In 1880, this property on the northeast corner of Mill and Main Streets, was the site of a two- story wooden building featuring a millinery store on the first floor and a hotel with mainly Chinese residents on the second floor. By 1905, this space was the site of a Chinese restaurant with confections and cigars on the first floor and the second-floor rooms to rent. This building burned down sometime before the twenties and was a vacant lot where the Guy Brothers Shop stored all kinds of pipe, fencing, and other steel goods. The sidewalk was marked off in five-foot spacings to measure rope.
Around 1920, per the Sanborn maps, a one-story modern commercial style structure with stucco cladding was built with concrete and wooden posts. This is an excellent example of the Modern Commercial style of the era, with its distinctive modern features in its flat roof, cubic form, smooth wall surface, and little facade ornamentation with the exception of a hint of entablature in the stucco. The first uses of this commercial building are unknown at this time.
In 1928, it became the location of Mountain States Power, Dallas’s first modern power company. Historically, Dallas had gotten its first electric power in 1889 from the City Electric Light Company founded by T. A. Riggs, a system featuring hydropower from the nearby mill race. At that time Dallas had 5 arc street lamps, followed soon by 13 street lamps powered by the city’s first generating power plant, using a 20-arc capacity dynamo powered by the same mill race.
In 1926, E. V. Dalton, who had been County Treasurer and owner of the Sterling Furniture Company (located in the current Dallas Cinema building at 166 SE Mill St.), retired from the furniture business and started an “electric store.” The business moved a couple of times and then settled in at 611 Mill Street across the street from the Dallas City Bank in 1935. In that same year, Otto Adolf purchased the business from E.V. and operated it as Adolf’s Electric Shop at the 611 Mill site. After 12 years, Adolph’s outgrew that location and moved to the larger Mountain States building in July 1947. In 1951 it was renamed Adolf’s Electric.
Alvin Adolf known as Al, started working with his father Otto, in 1959. Al operated the business for many years before retiring in 1993. The Adolph’s electrical and appliance business continued to run under the ownership of his wife, Charrlot, and remained in the family trust until 2009, when the building was sold to Town Leasing LLC. In the intervening years, the building has been the site of Dallas Glass, then a floral shop, a carpet store, then was vacant until it was purchased by Doug Graven and Rachel Phelps in 2013 who opened Pressed Coffee and Wine Bar. This business was a lively spot and a center gathering point of the large, internationally famous 2017 Total Solar Eclipse, that brought thousands of people to Dallas from all over the world.
Pressed Coffee closed c. 2020, a casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was followed briefly by interim owners, then by the purchase of the building by the owners and operators of the New Morning Bakery.
KEY REFERENCES:
- c. 1944 interview that Wes Sherman of the I-O
- Polk County Assessor’s DeedsLibrary of Congress Sanborn Maps:https://www.loc.gov/collections/sanborn-maps/?q=dallas+oregon