The Lavender Pit is a former
open pit
Open-pit mining, also known as open-cast or open-cut mining and in larger contexts mega-mining, is a surface mining technique of extracting rock or minerals from the earth from an open-air pit, sometimes known as a borrow.
This form of mining ...
copper mine near
Bisbee in
Cochise County
Cochise County () is a county in the southeastern corner of the U.S. state of Arizona. It is named after the Native American chief Cochise.
The population was 125,447 at the 2020 census. The county seat is Bisbee and the most populous city ...
,
Arizona,
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territo ...
. It is located near the famous
Copper Queen Mine
The Copper Queen Mine was a copper mine in Cochise County, Arizona, United States. Its development led to the growth of the surrounding town of Bisbee in the 1880s. Its orebody ran 23% copper, an extraordinarily high grade. It was acquired by P ...
. The Lavender Pit was named in honor of
Harrison M. Lavender (1890–1952), who as Vice-President and General Manager of Phelps Dodge Corporation, conceived and carried out this plan for making the previously unprofitable low-grade copper bearing rock of the area into commercial copper ore.
Phelps Dodge Corporation
Phelps Dodge Corporation was an American mining company founded in 1834 as an import-export firm by Anson Greene Phelps and his two sons-in-law William Earle Dodge, Sr. and Daniel James. The latter two ran Phelps, James & Co., the part of the ...
opened the Lavender Pit in 1950, at the site of the earlier, higher-grade Sacramento Hill mine. Production through 1974 totaled 86 million tons of ore averaging about 0.7% copper, or about 600,000 tons of copper produced, with gold and silver as byproducts. About 256 million tons of waste were stripped, but a portion of this was acid-leached for additional copper.
Turquoise
Turquoise is an opaque, blue-to-green mineral that is a hydrated phosphate of copper and aluminium, with the chemical formula . It is rare and valuable in finer grades and has been prized as a gemstone and ornamental stone for thousands of yea ...
was also a by-product of this mining activity. Bisbee turquoise, also known as
Bisbee Blue
275px, Bisbee turquoise commonly has a hard chocolate brown colored matrix.
Bisbee Blue or Bisbee turquoise refers to the turquoise that comes from copper mines located in the vicinity of Bisbee, Arizona. Bisbee turquoise can be found in many d ...
, is amongst the finest turquoise found anywhere in the world. Mining operations in the pit ended in 1974. The undeveloped Cochise deposit, located immediately north of the Lavender pit, contains an estimated 190 million tons of rock containing 0.4% acid-soluble copper,
[Phelps Dodge, 1992 Form 10K] which may be mined in the future.
Because of the competent host rock, this pit has much steeper sides than other open pit copper mines in the southwest area. The pit covers an area of 300 acres (1.2 km²), and is 900 feet (274 m) deep. Large tonnages of dump rock are placed around Bisbee, notably north of the residential district of Warren and other parts of the southeastern
Mule Mountains
The Mule Mountains are a north/south running mountain range located in the south-central area of Cochise County, Arizona. The highest peak, Mount Ballard, rises to . Prior to mining operations commencing there, the mountains were heavily fo ...
area.
Geography
The mine is at , at an altitude of 4941 feet (1506 m) above mean sea level.
See also
*
Copper mining in Arizona
Copper mining in Arizona, a state of the United States, has been a major industry since the 19th century. In 2007, Arizona was the leading copper-producing state in the country, producing 750 thousand metric tons of copper, valued at $5.54 billi ...
Notes
External links
Lavender Pita
mindat.orgVR panorama of Lavender pit
{{Commons category, Lavender Open Pit Mine
1950 establishments in Arizona
Bisbee, Arizona
Copper mines in Arizona
Cultural landscapes
Geography of Cochise County, Arizona
History of Arizona
Phelps Dodge
Open-pit mines
Surface mines in the United States