Owner(s): Economy Dental Supply Company
c/o Helen Spivak
1912 NE 27th
Portland, Oregon 97212

Description: This Commercial style, two-story, unreinforced brick masonry building, incorporates a flat parapet, sheet metal cornice and double-hung wood sash windows on the second floor. The storefronts on the east end appear to date from the 1920s. There are tile bulkheads and recessed entrances to four shops and access to a stairway up to the second level. A standing-seam metal awning from above the first floor storefronts over the sidewalk.

This building continues to display a 1920s overall appearance, primarily on the second level. Although changes have occurred to the storefronts, the building retains sufficient historic integrity to be considered a contributing building in the downtown district.

History and Significance: The Durbin Building is located at Salem’s primary commercial intersection. The building retains substantial architectural integrity on the second floor since around 1920, when the owners of the southerly Durbin Building, then Joseph and Lillie Adolph and George E. and Margaret Waters, altered the building. At that time, the existing exterior walls were covered with a light-colored brick and the rounded window heads were squared. It is likely that a rear addition was also made to the Durbin Building at that time, which joined an existing (1870s) two-story building on the east. Also, this building is associated with some of Salem’s noteworthy agriculturists and merchants: Solomon and Isaac Durbin, William Watkins, Richard H. Dearborn, H. Hirschberg, and George Waters.

Brothers Solomon and Isaac Durbin immigrated to Oregon in 1845. In 1848 Solomon fought in the Cayuse Indian War, then traveled to California later that year in search of gold. In the Sacramento area and later near the gold mining town of Jacksonville in southern Oregon, Durbin freighted supplies and raised cattle. After engaging in the cattle business in eastern Oregon and Montana, Solomon Durbin returned to his family’s home in Salem. From 1853 to 1874, he and his brother, Isaac Durbin, owned and operated a livery stable, known as Durbin & Company, at the corner of Commercial and State streets. A January 1862 photograph of the northeast corner of Commercial and State streets shows the two-story wood frame "S. Durbin" livery with a team of sixteen horses hitched up in the snow. In the early and mid-1880s, T.B. Wait sold hardware and farm machinery from the Durbin Building.

William Watkins and Richard H. Dearborn owned the adjoining property on the north. In the 1860s, they constructed a brick building fronting on Commercial Street. William Watkins probably operated a livery stable at that location. Richard H. Dearborn was a harness maker. A harness-making shop occupied the northern-most Watkins-Dearborn Building into the 1890s. By then the Durbin Building had become a saloon with offices on the second floor.

J.T. Fryer bought the southern-most Durbin Building in 1887. Between 1894 and 1911, H. Hirschberg owned the property. H. Hirschberg, Independence, Oregon, banker and large real estate holder throughout Oregon, bought this corner property in 1894 and owned it until 1911. Hirschberg, a native of Germany born in 1853, immigrated to the United States in 1870 and came west in 1872. Later that year, he settled in Independence, opening the first tin shop there and, in 1886, organizing the Independence National Bank. At this time, he began investing in real estate and, over the next four decades, acquired many business and residential properties in Independence, Portland, and Salem as well as extensive agricultural fields (especially hop fields) throughout the Willamette Valley. He also was active in fraternal groups, serving as treasurer of the state grange.

Joseph Adolph and George E. Waters both purchased an interest in the corner Durbin Building in 1911. George E. Waters, a native of Nebraska, born in 1869, came to Salem, Oregon, with his parents in 1872. In 1891 he opened a cigar store in Salem. Fifteen years later, he embarked on the tobacco wholesale business in his shop on State Street. He eventually added wholesale candy to the inventory of his tobacco shop on State Street. Joseph Adolph, born in 1882, ventured into business in Salem in the early 1900s. He first clerked at Rostein & Greenbaum groceries in Salem, then, opened his own cigar store on Commercial Street around 1910. His brother, Samuel, soon joined him in a business known as Adolph Brothers, which expanded to include soft drinks and billiards in the 100-block of North Commercial. Adolph and Waters invested jointly in other Salem commercial property in the early decades of the 1900s, including the building at 198 Liberty, N.E., also located in Salem’s historic commercial district. Adolph and Waters presumably remodeled the Durbin Building around 1920, at which time major alterations were made to the window headers, exterior wall surface, and the rear (east end) of the building. By the mid-1930s, the two Adolph brothers had joined Edward Rostein in a venture that eventually became Salem Drug Company. Waters passed away in 1940; Adolph died two years later. Harry Semler, a dentist, acquired this property in 1958 from Margaret Waters (George Waters’s wife) and Rex and Alden Adolph, sons of Joseph and Lillie Adolph. The Semler Dental Offices occupied the building for several years.