Tombstone Historic District

Ed Schieffelin went looking for silver in Apache country. Soldiers warned him he'd find only his tombstone out there. He found one of Arizona's richest lodes instead, and named the boomtown after the insult.

By the 1880s, fires had already come twice — 1881 and 1882 — burning out most of the wooden business district. What replaced it was adobe, brick, wood-frame construction that proved harder to kill. The 42-acre National Historic Landmark District, designated July 4, 1961 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places on October 15, 1966, preserves what came after those fires: the 1882 City Hall, Schieffelin Hall from 1881, a large adobe performance venue carrying the prospector's name, and the 1881 Bird Cage Theatre, which served as theater, playhouse, and brothel. The Crystal Palace Saloon dates to 1879, was rebuilt after the 1882 fire, and is still open. The Oriental Saloon stands too.

The district anchors at its southwestern corner on the former Cochise County Courthouse, now the centerpiece of Tombstone Courthouse State Historic Park. Allen Street runs the length of it. The O.K. Corral is here — though the gunfight that made it famous actually happened on Fremont Street, near the corral's back entrance, on October 26, 1881. That detail matters: the legend and the geography don't quite line up, and Tombstone is honest enough to let both stand.

The district's significance, per its own landmark designation, lies in what the place illustrates — the collision between lawlessness and civility on the mining frontier, played out in real time in a real town. It survived fires, floods, and the eventual failure of the mines. The boundaries of the landmark district were debated by historians through at least 1986. The town itself was never in doubt.