THE COPPER QUEEN MINE MODEL 

 By Edmund Otis Hovey 



EARLY in 1910, Professor James 

 Douglas of New York City, noti- 

 fied the authorities of the Ameri- 

 can Museum of Natural History that he 

 was prepared to furnish the data and the 

 means necessary for the construction of a 

 large scale model of the Copper Queen 

 Consolidated Mining Company's prop- 

 erty at Bisbee, Arizona, along lines which 

 have proved so successful and popular in 

 the Museum in representation of birds in 

 their habitats. 



Accordingly in August of that year, 

 the writer started for the Southwest, 

 taking with him Arthur Briesemeister, 

 a thoroughly trained and successful map- 

 maker, William B. Peters, a preparator 

 of long experience connected with the 

 department of preparation of the Mu- 

 seum, and Thomas Lunt, the Museum's 

 official photographer. Soon after arriv- 

 ing at Bisbee the party, under the leader- 

 ship of E. F. Pel ton, chief engineer of the 

 Copper Queen Company, went into the 

 field and determined upon the point of 

 view from which the picture of the model 

 as a whole with its proposed painted 

 background should be obtained. In 

 the model to-day practically the same 

 view is spread before a person who 

 stands in the middle of the platform in 

 front of the model. 



A scale of twenty -four feet to the inch 

 had been decided upon for the reproduc- 

 tion, hence it was necessary to go into 

 great detail in making photographic and 

 other notes and in drawing base maps. 

 The Company had a map on the scale of 

 eighty feet to the inch with twenty-foot 

 contours. Taking this as a foundation, 

 Mr. Briesemeister corrected and brought 

 up to date, roads, buildings and contours, 

 intercalated five-foot contours and noted 

 rock ledges and other peculiarities of the 



surface. Record was made of the color 

 of paint on each building, the nature of 

 the material used in construction, the 

 shape and character of the roof, the posi- 

 tion and nature of vines, shrubs and trees, 

 and in fact all other features that would 

 be useful in making a naturalistic repro- 

 duction of the region determined upon as 

 the portion to be represented. This 

 area is X-shaped, the back of the L being 

 curved, with extreme dimensions of 18 

 feet 6 inches by 11 feet 2 inches, repre- 

 senting an area 5315 feet long by 3418 

 feet wide. Numerous color sketches 

 were made by Mr. Peters and plants 

 were collected by him, all of which 

 have been useful in getting the surface 

 features to look natural. Oil sketches 

 made by Mr. Lunt together with photo- 

 graphs made by Mr. Lunt and myself, 

 were used by Bruce Horsfall, the nature 

 artist, in painting the background. 



After spending several weeks in the 

 field, the party returned one by one to 

 New York and in February, 1911, the 

 active construction of the model was 

 begun. The map sheets were enlarged 

 to the required scale and all the detail 

 entered upon them. Wooden boards 

 25 of an inch thick, representing the 

 distance between two consecutive five- 

 foot contours were cut according to the 

 contours and built up on sectional foun- 

 dations, there being six sections in all 

 in the model. The exposed edges of 

 these boards, therefore, corresponded 

 to the contours of the enlarged map. 

 Then the surface was modeled on in 

 clay by Mr. Briesemeister, assisted 

 by his son, William Briesemeister, utiliz- 

 ing the photographs constantly in mak- 

 ing the surface approach nature in its 

 appearance. After the clay surface was 

 finished J. C. Bell, the Museum's 



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