The Story

Faith's Business Equipment, later advertised as Jim Faith's Office Supplies, opened at 416 Vine Street in 1971 and stayed for nearly half a century. Its advertising emphasized the point that mattered to customers: a locally owned business in the same place for more than 48 years, offering office supplies, furniture and catalogs with free in-town delivery.

James H. "Jim" Faith became a longtime downtown Poplar Bluff businessman, and the storefront carried his name — "JIM FAITH'S BUSINESS EQUIP." — on the sign board above the glass through the 1990s and 2000s. Faith died in 2008, and the business continued under his name for years afterward, still listed at 416 Vine Street in 2019.

The building Faith occupied was already more than seventy years old when he opened, and it had been a livery stable, an automobile garage and an automobile dealership before it was an office supply store. His long tenancy is part of why the building survived the era when so much of downtown came down: a commercial building held in continuous use by one family business is a building nobody bothers to demolish.

A 1990 survey documented alterations to the building's upper floor windows at 416 Vine Street, one of the few written records of the facade from the years when the horse-and-automobile history above the storefront had been forgotten by nearly everyone walking past it.