The years that made Tombstone a legend lasted less a decade. The town of Tombstone was founded in 1879 and the 1880s were its glory years. The single most important event in the town's history, the Gunfight at the OK Corral, occurred on March 15, 1881, just two years after Tombstone's beginning. Of the decade of the 1880s, the most well known events happened from 1880 to 1882, just a three year span! There are other events during that decade that made Tombstone a legend, but this three year time span are the most well-known, the most important. These are the things that are keeping Tombstone alive to this day. The Wild West Days are what draw tourists to this otherwise obscure town in the high desert of southeastern Arizona.
Tombstone had its beginning in March of 1879 and by the time the 1880 Census was enumerated, the population had risen to about 3,500. One year later, it was up to about 11,000. In 1882 and 1883, the population was at its peak of around 14,000 people. Tombstone exploded from a barren patch of desert to a town of 14,000 people in about four years!
In 1881, the booming town of Tombstone became the county seat of the newly created
Cochise County, just two years after the town was born.
Tombstone's meteoric rise to prominence was followed by a precipitous fall in the latter half of the 1880s, when the mines began to shut down, one by one. In the 1890 Census, the population had dropped all the way to 1,800 and, by 1900, it had dropped to 650. When Tombstone lost the county seat in 1929 to the newly booming town of Bisbee, the population had fallen to about 200. After the county government left Tombstone and relocated to Bisbee, the Old Cochise County Courthouse, once humming with activity, fell into disuse and remained vacant until 1955, when restoration efforts were begun to restore the historic structure. The last county office moved out in 1931 and that was the beginning of a 24 year period that the building stood vacant. There was an attempt to convert the old courthouse to a hotel in the 1940s, but the plans fell through. The old courthouse was built in 1882 in the shape of a cross and it was constructed in the Victorian style. After restoration efforts were completed in the late 1950s, the Tombstone Courthouse State Historic Park was created in 1959 and now the old courthouse is a repository of all things historical relating to Tombstone's fabulous and gaudy history. It is one of the best historical museums I have ever been too and one of Arizona's most visited state parks. The courtroom was restored to its 1882 appearance. Even the gallows behind the courthouse has been preserved.
Today, Tombstone is a town that survives because of its history, its Wild West history. That is really the only thing that is keeping the town alive today. After Tombstone lost the county seat in 1929, it was thought that it would become a ghost town because, since the mines had all played out and the county government relocated to Bisbee, people thought that this once famous town had no reason to exist anymore. But then, in the late 1950s, it tourism potential was realized and now over a million people per year visit Tombstone. When the tourist industry began in earnest in Tombstone, the town's now famous slogan "The Town Too Tough To Die" was coined.
