Cotton Gin

 

This building sits in a big deserted field off the highway running through Malaga, NM.  One look and I knew I had to get some photos.  It took a lot of research on the Internet afterwards just to figure out what the purpose of this building was.  It has a catwalk with a bunch of rusted-out machinery suspended from the ceiling and there are tracks and fittings on the floor for other machines that have long since been removed.  I thought it could have been a factory.  But after some Googling, I've come to the conclusion that it was a large cotton gin.  I know that most people don't think of the New Mexico desert as the land of cotton, but there is an agricultural industry there for it and I can remember driving past cotton fields in southeastern New Mexico as a child.  In any case, it's an interesting building and a nice photo subject.