New Mexico-Arizona Wool Warehouse

Ever since the first Spanish settlers and missionaries brought flocks of sheep to New Mexico in the 17th and 18th centuries, sheep raising has been a major local industry. By the first half of the 19th-century sheep and woolen textiles were the chief items of export from the New Mexico area. Thousands of sheep grazed on New Mexico's high grassy plateaus; flocks belonging to wealthy Spanish landowners numbered in the millions. Before the Civil War, major sheep drives involving 5000-25,000 sheep (often referred to as "woolies' by writers about the sheep industry) were organized to bring food to the surging populations of the California mining camps. Other flocks went to feed the growing number of military battalions who served throughout the Southwest between the Mexican and Civil Wars. After the Civil War, the flocks were driven hundreds of miles to feed lots in Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska, and Texas. An estimated 350,000 sheep have driven annually from New Mexico to these states during 1876-1878, a figure which rose to l million a year in 1883-1885.

During this period after the Civil War, the area around Albuquerque became one of the largest wool-producing districts in the Territory and the city became a major wool market center, being both convenient for shipping and offering higher prices than elsewhere in the New Mexico Territory. In 1890, 5 million pounds were handled in the city and by 1907 Albuquerque had become the chief shipping point for the area's wool production. The local wool industry continued to prosper in the first half of the 20th century until the combination of high labor costs, the growing popularity of synthetics, and greater restrictions on grazing lands contributed to a sharp decline in wool production.

Although built late (1929) in the era of New Mexico's ranking position in American wool production, the Wool Warehouse is an appropriate symbol of the heyday of the New Mexican wool industry. It is the only building left in the city as a reminder of this once-thriving business; other city buildings related to wool sales and handlings, such as the Wool Scouring Mills, the Rio Grande Woolen Mills, and several large warehouses (oilfield Co. Warehouse, Gross-kelly Warehouse), have all been demolished. During the 1930s and 40s, the last high production period of the wool industry, the Wool Warehouse was a center for wool and hide sales and storage.

Gordon Bond, the grandson of the man who had the warehouse built, described the warehouse era: "At peak production times, five million pounds of wool would go through here. Also at its peak, 30 to 40 carloads of sheep wool, 40 to 50 carloads of cowhides and thousands of coyote, deer, elk, beaver and rabbits pelts... would be sold to wool and fur merchants in the east."

The designer of the warehouse, T. Charles Gaastra, took advantage of the necessarily large spaces to create a columned hall reminiscent of an Egyptian temple interior. The exterior design, a striking two-story elongated red brick cube, probably reflects the new architecture Gaastra had seen as a young man in Holland where he worked with his father, a contractor, in the second decade of the 20th century. Gaastra first appears in New Mexico in 1926 when he was working in Santa Fe with the firm Gladding and Gladding. The Wool Warehouse was one of several buildings in Albuquerque that he designed. In a more regional style are the Monte Vista and Eugene Field elementary schools and a group of buildings on the University of New Mexico campus.

The owner of the Wool Warehouse was Frank Bond, a well-known figure in the New Mexico wool industry. Born in Quebec in 1863, he came west in 1883 and settled in Espanola, New Mexico; shortly thereafter he got into the sheep business and for 42 years running his vast empire from his headquarters in Espanola. As Towne and Wentworth describe him in their book Shepherd's Empire, "In addition to being interested in breeding, they (Frank and George Bond) expanded as dealers, selling ewe bands in Colorado, Wyoming, and western Kansas, and whether bands to feed lots of the Middle West. As the business expanded, they opened headquarters in Albuquerque, from which they serviced their increasing number of merchandise stores. At its peak, the Bonds owned 25,000 head and handled between 100,000 and 200,000 as traders. They occasionally had as many as 50,000 to 60,000 heads on feed in Colorado
Nebraska and annual wool sales attained a peak of 500.000 pounds.

When Frank Bond moved his headquarters to Albuquerque in 1925, he not only moved to the market center of the wool industry in the Southwest, but he also moved to Albuquerque for his daughter Hazel's health. Tragically it was his other daughter, Amy, who died suddenly the following year; as if this were not enough, Hazel died two years later. In the same year as Hazel's death, work on the Wool Warehouse was begun; perhaps these two tragic losses so close to one another motivated him to start work on this new project. By 1930 the warehouse took its first clip of wool and continued as a center for wool and hide sales and storage until 1972 when the sharp decline in wool production caused the Bonds to lease the building to other tenants. They continued to own the building until 1976 when they sold it to the City of Albuquerque, which is using it for records storage.