The Bauer Bank Building in downtown Mancos is as sturdy and stout as the man after whom it is named. That fellow, a Prussian-born immigrant named George Bauer, came to the Mancos River Valley in 1881, trailing three burros laden with merchandise. He built those stocks into a quarter-million-dollar business—and helped the town achieve similar growth by investing in banks, mines, reservoirs, and telephone lines. Bauer even served as Mancos’s first mayor and sat on Montezuma County’s inaugural board of commissioners.

He also raised several buildings on Main Street, in part to keep the town from moving west to the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad’s siding. Bauer died in 1905, the year before the bank building was completed, but the edifice carried on his role as a symbolic community anchor. The bank offices stood in the basement, while a mercantile store occupied the ground floor and various small offices inhabited the second. Nearby Mesa Verde National Park (created the same year the building opened) may have had its first administrative offices here. Other tenants over the years included the local phone company and post office.

The building still houses business offices on its second floor. And it serves as a reminder of how big a difference one man can make.