The Ben Frankenberg Collection

of Bisbee Minerals

Bisbee, Arizona, “the Queen of the Copper Camps,” was a fabulous storehouse of mineral wealth. Countless tons of specimen-grade material must surely have gone to the crusher, but many fine examples also were saved, collected and traded by Bisbee miners, mine executives, shop owners, and businessmen. One such friend of mineralogy was Benjamin Frankenberg, who ran a department store in Bisbee from 1898 to 1928, and built an extraordinary collection recently presented to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County by his children.

A century ago Bisbee, Arizona was a boom town. This was the heyday of mining, when Bisbee was the world’s largest producer of copper and became known as the “Queen of the Copper Camps.”  This was also a period during which tons of beautiful specimens of azurite, malachite and other copper minerals were mined, only to end up smelted as ore.

Fortunately, some individuals with keen perception of natural beauty (and some expendable income) recognized the extraordinary nature of the “ores” and sought to preserve the finest examples. Among these enlightened individuals was Ben Frankenberg, who for three decades purchased fine specimens from miners who frequented his store in Bisbee. He even grubstaked some of them to go out and dig specimens for him. He built a diverse collection of twelve dozen mineral specimens from the mines of Bisbee, a collection which serves to document the most important period of mineral production at one of the world’s most famous producers of exceptional mineral specimens.

Benjamin Isaac Frankenberg was born December 1, 1872 in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Isaac and Barbara Meyer Frankenberg. Isaac (born ca. 1827) had come to the U.S. from Hannover, Germany in 1857 and settled in Cincinnati, where he met and married Barbara “Babette” Meyer in 1859. He worked as a merchant, a butcher, and even a cattle drover during the following years, in which time he and Barbara had seven children: Meyer (born 1859), Amelia (born ca. 1861), Henriett (Hattie; born ca. 1868), Alexander (born ca. 1869), Fanny (born ca. 1870), Bejanmin (Ben) and Samuel (Sam; born ca. 1873). Isaac died ca. 1885, and Barbara probably died sometime between 1891 and 1900.

In 1892 Ben, age 20, decided to travel West in search of adventure and opportunity. He gave up a budding career in the dress goods business in Chicago where he been employed in the famous Marshall, Field & Company department store. Upon moving west, Ben’s first job was as an advertising agent for a New Mexico company and then he served as representative for a Chicago store. In 1898, he arrived in Bisbee. A Frankenberg family story relates that upon his arrival in Bisbee for the first time, he witnessed the hanging of several cattle rustlers. His immediate reaction was that this must be a law-abiding town and he decided to settle there and open a dry goods store.

He called his store “The Fair,” perhaps after a large department store with that name in Chicago. His first store occupied a 15 by 20-foot room on Brewery Gulch. In less than four months he replaced his original store with a larger one on Main Street. Before too long Ben’s brother Sam joined the business and then their brother-in-law, Moses Newman (the husband of their sister Hattie), became a partner in 1901.

A new two-story store built in 1902 had 12 employees and featured a variety of departments with the latest in fashions from New York and Paris. Following a fire in 1908, which destroyed many of the buildings on Main Street, a new store was opened in 1909. “The Fair” by this time had become the largest clothing store in Cochise County.

Ben made frequent trips back East to buy merchandise for the store. On one of these trips, he met Clara Kaufman, a family friend from Baltimore. In 1915 they were married in Hampton, Virginia and Clara headed back to Bisbee with Ben to raise a family. They had three children: Babbette (Bobbe), born May 16, 1916. Maynard (now Maynard Franklin), born March 9, 1919, and Benjamin, Jr., born January 31, 1924 and died February 28, 1973.

The Frankenberg brothers and Moses Newman sold their store in 1928. Today, “The Fair” is a museum operated by the Bisbee Restoration Society. In the years leading up to the sale of “The Fair,” Ben began planning a move for his family to Beverly Hills, California. He commissioned a house to be built there, naturally with a large built-in display case for his mineral collection. His brother Sam retired to the Los Angeles area, too.

Ben Frankenberg died January 5, 1964 at the age of 92. His daughter Bobbe cherished her father’s mineral collection and continued to maintain it in the family home. She became interested in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and for a time in the early 1970’s served as a museum docent. In March of 2006, Bobbe and her brother Maynard Franklin donated the remarkable mineral collection to the Museum in the memory of their parents, Ben and Clara. A selection of the finest specimens from the collection is on display in the museum’s Hall of Gems and Minerals.

Story by Anthony R. Kampf published in The Mineralogical Record, vol. 37, pp. 275-281 (2006).

Ben Frankenberg

Azurite (8 mm across)

Copper with cuprite (16 cm tall)

Malachite (17 cm tall)

Malachite after azurite (6.4 cm tall)

Azurite with malachite (15 cm tall)

Malachite and azurite (14 cm tall)