s club in the territory owned a clubhouse when it was built. The club’s first big project was a kindergarten, and it still holds a Home Tour and Art Auction after Thanksgiving to raise money for scholarships. Hurst designed the Central School too, built in 1905 as an elementary school and now an art center.
Click to explore a larger preview. The digital watermark does not appear on printed maps.
Names on this map
These names are printed on this map.
Streets and roads: N Old Divide Rd, West Blvd, W Guest Rd, Denn Mine Rd, Main St, N Windwood Rd, Dee St, W Sunrise St, Cochise Ln, W Red Mountain Rd, S Dalewood Rd, Douglas Ave.
More street names, A to Z
Arizona St, Bisbee-Naco Hwy, Bison Rd, Bonanza Ave, Brewery Gulch, Collins Rd, Lunar Rd, Marie St, S Arizona St, S Swan Rd, W Aspen St, W Della St, Yuma Dr.
Old Bisbee and Warren
Old Bisbee, the historic heart of the city, is known for its Victorian-style houses and its Art Deco county courthouse. Its plan was laid out on a walking scale before the automobile, so it’s compact and easy to explore on foot, and the old four-story high school has a ground-level entrance on every floor. The Bisbee 1000 Stair Climb, a five-kilometer run, takes in 1,034 stairs, with musicians playing along the way. In 2013 Bisbee became the first city in Arizona to pass a civil union law for same-sex couples.
Warren, the town page says, was Arizona’s first planned community, laid out as a home for the more prosperous families of the mining district, and it has a fine collection of Arts and Crafts bungalows. It holds City Hall, Bisbee High School and the Warren Ballpark, which the Calumet and Arizona Mining Company built in 1909 for its miners and their families and which the city page says may be the oldest ballpark in baseball still in use. Lowell, once a sizable mining town just southeast of Old Bisbee, was mostly taken by the Lavender Pit in the 1950s. Lowell Junior High School and the Bisbee Restoration Museum are printed on the map, along with School Hill, Castle Rock and Morales Creek.
This Bisbee map is a good addition to an office, library or den, and it can help teach children the geography and history of an old copper town. It’s made for anyone who calls Bisbee home, from Old Bisbee to Warren, and KNOWOL created it in 2026 to show the city as it looks today. Zoom in on the preview above to explore the details, then click here to get your copy of the Bisbee map.
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