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BISBEE — For years, people have visited the Copper Queen Mine to get the feel of what it’s like to work in one.
Now, a mine will come to life in a museum.
“Digging In: Bisbee’s Mineral Heritage” is near completion at the Bisbee Mining & Historical Museum, and Director Carrie Gustavson couldn’t be more pleased.
 Carpenter Allen Jones connects a hose to a pneumatic drill as he creates a mining scene in the Bisbee Historical and Mining Museum’s new Smithsonian Project exhibit. (By Mark Levy-Herald/Review) |
After eight years in the making, the exhibition, housed on the museum’s second floor, should be open in a month.
“This is a wonderful thing,” she said. “I’m really excited it’s opening.”
“Digging In” starts with mining’s past and ends with its future, which is strongly linked to environmental remediation.
In one sense the exhibition, according to a museum newsletter, shows how “Arizona Copper miners answered the nation’s call to the Age of Electricity,” starting in the late 1880s.
“Digging In” is a Smithsonian Institution-designed exhibit being built by a Tempe-based exhibition/build group, which started installation in January.
Gustavson said much gratitude is due to Southwest Scenic Group, “the firm that took on a complex project,” and the two people overseeing construction, Manuel Mediola and Chris Spaseff.
“Manuel and Chris head up an incredible team,” she said. “It’s really something to see a project that began as an idea translated onto paper, and then taking shape.”
The exhibition
When climbing the second floor, en route to the a miner’s change house display, one sees corrugated steel, unused material from Phelps Dodge.
“We’re using real furnishing,” Gustavson said, and that includes the same lockers miners stored their gear in all those years ago.
From the change house, the tour winds through “Glory Hole,” the earliest mining claim and into the underground mine.
For further authentic ambiance, designers from the Smithsonian recreated a crystal cave, enclosed behind glass.
“When we get the track in here, it’s going to be dramatic,” Gustavson said.
A large non-working pneumatic drill also will be on hand for visitors to touch, a chute and video and audio displays, including one miner’s story.
Visitors also will learn about copper ore, “the economic rock,” and how it changed society.
As ore grade declined, mining companies needed to find a way to extract it and still remain profitable.
“Basically, you go from digging it out to blowing it up,” Gustavson said.
That’s where the open pit scene comes into play.
Gustavson said the biggest challenge is how to interpret the scale and volume of an open pit in an exhibit gallery that would fit into the bed of a huge mining haul truck.
“We went big,” she explained, and that means featuring a 12.5-foot-high haul truck tire that one can walk through, plus a video display of what it’s like to be in a shovel cab.
A fabricated shuttle bucket holds a 52-cubic-foot piece of fabricated copper ore, representing what the average citizen would use every year in copper.
That, in turn, ties into the consumer angle. Displays will feature how copper is used in everyday products.
An average American, Gustavson said, uses 25 pounds of copper per year, “and our lifestyle depends heavily on it.”
“If you don’t think you’re dependent on copper, think about the last time the power went out,” she added.
Along with electricity, copper is essential to almost all appliances and even now can be found in some trendy skin care products and even chocolate.
An interactive display will ask visitors how much copper they use. M & R Salvage donated the front of a 1965 Comet to represent how much copper was once used in cars.
One challenge, she said, was to create second-floor exhibits that weighed less than 100 pounds per square foot and build “within load-bearing limits.” For example, the mining slope looks and feels like rock, but is actually a lightweight combination of foam and concrete slurry on a wooden framework.
A builder’s perspective
Rebecca Bertolucci, a carpenter with Southwest Scenic Group who helped construct the “rock walls,” called “Digging In” the most exciting project from the very beginning.
“These are the most extraordinary people I’ve ever worked with,” she said.
Bertolucci credited Dan Hall, a draftsman, with bringing two-dimensional picture to life and carpenter Josh Curtiss for his “tremendous contributions.”
Allen Jones, another of the builders who specializes in texturing and building rock walls, said this was definitely a new experience.
“I’ve done set design, but you’re actually creating an atmosphere of someone being in the mine,” he said.
Other sets, he said, just present an illusion.
There were challenges, the two said, such as hauling objects up the stairs and making sure dimensions of displays perfectly fit in each room.
Bertolucci thanked the museum staff for its support and hospitality.
REPORTER Karen Weil can be reached at 515-4692 or by e-mail at karen.weil@bisbeereview.net.
nicole ray wrote on Jun 21, 2009 3:35 PM: