Klindt’s Bookseller, Oregon’s oldest bookstore, sits on a busy street in the heart of downtown The Dalles.

It was established in 1870 by Ingwert Cornelius Nickelsen, a Danish citizen from the Frisian Islands. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1859 at the age of 17. Landing at New York, he worked in the restaurant business until 1867, when he decided to try his fortune in the west and reached The Dalles in 1868. Originally, he worked at the town’s famed Umatilla House Hotel.

In 1870, he opened his business, I.C. Nickelsen’s Stationery, Books, Music and Jewelry. This was six years before Mark Twain published “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.”

A fire in 1893 destroyed the original storefront, and the firm moved across the street to the “new” location at 315 East Second St., where it has remained for the last 129 years of its 152-year history.

Nickelsen sold the bookstore to the Weigelt family in 1928. The Weigelt brothers, Gus and Paul, along with their sister Edna, owned and operated Weigelt’s Bookstore & Stationers for the next five decades.

In 1981, Philip and Linda Klindt, with pioneer roots in the community, purchased the store and renamed it Klindt’s Booksellers. As part of the deal, Edna agreed to stay on for a year to help the Klindts get settled. She ultimately stayed for nearly 20 years.

The Klindts were a cosmopolitan influence in the town, bringing in hundreds of foreign and independent movies to rent or purchase on VHS cassettes, and escorting tours to Eastern Europe and Russia. Philip also held Thursday evening salons at a local restaurant, with wide-ranging topics from politics to philosophy to history, music and film.

Linda Klindt died in 2000, and Philip carried on until his own death in 2010. The couple had no children, so after their deaths, the store passed to their niece.

Kristin Klindt and her husband, Joaquin Perez, were living in the San Francisco Bay Area when that happened. With their 4-year old son Henry about to start school, it was a good time to relocate.

Perez became the day-to-day manager of the story, while Klindt continued working remotely for an online analytics company and handling the remote work of managing the bookstore.

When the store was in pandemic lockdown, Perez used the opportunity to refinish the original wood floors of the shop, and repaint the many bookshelves. He also made home deliveries of book orders.

That the store has managed to survive for so long is due to hard work on the part of the owners and a fiercely loyal local following. Once you’ve been to the bookstore, you can see why it’s hard to leave.

Edna Weigelt, who died in 2003, was a short woman who kept some things on a high shelf in the bathroom she could only reach by standing on the toilet seat. To this day, employees sometimes find footprints on the seat, and when working at night, they say they feel Edna’s presence.

“We have Philip and Linda’s ashes in the store,” Perez said. “It may sound spooky, but we feel as if we are being watched over.”

Rodger Nichols is a freelance writer from The Dalles.