Bachelor City History
Located approximately three miles miles northwest of Creede, the settlement of Bachelor City was established in early 1892 near the mines on Bachelor Mountain. The Last Chance, Amethyst, Bachelor, and other nearby mines employed hundreds of men, and Creede was too far down the mountain to be a convenient place for the miners to live. As the mines prospered in the early 1890s, so did the town.
The first buildings—a private residence and a boarding house—were erected in September 1891. Soon after, the Last Chance Mine added a second boarding house for its growing crew of miners. In January an 80 acre town site was platted, and by the end of the month two saloons and a brothel were already in operation. By March, over 100 houses had been built, with more under construction. The April 1, 1892 edition of The Creede Candle reported on the progress at Bachelor City:
Bachelor is one of the liveliest of the many towns in the camp. Many new buildings are going up and the merchants are having a good trade. There are eight stores, about a dozen saloons, several assay offices, boarding houses, hotels, and restaurants in operation and more going up. Some large and substantial two story buildings are in the course of erection, and the town has the appearances of permanency.
A post office was established in April 1892, but used the name "Teller" to avoid confusion with Bachelor, California. The town had a school, a miner's union, and its own newspaper The Teller Topics.
Bachelor City experienced its share of violence during its rowdy early days. In one instance a miner named Thomas Coyne was shot dead by a deputy sheriff after he resisted arrest after "making a disturbance at a dance house." Another act of violence was reported by newspapers in May 1892:
A horrible tale of inhumanity comes from Creede which almost surpasses belief. Albert Taylor was sleeping off the effects of a drunken debauch in a saloon when a party of drunken fiends turned their attention to him committing upon his person the most fiendish attrocities imaginable from the effects of which the man died.
Public outrage ran so high in Bachelor City that an angry mob threatened to lynch the two men taken into custody for the crime. As was often the case in mining boomtowns, the chaos of the first year eventually subsided, and Bachelor evolved into a respectable, working-class community.
Bachelor City reached its peak population of around 1,200 residents in 1893. By the mid-1890s, however, the district’s mines began to decline due to persistent water issues and the rising costs of extracting lower-grade ore from increasingly deep shafts. The workforce at the mines was reduced, and the town’s population declined to about 800 by 1896, and then just 200 by 1900.
The town persisted for another decade, but the post office ultimately closed in 1912. Today, a historical marker is all that remains to identify the former townsite.
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