Superior was a silver town first and a copper town after that, and its old main street hotel is open again. This map of Superior prints the Magma Hotel, the Superior Public Library, John F. Kennedy Elementary School, the Bob Jones Museum and Besich Park, with No Name Wash, Queen Creek and Silver King Wash giving shape to the land.
Superior is a town in northern Pinal County, about 70 miles east of Phoenix.
KNOWOL made this map in 2026 and gave modern data the look of a vintage atlas. The shaded relief of the landscape comes from United States Geological Survey elevation data, and the streets were drawn from Census Bureau files. The Magma Hotel was confirmed against the National Park Service and the National Register of Historic Places. The town’s page calls Superior the oldest town in Pinal County, and in Western Apache it’s called Yooʼ Łigai; the 2020 census counted 2,407 people here.
Queen, Hastings, Superior
The town began as Queen, which had around 100 people about 1880, with a general store, two hotels, saloons and a post office. It was then called Hastings and platted under that name in 1900, and in 1902 the Superior townsite was laid out and named for the Lake Superior and Arizona Copper Company; the Superior post office opened on December 29, 1902. Superior was founded as a mining town for the Silver King and, later, the Magma mines. Charles G. Mason’s party found native silver and staked the Silver King claim in March 1875, about 3 miles north of today’s town, and the Silver Queen vein, the future Magma, was staked days later. When the silver ran low the mines shut down in the late 1800s, and in 1910 William Boyce Thompson and George Gunn bought the Silver Queen and organized the Magma Copper Company. A concentrator came in 1914, a narrow-gauge railroad to the Southern Pacific in 1915 and a smelter in 1924. Over its life, from 1910 to 1996, the Magma mine produced about 1,300,000 short tons of copper.
The Magma Arizona Railroad, built by the mining company and headquartered in Superior at first, carried cattle and copper to the Southern Pacific main line from 1915 to 1997. It was converted to standard gauge in 1923, and its page calls it the last industrial short line railroad in the United States to use steam power, until it switched to diesel on September 4, 1968.
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 Magma Ave, School Ave, Richardo Ave, Corral Dr, W Mary Dr, Verde Dr, Sunset Dr, Saguaro Dr, Golf Course Rd, W Crowe St, W Odonnell Dr, W Main St.
More street names, A to Z
Apache Leap Rd, Church Ave, E Old Phoenix Rd, Gomez Dr, Ray Rd, W Highland Dr, W Highlands Dr, W Smock Ave, W US Hwy 60.
The Magma Hotel
John McPherson, a Canadian, came to Superior from Globe in 1902 to make his fortune in the booming mining town. In 1912 he bought four lots and began building the Magma Hotel out of reinforced concrete, an idea he took from the rebuilding of nearby Ray after a fire. It was the first concrete building in a town of mostly wooden buildings, and in 1917 it got a Delco Light system, the first in Superior. A brick addition built by the local architect and builder John Davey followed in 1923, and over the years the hotel was a boarding house, a stop on the Greyhound line and home to the Magma Cafe, which O. C. Hing leased in 1918. It closed in 1992, was listed on the National Register in 1994 and lost its 1916 adobe addition after that wing’s front wall partly collapsed in 2007 and the town took it down. A company owned by Miguel A. Sfeir bought it in 2010, restored it and reopened it in 2019 as a 21-room boutique hotel, with the old sleeping porch now a wraparound veranda.
Around the map
William Boyce Thompson built a winter home overlooking Queen Creek in the early 1920s, and in 1924 he founded the Boyce Thompson Arboretum along the creek, 3 miles west of Superior beneath Picketpost Mountain. It’s the oldest and largest botanical garden in Arizona, with more than 2,600 kinds of arid land plants and 270 bird species seen in the park, and it became a state park in 1976. Films set in Superior include How the West Was Won, The Gauntlet and U Turn, and scenes for U Turn were shot at the Magma Hotel. John F. Kennedy Elementary School and Superior Junior/Senior High School make up the Superior Unified School District. The Superior Public Library, the Bob Jones Museum, Besich Park, No Name Wash and Silver King Wash have their places on the sheet as well.
This Superior map makes a good addition to an office, library or den, and it can help teach children the geography and history of the area. It’s made for anyone who calls Superior home, along Queen Creek, and KNOWOL created it in 2026 to show the town as it looks today. Zoom in on the preview above to explore the details, then click here to get your copy of the Superior map.
Sources
