Frank Bond's Wool Warehouse, originally the New Mexico–Arizona Wool Warehouse, faces you in Albuquerque's Warehouse District. Built in 1928–29 by wool merchant Frank Bond, this building was completed in 1929 at the height of a booming regional trade. Albuquerque's central location and convenient access to the AT&SF Railway made the city the hub of the New Mexico wool trade, which flourished as American demand for wool increased rapidly after World War I. Inside, the warehouse could hold five million pounds of wool and hides, and it housed the offices of the Bond-McRae wool trading company, the Wool Warehouse Company, and the New Mexico Cooperative Wool Marketing Association.
Bond served as president of the first two companies until they were taken over by his son in 1936. The building's story continued into preservation: it was added to the New Mexico State Register of Cultural Properties in 1980 and to the National Register of Historic Places in 1981. Beginning in the 1940s, wool production in New Mexico began to decline.
Picture five million pounds of wool and hides once packed inside, bound for the rails of the AT&SF just beyond these walls.