The Story

J. J. Frank's livery, feed and boarding stable is the business that made this Vine Street corner a transportation address. A Sanborn fire insurance map from 1895 identifies "J. J. Frank Livery & Feed" on this ground, and the 1901 map labels the same building "J. J. Frank Livery."

Frank's association with the site may reach back further. In 1889 an advertisement announced that J. J. Frank and George Hauburger had purchased the livery business of John Gray, renovated the stable throughout, and offered single and double rigs to let, horses bought and sold on commission, and carriages for weddings, funerals and depot trips day or night, with Frank as manager. Whether that stable stood at this address is not yet established — an 1884 promotional book, A View of a Growing Town, places an earlier livery stable kept by Thomas M. Johnson on Vine Street between Fourth and Fifth streets, without giving a street number.

In September 1899 the Poplar Bluff Republican reported that Frank had begun a large brick addition on the east side of his stable, 50 feet wide and as long as the building already occupied, with a brick front and rear. He sold the operation in March 1906 to James R. Hogg — horses, carriages and building included — for a reported $18,000, then opened a livery in Sedalia, Missouri that he sold for $20,000 in 1907.

Frank returned to Poplar Bluff, and after acquiring George Begley's undertaking business in 1910 he formed the Frank Livery & Undertaking Company, operating from the opposite side of Vine Street at 419 Vine. In March 1911 that company bought the Malugen Brothers livery, returning Frank's firm to the barn he had built. He kept ownership of the building when he sold the operating livery to Dan Peterson on January 1, 1918, and in the summer of 1927 he restored the tornado-damaged Garner Motor Company building on this property as a two-story structure — the last chapter of his long involvement in the place he helped create.