Bachelor Peak

Type: General Entry

Published: November 1, 1994

Updated: December 5, 2017

Bachelor Peak (Bachelor's Peak) is on U.S. Highway 183 fourteen miles northwest of Briggs in northern Burnet County (at 31°00' N, 98°06' W). It rises 1,391 feet above sea level, nearly 200 feet above the surrounding countryside. Two stories describe the origins of the name. One account involves five pioneer bachelors who spent a night gambling and feasting on the geographic high point. The other version suggests that early settler Alexander Brown and six other bachelors once had a picnic on its summit, and the hill was named for them. A small amount of marble was quarried near Bachelor Peak for the construction of the courthouse in Llano. In 1897 prominent stockman Joseph Field married Francis E. Smith at Bachelor Peak Ranch, which his family owned from 1888 until 1910. The peak was marked as a station of the United States Geological Survey.

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Darrell Debo, Burnet County History (2 vols., Burnet, Texas: Eakin, 1979). Houston Post, December 25, 1897, December 27, 1908, January 20, 1910. Hugh Chester Mitchell, First-order Triangulation in Texas (Washington D. C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1935). Sidney Paige, Mineral Resources of the Llano-Burnet Region, Texas with an Account of the Pre-Cambrian Geology (Washington D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1911). Fred Tarpley, 1001 Texas Place Names (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).

The following, adapted from the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, is the preferred citation for this entry.

Anonymous, “Bachelor Peak,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed May 20, 2022, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/bachelor-peak.

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Original Publication Date:: November 1, 1994
Most Recent Revision Date:: December 5, 2017

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