dancing with architecture: Artesia (with a side of Mentone)

Old church at Mentone.

As we continued our trip to Cloudcroft, we stopped in at Mentone, Texas, (nothing [much] to see here, folks, except) to see the church. We then drove through the eminently quaint New Mexican town of Artesia (daylight photos of Artesia on trip out; nightlight photos of Artesia on trip back).

Artesia got its name from the plentiful (at the time) artesian wells that graced the place (here's another  blog of mine focused on [gulp] artesian well postcards). The water wells stopped flowing by the 1910s to be replaced a few years later by oil wells, which is why the town is exceedingly quaint for its size: it has money (and New Mexico's largest refinery [which isn't saying much...]). Nonetheless, the Yates Petroleum family has a halfway decent eye for architecture.

Despite its small size, Artesia packs a wee bit of an architectural punch with a progressively designed library and corporate headquarters for Yates Petroleum.