Pioneer Bisbee Family – The Robinsons

Transcribed by Jean Walker

On March 16, 1882 Nettie (Ecob) Robinson and her youngest daughter, Florence, boarded an east coast train to Arizona territory. Husband and father, John “Charles” Robinson had found work in a mill in Tombstone, Arizona and they were on their way to join him there. Nettie and Florence disembarked at a little train station in Contention, Arizona. The last nine miles of their journey to Tombstone would be by stagecoach.

Upon their arrival, it did not take Nettie long to decide that Tombstone was no place for her family to live. With its dance halls, brothels, shoot outs and godlessness, she soon had her family back in the stagecoach for the long and arduous ride to Bisbee. They arrived there on March 22, 1882 and determinedly remained.

Bisbee was but a mining camp in 1882, and it had few creature comforts. It offered a barbershop, a restaurant, two stores, a bakery, a jewelry shop, a butcher shop, saloons, gambling halls and a newsstand. The few hundred people who lived there banded together against shared hardships, and built the foundation of what Bisbee is today.

On April 8, 1886 Florence married Richard Rundle, who had arrived from England fourteen years ago. Their marriage was preformed in at St. Paul’s church in Tombstone and was witnessed by Miss Clara Stillman – Bisbee’s first school teacher.

Richard and Florence had four daughters: Florence Clemo, born in 1887; Marie Opie, born in 1889; Dorothy Deane, born in 1890; and Grace Eleanor, born in 1892.

Opie Rundle would become a Bisbee historian and share her mother and grandmother’s pioneering story and the story of Bisbee’s history by writing “Bisbee Not So Long Ago” published in 1967 by The Naylor Company. This information, in part, is a summary from that book.

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