Built on a wide curve of the river the Indians had called Rocquonic for the water that would run red every spring with the rust-colored silt from upriver, it sat in the midst of a narrow, fertile valley, nestled in the heart of rolling hills. Though hardly isolated, it was not a stop on any important route. When the railroads were laid in the mid 1880s, Red River was bypassed for the more accessible Montville, and so the town itself never expanded far beyond its original configuration: the Rocquonic Inn, the general store, the grange, the First Congregational Church, the post office, and the two-story white clapboard building that had once been the blacksmith’s shop and that for most of this century had served as the town hall and library combined. Woodstock and the Summer of Love washed far enough north and east to spill over into Red River. Communes sprang up all over upstate New York in the wake of the peace movement, and hippies, in a mass return to nature, started to homestead the old family farms, some of them left fallow since the Depression.
