Long before Red River was a ski town, it was a rough mining camp of tents, saloons, and assay offices — and in the middle of it lived a woman the whole town knew as Aunt Becky. Rebecca Coffelt arrived in the late 1800s and stayed through the 1930s, working alongside the men at the Esther mine. But history remembers her less for the ore she helped pull from the hills than for what she coaxed out of the thin mountain soil: one of the most famous flower gardens Red River has ever seen.
Visitors to Aunt Becky's cabin came away talking about two things. The first was the inside of the cabin itself. In her book "Wagon Days in Red River," longtime resident Winifred "Winnie" Hamilton wrote that children and neighbors were drawn to Aunt Becky's walls and ceiling, which she had papered with pictures cut from magazines — children, birds, flowers, movie stars, and presidents. In a town where most walls were bare logs, her collage of color was its own small museum.
But it was the garden out front that made her a legend. Laura R. Krehbiel, writing in the 1938 promotional booklet "Red River New Mexico, Your Mountain Playground," described it as "a beautiful garden of mountain flowers; delphiniums which tower over your head, all kinds of columbine, bright yellow poppies, and so many others that her yard in midsummer is a riot of color." Old-timer Lottie Tweed remembered the work behind the beauty: watering took Aunt Becky two hours every single day, because she had to walk down to the river and haul every bucket back by hand. As Tweed put it, there were few people in those days who planted flowers like that.
Decades later, the town made sure her garden would not be forgotten. In the spring of 2000, Lottie Tweed herself created the Aunt Becky Coffelt Memorial Garden at the Little Red Schoolhouse — now home to the Red River Historical Society museum — planting the very flowers Krehbiel had described in 1938. With the help of area nurseries and a few old timers, Tweed identified and planted iris, violets, petunias, lilies, Sweet William, and the rest, so that every midsummer the schoolhouse yard blooms the way Aunt Becky's did.
Aunt Becky arrived when Red River was a boom camp chasing gold and stayed until it was something else entirely — a place people came to fish, breathe the mountain air, and slow down. Her legacy is a gentle reminder that the town's first settlers were not only prospectors and merchants, but homemakers who turned a rugged mining camp into a community worth remembering.