Q – What was the Monticello Antique Marketplace building originally?
A – This is a tricky question and one I’ve puzzled over for several years. When you look closely at the 8600 SE Stark Street building, you can see it was built in stages.
I haven’t been able to date all the components, but the earliest one is the two-story building at the corner of Stark and 86th Avenue. If you enter the Marketplace here, you are standing in what was the Dehen Knitting Mills company, a manufacturer of knitted clothing. Just imagine this space filled with busy workers and the clattering of knitting and sewing machines.
Delving into the history of the Dehen company, a fascinating story of a German immigrant and his American family unfolded. The story began with Wilhelm Peter Isenberg (1879-1955), later known as William P. Dehen.
He was born in the beautiful southern German city of Trier, where wool textile production dates back to Roman times. Both his paternal and maternal families were engaged in the manufacturing and sale of knitted wool garments. In 1920, Dehen told a reporter for Olympia’s Washington Standard that, as a youth, he had worked in his father’s knit-goods factory and had studied textile technology at Germany’s prestigious Reutlingen University.
He immigrated to the U.S. in 1903 and—again, according to the Standard—brought the first fully automatic knitting machine to the National Knitting Mills in Milwaukee. By 1905, he had Anglicized his first name to William, but he kept his surname until about 1914. Then, perhaps because of building anti-German sentiment on the eve of World War I, he adopted his mother’s family name, Dehen.
According to Dehen’s grandchildren, Liz Artaiz and Mike Dehen, someone encouraged William to seek his fortune on the West Coast. By 1906, he was working for a knitting mill in San Francisco, but shortly after he arrived, it was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire. In 1907, he and his brother Mathias established their own knitting company in southern California. By 1909, he was back in San Francisco working as a superintendent for the Acme Knitting Company.
In San Francisco, William met Celia A. Schmitt (1885-1970), the daughter of a German immigrant born near Trier. Celia helped run the knitting companies they established in Seattle and Portland between 1915 and 1920. The couple had four children: Henry (b. 1910), Rosemary (b. 1912), Alvira (b. 1914), and William (b. 1922). All except Rosemary, who died tragically in a fire in 1915, would work in the Montavilla factory.
According to Dehen family descendants, William and Celia were destitute when they moved to Portland (probably in 1921), so William had to work as a night watchman at Jantzen Knitting Mills. By 1922, they had opened Dehen Knitting Mills on Stark Street, probably in a preexisting building. In 1925, they commissioned a purpose-built, two-story factory at the corner of Stark and 86th Avenue (which is now the northwest end of the Monticello marketplace). The Oregon Daily Journal of May 9, 1925, reported that the new mill had two floors for production and a basement for storing yarn and other knitting supplies. The five employees produced sports sweaters and bathing suits on German knitting machines.
The Dehen mill produced a variety of knitted wool garments––sweaters, bathing suits, underwear, dresses, skirts, and jackets––and sold them to wholesale and retail customers. By 1928, the Dehen company had 15 employees.
In 1927, the company acquired a Jacquard circular knitting machine specifically designed for wool bathing suits.
The Dehen business continued to grow. In 1927, they added a one-story building behind the 1925 mill. (This still exists on the south side of the antique mall.) By this time, the Dehen mill had 26 knitting machines and 24 sewing machines to produce sweaters, bathing suits, underwear, dresses, skirts, athletic suits, and shirts.
After the stock-market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Depression, the Dehen company fell on challenging times. Customers were unable to pay for products. The bank foreclosed. But the business would continue. According to William’s son Bill, his father and a few friends liberated some knitting machines and yarn. With these supplies, the family continued to produce knit goods in the basement of their new home in Portland’s Goose Hollow neighborhood. They sold them in a storefront at 730 SW 10th Avenue (now the Galleria building). At one point, they even had to sell their goods door-to-door in Gresham, sometimes trading for food.
Despite the lean Depression years, the business survived and ultimately thrived. William and Celia lived to see the company turn around and succeed. Today, Jim Artaiz, husband of Dehen’s granddaughter Liz, runs the Dehen 1920 in Portland, producing high-quality knit goods. For more on the company’s history, you can watch the Portland TEDX talk by Benjamin Dehen-Artaiz, great-grandson of William Dehen, on YouTube. You can also see the current line of knit products on the Dehen 1920 website. Additionally, you can visit their retail store at 1040 NE 44th Avenue to see some of their knit goods and even see the current mill with its knitting and sewing machines.
So, what happened to the Dehen Mill Building? When the Dehens left in 1934, the Coast Printing Company (later the Coast Salesbook Company) moved in. This company was purchased in 1968 by Ennis Business Forms, a national corporation. In 1999, Kelli Vinther purchased the building and transformed it into the Monticello Antique Marketplace. At some point during these decades, the owners built additions to the Dehen Knitting Mill to create the antique mall and Monti’s restaurant complex that is the Montavilla institution of today.
This is part of a new segment at Montavilla News called Montavilla History Questions Answered. If you have questions about Montavilla’s past that you’d like answered, local historian Patricia Sanders will investigate your question. Please email your questions to history@montavilla.net and we may feature it alongside Patricia Sanders’ research in a future post on this page.
