Rose Tree Museum

In spring 1885, a Scottish woman named Mary Gee received rose cuttings from home and shared one with Amelia Adamson, who ran a boarding house at what's now Fourth and Toughnut. Adamson planted the White Lady Banksia cutting by the porch. It took. The desert air, the specific soil, something — the rose didn't just survive, it thrived beyond any reasonable expectation. By the time James and Ethel Robertson Macia bought the place in 1920, the rose had grown large enough to warrant a trellis. They built one. The rose kept going.

In 1933, writer John Hix called it the world's largest rose tree. Ripley's "Believe It or Not" featured it in 1937. The Macias renamed the boarding house the Rose Tree Inn in 1936. The family had settled Tombstone during its silver-rush years, and they stayed — through boom, bust, fire, the long quiet after the mines closed. In 1964, their children and grandchildren opened the museum as a tribute to that endurance, to the pioneer families who made Tombstone the town too tough to die.

The rose now covers roughly 5,000 to 9,000 square feet on a framework of poles and pipe, the trunk measuring somewhere around twelve to fourteen feet in circumference. Guinness certified the record. Locals call it Tombstone's Original Shady Lady — Dorothy Devere coined the nickname when she ran the place. It blooms for about six weeks each spring, March through April, when the museum holds its annual Rose Festival. Inside: memorabilia from Tombstone's early days, Robertson-Macia family collections, dioramas of the Lucky Cuss Mine and the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

Go during bloom season if you can. The white flowers are small, fragrant, countless. The canopy provides genuine shade in a town where shade matters. You'll learn something about the people who stayed after the silver ran out.