Arizona Oddities

Main Menu

  • Home
  • Your Guides
  • Departments
    • Art
    • Dose of History
    • Culture
    • Natural Surroundings
    • Odd Observations
    • Weather Talk
    • Food & Dining
    • Small Town Scene
    • Recreation
    • Only in Arizona
  • Get the Books
  • Contact Us

logo

Arizona Oddities

  • Home
  • Your Guides
  • Departments
    • Art
    • Dose of History
    • Culture
    • Natural Surroundings
    • Odd Observations
    • Weather Talk
    • Food & Dining
    • Small Town Scene
    • Recreation
    • Only in Arizona
  • Get the Books
  • Contact Us
Natural SurroundingsSouthern Arizona
Home›Natural Surroundings›Lavender Pit in Bisbee Produced Massive Amounts of Copper

Lavender Pit in Bisbee Produced Massive Amounts of Copper

By Sam Lowe
October 16, 2015
2260
0
Lavender Pit in Bisbee

Lavender Pit in Bisbee.

BISBEE – If you’ve ever used a kitchen spoon to dig a hole in your back yard, or wondered how long it would take you to shovel your way to China, the Lavender Pit may be your personal mecca. It’s a big hole in the ground, dug over a 23-year span as part of a copper mining operation. It’s wider than anything you ever scooped out with Mom’s best soup ladle, and deeper than anything you’ve ever imagined while burying your secret money cache out behind the garage.

The pit is humongous – 1,000 feet deep, three-quarters of a mile wide, a mile-and-a-half long, and covering 600 acres. From 1951, when the digging started, until 1974, when the operation shut down, men and machines dug 375 million tons of material out of it. That figure included 94 million tons of ore, 108 million tons of leach material, and 173 million tons of waste rock.

The pit, named after former Phelps Dodge official Harrison Morton Lavender Sr., was also responsible for obliterating a town. Before mining operations began, the 191 homes and businesses that made up the community of Lowell had to be relocated.

(Visited 557 times, 1 visits today)

Related Posts:

  1. The Concrete Iron Man of Bisbee
  2. Sharlot Hall All Gussied Up in Copper
  3. Move Over Chicago, Best Franks Found at Jimmy’s Hot Dog Company in Bisbee
  4. Creepy Curiosities Found at The Bisbee Mini Museum of the Bizarre
  5. Walter Swan Created One Unique Way to Sell Books in Bisbee
Tagsbisbeemining

Leave a reply Cancel reply

Arizona Oddities Archive

Most Popular Posts

  • How to Keep Scorpions Away from Your Home
  • How to Keep Javelinas Away from Your Yard
  • What’s With All the Backyard Concrete-Block Fences…
  • Did You Know it’s Against the Law to Grow…
  • Four Deserts, One State

This Week Past Years

2014

  • Arizona Prospector Seeks Scientific Proof of Soul

2013

  • World’s Largest Pipe Organ Delights Pizza Lovers in Mesa
  • Cactus & Wildlife Trivia 2: Can You Pass?

2012

  • Those Bombastic Frontier Gazettes and Their Irrepressible Fighting Editors!
  • Hamburger Calico Beans Recipe
  • What's the Difference Between Partly Cloudy and Partly Sunny?

2011

  • How the Phoenix Area Nabbed the "Valley of the Sun" Nickname

2009

  • Prickly Pear Fruit Makes Candy, Jelly
  • Recent

  • Popular

  • Comments

  • Hello world

    By Robert Pfeifer
    May 17, 2022
  • Find a Famous Writer and Explorer's Mountain Retreat in Greer

    Find a Famous Writer and Explorer’s Historic Mountain Retreat in Greer

    By Taylor Haynes
    July 31, 2020
  • How to Keep Scorpions Away from Your Home

    By Andrea Aker
    January 3, 2011
  • Javelina

    How to Keep Javelinas Away from Your Yard

    By Andrea Aker
    November 23, 2011
  • Phil Motta
    on
    August 27, 2021

    Why Does Downtown Phoenix Seem to Have Two Downtowns?

    I know this post ...
  • Carol
    on
    October 17, 2020

    The Tucson Artifacts are the Southwest’s Greatest Hoax

    lol ... these "clues" ...

Follow us

© Copyright 2009 – 2020 Aker Ink, LLC :: Arizona Oddities is published by Aker Ink.