Historic Warren Ballpark - A Bisbee Icon
America’s oldest operating multi-use ballpark - seen up close on a Big Jeep Tour
Warren Ballpark is not a museum behind glass. It is a living field in Bisbee’s planned Warren district, still used for high school baseball, football, graduations, and community events more than a century after the first pitch. Guests on Big Jeep Tours stop here to stand at the fence, look down on the same diamond that opened in 1909, and hear stories you will not get from a plaque.
Built as recreation for copper-mining families, the park sits a few miles southeast of Old Bisbee, at Arizona Street and Ruppe Avenue. The setting is almost cinematic: a shaded grandstand, a deep outfield, desert hills behind the lights, and a neighborhood of wide boulevards that looks nothing like the steep stairs of downtown Bisbee.
Why this field belongs on your Bisbee itinerary
Fenway Park opened in 1912. Wrigley Field opened in 1914. Warren Ballpark opened on June 27, 1909, when the El Paso Browns faced the hometown Bisbee Beautiful. That first game is why locals call this the oldest operating multi-use sports park in the United States - a claim Big Jeep Tours highlights because the same ground still hosts baseball and football today.
The park covers about 40 acres. Baseball occupies the east side; football bleachers sit on the west. Current dimensions run about 351 feet down the left-field line, 390 to center, 394 to right, and a striking 444-foot pocket in left-center. The original wooden grandstand gave way to a WPA-era concrete and raw-adobe structure in 1936–37, complete with locker rooms, offices, and that distinctive canopy still shading the seats.
It remains home to the Bisbee High School Pumas. The annual football game against the Douglas Bulldogs, the “Pick Game”, is Arizona’s oldest high school rivalry. In spring, vintage clubs return for the Copper City Classic, playing by 19th-century rules to raise money for the Friends of Warren Ballpark.
See Warren Ballpark with Big Jeep Tours
You can drive past the fence on your own. The reason to go with Big Jeep Tours is the storytelling. Owner-guide Travis Bishop is a fourth-generation Bisbee native who played football on this field. He does not treat the stop as a photo dump. He parks where guests can take in the grandstand, the mountains, and the exact ground where Bisbee’s most difficult chapter unfolded.
Best tour for this stop: the 3-hour Smelters Ballpark Tour. It ties Old Bisbee, the open-pit mines, Lowell’s vintage streetscape, and Warren into one private ride. Adult fare is typically $105, seniors $95, youth $53, and children under 13 ride free. Maximum four guests.
Also includes the ballpark: the 4-hour 12 City Tour (all twelve historic suburbs).
On the Smelters Ballpark Tour you will:
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Roll through Warren’s planned streets and executive homes on Vista Avenue
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Stop at the legendary ballpark, operating continuously since 1909
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Hear Travis’s own game-day memory of playing here as a kid
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Stand on the ground tied to the 1917 Bisbee Deportation
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Put the park in context with Lowell, the Lavender Pit, and Old Bisbee
The Jeep usually doesn't enter the locked interior of the grandstand. The view from the street and fence is the point: the scale of the field, the adobe walls, and a guide who grew up on that grass.
A ballpark built for a copper boomtown
Warren was laid out in 1905–07 as one of the first planned communities in the American West - a “City Beautiful” suburb for mining-company families, complete with a streetcar line that ended at the ballpark. The Calumet & Arizona Mining Company (Cornish Miners) paid a few thousand dollars to give miners and their children a place to play. Downtown Bisbee was too steep for a stadium. Warren’s flat grid was not.
The park was designed from the start for more than baseball. Cricket, rugby, soccer, Wild West shows, and football all used the same ground. After the Depression, Phelps Dodge sold the aging park to the Bisbee Unified School District for $10, so WPA money could rebuild it. That is why today’s grandstand feels both old and sturdy: 1930s adobe and concrete wrapped around a 1909 idea.
Barnstorming major leaguers passed through for decades. Hall of Famers John McGraw, Connie Mack, and Honus Wagner appeared here. So did Olympic champion Jim Thorpe. After the 1919 Black Sox scandal, banned or “outlaw” players - including Hal Chase, Chick Gandil, and Buck Weaver - suited up in the Copper League on this field. From the late 1920s through 1955, the park hosted minor-league clubs known as the Bees, Yanks, Miners, and Copper Kings.
Book the tour that actually stops here
Warren Ballpark rewards a guide who can point at the grandstand and say, “I played on that field,” then turn and tell you why 1,200 men were held on the same grass in 1917. That is the Smelters Ballpark Tour - Reserve the 3-hour private Jeep tour. See Old Bisbee, the pits, Lowell, and the oldest multi-use ballpark still doing what it was built to do: gather a mining town under the lights.