Founding Families

Red River's second founding did not ride in with a gold pan. It arrived in 1936 with a family looking for a living. L.S. Lewis brought his wife Jessie and their children Clifton, Evelyn and five-year-old Lester to the west end of the valley, and bought 110 acres that stretched from what is now River Ranch toward the Black Mountain Playhouse on Pioneer Road.

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.

Twenty-five miles north of Taos, in the center of the village of Questa, stands an adobe church that has been testing its community's devotion for nearly two centuries. San Antonio de Padua — Saint Anthony of Padua — anchors a parish whose roots reach back to the first years of the settlement the Spanish called San Antonio del Rio Colorado.

Before the ski lifts and the motorcycles, Red River was River City — a rowdy gold camp perched at 8,750 feet in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Oral history says the town was founded on July 3, 1895, by Colorado miner Edward I. Jones and the Red River City Town and Mineral Company. It took its name from the stream running through it, which turns red with silt after heavy rains.

Long before Red River was a town, the valley belonged to hunters and herders. Utes and Jicarillas chased elk and bighorn sheep across the high meadows, and sheepherders from Questa, Costilla, and Taos grazed their flocks where Main Street runs today. Prospectors drifted through in the 1870s and found the silence of the valley restful — and kept drifting, because the great strikes were all over in Elizabethtown. Then came three French-Canadian trappers with gold pans.