The building house the Ketelson & Degetau store, a hardware firm that sold “clothing, sewing machines, agricultural implements, dynamite, arms and ammunition. When German citizen Max Weber arrived in EL Paso in the 1880s he worked for Ketelsen & Degetau. He would later become the German vice-consul in Juarez. He made a name for himself for helping General Navarro escape to El Paso after Pancho Villa and Pascual Orozco demanded that he be placed on trial for the killing of civilians and revolutionary soldiers who had surrendered after the battle of Mal Paso. Weber was also president and stockholder of the Guaranty Trust & Banking Company as well as the business representative for governor Enrique Creel. Weber built ties with the region’s business elites and eventually managed “the 100,000 thousand acre Compañía Carbonífera, in which Enrique Creel maintained interests” (Estrada, 18-19). By 1908, Weber also held 300 acres of land in the Juarez Valley that he leased to tenant farmers (Estrada, 24). Ketelsen & Degetau also had a store in Juarez that was destroyed at the onset of the Mexican Revolution. Ketelsen & Degetau claimed 600,000 pesos in damage. Otto Kuck, who worked for the German consulate in Ciudad Chihuahua, ran the company that was destroyed in Juarez. Kuck and Weber were friends (Estrada, 20). The Ketelson and Degetau store in Juarez was destroyed by Pancho Villa during the 1911 Battle of Juarez. It is written that “[t]he explosion was so loud it was heard in border towns 35 miles away.”
