Bowen: Named for a Senator, Gone by Twenty-Nine

About six miles north of Trinidad, a coal camp once sat a quarter mile below its mine on the slope of a hill along the Colorado and Southern Railway. The settlement was first known as Aylmer when its post office opened in nineteen hundred. By nineteen oh six it had been renamed Bowen, for Thomas Mead Bowen, a Colorado lawyer, state legislator, and United States Senator from eighteen eighty-three to eighteen eighty-nine, who owned the mine and made a fortune from it.

By nineteen eleven the town held around two hundred people, all of them tied to coal. The camp had already survived a catastrophe: on August seventh, nineteen oh two, an explosion of dust ignited by blasting powder killed thirteen miners in a single shift. The mine pressed on regardless.

When the coal gave out and the railway traffic slowed, the post office closed in January of nineteen twenty-nine, and the town dissolved with it. Nothing marks the site today.