The Lavender Pit: Named for a Man, Not a Color

The name Lavender Pit suggests the color of the canyon walls at sunset, when certain minerals in the exposed rock catch the light and glow in shades of purple. But the pit is named for a man. Harrison M.

Lavender was a Phelps Dodge vice president and general manager who developed the plan to make Bisbee's low-grade copper ore commercially viable through open-pit mining at industrial scale. The pit that bears his name opened in nineteen fifty and consumed what had been the Sacramento Hill area south of downtown Bisbee, an area that had previously been mined underground. Over the next twenty-four years, roughly three hundred forty million tons of ore and waste rock were removed from this site.

The pit grew to roughly three hundred acres in area and about nine hundred feet in depth, a wound in the landscape visible from the highway. The ore it processed averaged only seven-tenths of one percent copper by weight, far below the rich early grades, but the sheer volume made the numbers work. The Lavender Pit closed in nineteen seventy-four when even these marginal grades could no longer justify the operating costs.

It was never refilled. Today it sits raw and open at the edge of downtown Bisbee, with a pull-off viewpoint on Arizona Highway Eighty where you can look down into the terraced walls. The pit produced an unexpected byproduct.

Bisbee Blue turquoise, considered among the finest in the world for its rich sky-blue color and dark matrix, came out of the Lavender Pit waste rock. Jewelers around the world seek it.