The Old Tombstone City Hall stands at
306 East Fremont Street, State Highway 80, in Cochise County, Tombstone, Arizona. The building was built in 1882 (five years after Tombstone was founded and three years after Tombstone was incorporated), after most of the town’s first buildings burned from subsequent fires in June 1881 and May 1882. The site was added to the National Register of Historic Places on February 1, 1972.
According to the marker placed to the left of the Hall’s front door in 2005 by the Tombstone Restoration Committee, Architect Frank Walker designed the City Hall in Victorian style adapted to Western Territorial. It has been in continuous service since 1882 for mayors, marshals, and official city offices, and in the 1880’s, it housed the fire department’s Rescue Hose Company #2.
At the time of its installation, the City Hall had its work cut out for it: The town was mostly young men. Respectable women used the north side of Allen Street, while their commercial sisters plied trade on the south side, as far as possible from the proper residential section north of Fremont Street. The Southern Pacific had come to Tucson; union wages were $4 a day; and 110 places in Tombstone were licensed to sell liquor 24 hours a day. The population had grown from a handful of people to over 7,000 (and would reach over 10,000 less than three years later) when this City Hall was built, yet there were only four churches. Water had to be hauled in from outside sources, and, because the county seat and territorial capital were so far away, the lawlessness was rampant and the political machine was corrupt.
The building — according to the National Historical Landmark marker placed at the building site in 2005 by the Tombstone Restoration Committee and the form filed with the National Register of Historic Places at the time of Tombstone’s requested placement (February 1978) that nicely details the architecture — is a three-bay, two-story, fired-red brick building that has housed both the Tombstone city government and the fire department, once simultaneously. The arched doorways of
the ground floor have recessed doors with plain transoms above, the central doorway
being double. The second-story windows have round-headed drip moldings, the
windows of the central bay being double to match the doorway below. There are two cornices, one over the doorways, supported by ornamental brackets; the second story cornice is topped by a pediment, with matching lines repeated in the parapet above. The
parapet is decorated with four finials. The city offices inside were modernized in the early 1970’s, the ceilings having been dropped, the walls paneled, a new door cut,
and the floors carpeted.
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Updated on April 10, 2012
Resources: Wikipedia, National Register of Historic Places, Tombstone’s form for National Register of Historic Places, and the Historical Marker Database entry.
Photographs by Leah Angstman, October 23, 2011. Do not remove the signature watermark without permission. [ref index TSN]
To amend this entry or to acquire permission for use of photographs, please email alt[dot]current[at]gmail[dot]com.
