The claim to what would be the Contention Mine was made by a Hank Williams. Ed Schiefflin was the original prospector to discover gold in what would become the Tombstone Hills which led to a minor gold rush and a community of thousands. Ed had a partner who helped to make it more possible to defend their claims from the hordes of new-comers. The partner, Dick Gird, felt Williams’ claim too closely related to theirs, and it was an issue of contention for some time, until Williams finally settled out and sold his cliam, and the dispute became the namesake of the mine.
Contention City itself was founded and parceled out by John McDermott, the saloon-keeper, and a D. T. Smith (amazing how many of these folks had no first names on the frontier, and how many women were just ‘Mrs. DT Smith’!). Located several miles north and west of the mines at Tombstone, and built specifically as a mill-site, it was necessarily as near as possible to the water needed for the ore reduction process. In this case it was from the prominent river in the area, the San Pedro. It was one of only two such rivers in all of southern Arizona, a year-round water supply at that time. Furthermore it seems that at about the same time at least a couple railroads were being constructed which ran along the east side of the river. A shareholder in one was N. K. Fairbank (namesake of his town site 3 miles to the south) who also was involved in the Grand Central Mining company, then operating in the Tombstone district.
The town was laid out, subdivided, and lots already being sold during September of 1879. The Post Office was opened the next April. The first of the mills opened was Grand Central Milling, presumably related to Fairbanks’ mining company in some way. Later Head Center and Contention milling built facilities there too. The Post Office closed in 1888 and by the 1930s all that remained were crumbling walls of four adobe buildings, a small cemetery, and an entry arch for one of the mills. The aerial photo shows the outline of the sole surviving ruin as of 1964. By 1985 no structures remain and the site is difficult to identify at all. The site is not on a roadway, and the railroads are long closed down now; no old-west mis-behavior seems to have occurred there, few stories told, and so the location faded rapidly into obscurity, in spite of its close relation to the still-famous Tombstone.