Bowen is an extinct town in

Las Animas County Las Animas County is a county located in the U.S. state of Colorado. As of the 2020 census, the population was 14,555. The county seat is Trinidad. The county takes its name from the Mexican Spanish name of the Purgatoire River, originally c ...

, in the

U.S. state In the United States, a state is a constituent political entity, of which there are 50. Bound together in a political union, each state holds governmental jurisdiction over a separate and defined geographic territory where it shares its sover ...

Colorado Colorado (, other variants) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It encompasses most of the Southern Rocky Mountains, as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the western edge of t ...

. The 1911 Colorado Business Directory describes the town as "Coal mining town and station", population 200, on the

Colorado and Southern Railway The Colorado and Southern Railway was an American Class I railroad in the western United States that operated independently from 1898 to 1908, then as part of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad until it was absorbed into the Burli ...

. On 7 August 1902 an explosion of dust ignited by giant powder at the Bowen Mine killed 13 people. The precise location of the town site is unknown to the

GNIS The Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) is a database of name and locative information about more than two million physical and cultural features throughout the United States and its territories, Antarctica, and the associated states of ...

, but newspaper articles reporting the 1902 Bowen Mine Explosion place the town "about a quarter of a mile below the mine", near

Trinidad Trinidad is the larger and more populous of the two major islands of Trinidad and Tobago. The island lies off the northeastern coast of Venezuela and sits on the continental shelf of South America. It is often referred to as the southernmos ...

. A post office called Bowen was established in 1906, and remained in operation until 1929. The community had the name of Thomas F. Bowen, a state legislator.

References

Ghost towns in Colorado Geography of Las Animas County, Colorado {{Colorado-geo-stub