Biohazard Cleanup Near Briggs Bisbee, AZ

Bisbee is an incorporated city and the county seat of Cochise County in southeastern Arizona, set in the Mule Mountains about 11 miles north of the Mexican border at Naco.

Bisbee was founded in 1880 as a copper, gold, and silver mining town and named in honor of Judge DeWitt Bisbee, one of the financial backers of the adjacent Copper Queen Mine.

The city was incorporated on January 9, 1902, and by 1910 it had 9,019 residents, making it the third-largest community in Arizona Territory, ringed by mining suburbs such as Warren, Lowell, and San Jose.

In 1917 Bisbee was the site of the Bisbee Deportation, in which the Phelps Dodge Corporation and county authorities seized more than 1,000 striking miners at gunpoint and shipped them in cattle cars across the desert to Hermanas, New Mexico.

The Cochise County seat was moved from Tombstone to Bisbee in 1929, and the Art Deco Cochise County Courthouse remains a downtown landmark.

High-grade turquoise promoted as Bisbee Blue was a famous by-product of Bisbee's copper mining, and Bisbee mines also produced mineral specimens such as cuprite, aragonite, wulfenite, malachite, azurite, and galena found in museum collections worldwide.

Bisbee's population peaked at 9,914 in the 1960 census after open-pit mining expanded and the city annexed Warren and Lowell-South Bisbee in 1959, then declined as mining wound down.

Phelps Dodge halted its Bisbee copper-mining operations in 1975, and part of the Copper Queen Mine was converted into the Queen Mine Tour, which opened to visitors on February 1, 1976 and has since drawn more than a million visitors.

After mining ended, Bisbee reinvented itself as an arts and heritage-tourism community; its steep, walkable Old Bisbee district is noted for Victorian-style houses, including an old four-story high school in which every floor has a ground-level entrance.

The Warren district within Bisbee was Arizona's first planned community, designed as a bedroom community for affluent mining officials, and it holds Warren Ballpark, built in 1909 and believed to be the oldest baseball park still in use in the United States.