Did you know that one of Red River's most unassuming little houses once served as the town's contagious ward? At the northwest corner of Jayhawk Trail and High Street stands a one-story, square building with a gabled roof and a small porch, known today as the Red River Miner's Hospital, or the Westoby House. It was not built where it stands. According to the Town of Red River's comprehensive plan, the building was constructed in nearby Hospital Canyon in about 1915, as a contagious ward for miners who succumbed to the unsanitary conditions of camp life, and it was later moved to its present site.
To understand why a mining town needed such a place, picture Red River in its boom years. By 1900 the town's population had grown to about 3,000, and hundreds of gold, silver, and copper mines were carved into the sides of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, in Goose Creek, Bitter Creek, and Pioneer, Mallette, and upper Red River canyons. Men lived crowded together in cabins and camps, where illness could travel fast. A small ward set apart in its own canyon gave sick miners a place to be cared for away from the rest of camp. The town plan calls the building architecturally significant as an example of a public building reflecting the short-lived period of mining prosperity in Red River.
Look closely at its walls and you will see its most important feature. The house is sided with pressed metal imitating rusticated stone blocks, paired with wooden fish-scale shingles. Pressed metal could be ordered, shipped in, and nailed up to give a modest frame building the dignified look of cut stone, and here it has survived remarkably well. After its hospital days ended, the structure was converted into a residence, but it retained its early appearance, with that patterned metal siding still doing its quiet impersonation of stone more than a century later.
The house owes its second name to the man who later lived in it. Edward P. Westoby was a pioneer figure in Red River who came to the area in 1882 to trap beaver, among the earliest permanent settlers of the valley. In that same founding era, Westoby joined Sylvester, Orin, and George Mallette in building the log cabin that still bears Sylvester's name. Westoby stayed on to become a gold miner, a hunter and trapper, a taxidermist, a writer, and a deputy sheriff of Red River, a resume that reads like a whole frontier town packed into one life.
The little hospital-turned-home was entered on New Mexico's State Register of Cultural Properties in December 1983, and the town's comprehensive plan counts it among Red River's seven historic structures, alongside the Little Red Schoolhouse, the Mallette cabins, the Melson-Oldham Cabin, and the Pierce-Fuller House. On your next stroll up Jayhawk Trail, slow down at High Street and look for the stone pattern that is not really stone. Behind that pressed-metal disguise is a building that cared for sick miners, sheltered one of the town's founders, and still stands as one of the smallest, and most telling, survivors of Red River's mining age.