Robert S. Bridgman moved to Poteau from Hackett, Arkansas, in the fall of 1896 at age 38, and soon bought a moderate one-and-a-half-story building off Railroad Avenue, known today as Broadway, while also acquiring the Poteau Journal that same year. Along the dirt road beside the Frisco Railroad tracks, he established Bridgman's Furniture in 1896, using the first floor as the store and the half second floor for his printing press. The first building measured 24 feet wide by 32 feet deep and provided almost 800 square feet of sales space, giving Poteau residents one of the finest furniture stores in eastern Indian Territory. According to local sources, the store moved in 1927 from its old location to 104 Dewey Avenue, where it remains today, although it may have been there as early as 1902, the first year the Bridgman Building appears on old maps labeled “Hardware, Furniture, and Undertaker.” In the early 1900s, furniture stores commonly also served as local undertakers because furniture was typically made in house from local wood and supplies, making it practical to build caskets in the same location, but by 1909 only the furniture store remained. For more than one hundred years, the Bridgman family remained a solid pillar of Poteau's success.