Skip to main content

Throwback Thursday; Bisbee, AZ and Old US 80

In Cochise County, Arizona along an old segment of US Route 80 designated as Arizona State Route 80 is the old mining town of Bisbee.






Bisbee is located in the Mule Mountains at an elevation of 5,538 feet above sea level.  Back in the early days of Arizona travel wasn't as direct as it is now.  Often roads followed old wagon trails from the major population centers of the time.  In the case of US Route 80 when it was originally plotted out it took the path of the Old Spanish Trail.  This alignment consisted of a huge southwestern swing into New Mexico to Douglas.  From Douglas US 80 swung northwest through the classic mining communities of Bisbee and Tombstone before swinging west to Tucson.  US 80 also took another major swing north from Tucson to Phoenix rather than westward to Yuma.  US 80 was such in impractical route that I-8 largely took the path of AZ 84 west from Tuscon to Gila Bend and I-10 from Benson to the New Mexico state line.  The path of US 80 makes much more logical sense looking at the 1927 State Highway Map of Arizona:

1927 Arizona/New Mexico State Highway Maps Part A

1927 Arizona/New Mexico State Highway Map Part B

Bisbee was founded back in 1880 as a gold, silver, and copper mining community.  Since 1929 Bisbee has been the Cochise County seat which was originally in Tombstone.  Early Bisbee centered around the Copper Queen Mine which was in operation from 1880 until 1985.  Bisbee's mining industry survived far longer than it did in Tombstone and largely moved to open pit mining in the 1950s.  The Lavender Pit is the most obvious example of the open pit days with the massive hole easily observed on the south side of AZ 80.





Bisbee's population peaked out near 1960 at about 10,000 residents.  After Lavender Pit closed in 1974 followed by the Copper Queen in 1985 Bisbee began to decline.  The current population of Bisbee is approximately 5,000 residents and doesn't show much signs of slowing any time soon.

US 80 had a huge alignment shift through Bisbee prior to the completion of the Mule Pass Tunnel in 1958.  Early US 80 used Main Street and Tombstone Canyon Road west through Bisbee on an approach of Mule Pass.   US 80 used West Boulevard and Old Divide Road climb over Mule Pass.  By 1989 US 80 had been truncated out of Arizona and the route through Bisbee had become AZ 80.

Bridgehunter.com on the Mule Pass Tunnel

USends on US 80 end points

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Old River Lock & Control Structure (Lettsworth, LA)

  The Old River Control Structure (ORCS) and its connecting satellite facilities combine to form one of the most impressive flood control complexes in North America. Located along the west bank of the Mississippi River near the confluence with the Red River and Atchafalaya River nearby, this structure system was fundamentally made possible by the Flood Control Act of 1928 that was passed by the United States Congress in the aftermath of the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 however a second, less obvious motivation influenced the construction here. The Mississippi River’s channel has gradually elongated and meandered in the area over the centuries, creating new oxbows and sandbars that made navigation of the river challenging and time-consuming through the steamboat era of the 1800s. This treacherous area of the river known as “Turnbull’s Bend” was where the mouth of the Red River was located that the upriver end of the bend and the Atchafalaya River, then effectively an outflow

Memphis & Arkansas Bridge (Memphis, TN)

  Like the expansion of the railroads the previous century, the modernization of the country’s highway infrastructure in the early and mid 20th Century required the construction of new landmark bridges along the lower Mississippi River (and nation-wide for that matter) that would facilitate the expected growth in overall traffic demand in ensuing decades. While this new movement had been anticipated to some extent in the Memphis area with the design of the Harahan Bridge, neither it nor its neighbor the older Frisco Bridge were capable of accommodating the sharp rise in the popularity and demand of the automobile as a mode of cross-river transportation during the Great Depression. As was the case 30 years prior, the solution in the 1940s was to construct a new bridge in the same general location as its predecessors, only this time the bridge would be the first built exclusively for vehicle traffic. This bridge, the Memphis & Arkansas Bridge, was completed in 1949 and was the third

California State Route 203 the proposed Minaret Summit Highway

California State Route 203 is an approximately nine-mile State Highway located near Mammoth Lakes in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of Mono County.  California State Route 203 as presently configured begins at US Route 395, passes through Mammoth Lakes and terminates at the Madera County line at Minaret Summit.  What is now California State Route 203 was added to the State Highway System in 1933 as Legislative Route Number 112.  The original Mammoth Lakes State Highway ended at Lake Mary near the site of Old Mammoth and was renumbered to California State Route 203 in 1964.  The modern alignment of the highway to Minaret Summit was adopted during 1967.   The corridor of Minaret Summit and Mammoth Pass have been subject to numerous proposed Trans-Sierra Highways.  The first corridor was proposed over Mammoth Pass following a Southern Pacific Railroad survey in 1901.  In 1931 a corridor between the Minarets Wilderness and High Sierra Peaks Wilderness was reserved by the Forest Service for po