A mining camp needs saloons and stamp mills. A town of families needs a school. That difference is written into one small building in Red River, the Little Red Schoolhouse, built in 1915 and used as a school until 1942, according to the town history at redriver.org. It is one of the town properties listed on the National Register of Historic Places, entered on February 23, 1984 as part of the Red River Multiple Resource Area.
By the time the school opened, Red River was changing hands. The boomtown once known as River City, with its mines, saloons, dance hall and boarding houses, had faded, and homesteaders had replaced prospectors. Those settled families rented out abandoned miners cabins to summer visitors escaping the flatland heat, and by the late 1920s Red River had a new reputation as a mountain playground. The children in the schoolhouse desks were the sons and daughters of that in-between generation, the families who stayed.
Their school days, remembered by former students Johnny Brandenburg and Opal Gallagher Gwinn for the Red River Historical Society, were practical and close to the ground. In the 1930s Johnny arrived at 6 a.m. to stoke the wood-burning furnace, a job that paid 5 dollars a month. At 8 a.m. Opal rang the bell, and about 25 students, from first through eighth grade, filed in and left their overshoes in the hall. The building was lit by lanterns and had no indoor plumbing or running water, so students took turns hauling water from the river. The basement served as an apartment for the teacher, and a hitching rack stood on the east side for horses.
Opal rode in daily on horseback from the Old Red River Pass country, kept a dress at school because Levi's were not allowed in class, and changed in a closet each morning. Winter often shortened the school year to four or five months. Under their teacher, Mrs. Wilton, the day began with the pledge of allegiance and covered reading, writing, arithmetic, history, geography, art and music. Lunches arrived in lard pails and waited in the entry hall.
The schoolhouse mattered to parents as much as to pupils. For years it was the town's first community center, hosting weddings, funerals and elections, along with Halloween and Christmas parties and dances around a player piano that now sits in the museum. Its bell doubled as the town alarm at a time when Red River had only two telephones, tolling for a house fire, a forest fire or a child in the river. After the school closed in the early 1940s, the Red River Women's Club maintained the building and kept it in use for town functions.
Keeping it took work. An ownership dispute with the Questa Independent School District ended in the 1970s with a judge ruling for the district, and only after years of negotiation did the town buy the building for 36,000 dollars and move it to its present site on Jayhawk Trail. Historical Society members and town officials then raised funds to repaint it, rebuild the porch, refinish the floors, re-roof it and add heating, a ramp and a security system. Inside today are school desks, old photographs and artifacts from Red River's past. As Historical Society member Frances Williams put it, getting the schoolhouse back meant a lot to the descendants of the old timers. It still does. It is the clearest small monument in town to the families who decided Red River was not just a strike to work, but a home to raise children in.
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