The Tombstone Courthouse

This handsome two story building of brick and adobe is where the wildness of Tombstone met the machinery of the law. In eighteen eighty one the territory carved Cochise County out of the eastern half of Pima County, and Tombstone, riding high on silver, was named the county seat. The next year, in eighteen eighty two, workers finished this courthouse at a cost of about fifty thousand dollars, laid out in the shape of a cross in the fashionable Victorian style.

Under its roof sat the offices of the sheriff, the recorder, the treasurer, and the board of supervisors, along with the courtrooms and the jail. In the courtyard out back stood the gallows, where the county carried out legal hangings, a sober counterpoint to the gunfights in the streets. The courthouse ran the county's business until nineteen twenty nine, when the seat was moved to the growing copper town of Bisbee and this building fell silent.

It could have crumbled like so much of the old town. Instead, restored by local citizens, it opened in the late nineteen fifties as Arizona's very first operating state park, and today it holds the museum where the true story of Tombstone is kept.