Background Report - Arizona Town Hall

56,000 visitors a year, nearly 75% of those from outside Wickenburg. That represents a
significant contribution to economic development in a community that has very little industry.
While prominent, the cultural institutions in Wickenburg face a challenge in building
bridges with business owners and residents in the community. Cultural institutions struggle to
meet the needs and appeal to the interests of full-time residents as well as part-year residents
and visitors. Figuring out how to serve all of those constituencies is a daily challenge.
In this tough post-Great Recession economy, cultural organizations seek more than ever
to create relevant connections with their communities. Some are doing so with half of the
pre-recession human and financial resources, largely through the spirit of volunteerism that
is particularly strong in rural communities.
Telling Stories
Carrie Gustavson, Director, Bisbee Mining & Historical Museum
Arizona possesses a remarkable landscape, which framed by the borders of our geographically
large state, has created its distinctive sense of place. But it is not defined by a single
community, be it a Phoenix or a Bisbee, but rather by the startling diversity of its places
and people, each of which has a distinctive story to tell. These chronicles represent a
multitude of voices and narratives which are celebrated by the many cultural organizations
located in rural Arizona.
The rural Arizona of a place like Bisbee, distant from the state’s major urban centers,
derives its identity neither from the many legislative decisions made by government officials
in metropolitan Phoenix nor from the headlines randomly picked up by state or national
media. The experience of rural Arizona is more immediate, an intrinsic part of our lives. We
are all—past, present, and future—part of the story.
The Bisbee Mining & Historical Museum is a community history museum, and like
other rural institutions throughout the state, plays a significant role in interpreting how
Arizonans understand their shared heritage, assess the present, and plan for the future.
As common tradition fades, Arizona’s hundreds of smaller rural museums assume the
stewardship of teaching communities the importance of not only preserving history, but of
understanding the nature of the history we seek to preserve, and the lessons it offers for today.
Community museums are, in essence, in the front line of the history business, and collectively
such histories of which they are guardians are the foundation of our image as a state. But
community museums could improve their impact by looking beyond their local communities
to weave their local and regional stories into an understanding of the collective experience of
Arizona as a whole.
The story of Bisbee’s mines is anything but a local one. Arizona is known as the copper state,
and mining was the transformative industry of the American West, with Bisbee as an important
arena in which social and economic issues of statewide and national importance were played
out. Some of the richest copper mines in the world were located here, and it was once the
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