The little shop on Section Street geared toward everything male has been a Fairhope fixture for a quarter century, but the story behind Riverbend — and the engraving operation in its back room — reaches back further than most customers realize, to ice plants and creameries, a movie theater that premiered “Gone With the Wind,” and a fire that nearly ended the business in a single November night.
Riverbend, at Section Street and De La Mare Avenue, is part men’s clothing and gift shop, part custom workshop. In the rear, East Bay Engraving turns out engraved, embossed, and embroidered work — awards, apparel, personalized gifts — for customers across the Eastern Shore. The retail and service sides feed each other, co-owner Morgan Slay says, and together they have carried the family business through 25 years and counting, several moves, and one very bad fire.
Roots in Fairhope’s founding families
The Slay family’s downtown pedigree runs deep. Morgan’s great-great-grandfather, Adolph O. Berglin, arrived in Fairhope in 1896, bought land where the airport sits today, and built one of the town’s founding fortunes — timber, banking, a seat on the original board of the First National Bank of Fairhope, and the executive council of the single-tax colony. He founded Berglin’s Creamery, widely credited as the first creamery in Alabama, served as the town’s first postmaster, and — as family history records — became Fairhope’s third mayor, serving from 1914 to 1916 in the era when the job was part-time and terms lasted two years, as the brick in front of the Fairhope Welcome Center attests.
The Berglin name was a fixture of downtown commerce for generations. A.O. Berglin’s Fairhope Ice and Creamery Company operated from the bayfront before moving to the corner of Fairhope Avenue and Bancroft Street, selling Azalea Brand ice cream and block ice to a town without home refrigeration; the family business ran until Barber Pure Milk bought it in 1961, closing the Fairhope operation in 1963. On his mother’s side, the Moyers ran one of Fairhope’s first pharmacies. The Slays even repurposed the marble countertop from the old Moyers drug store into a fixture in the current shop — a piece of downtown history you can still rest a gift box on.
From trophy shop to Riverbend
The business itself began with Morgan’s father, Warren Slay, who walked into a small trophy shop on the corner of Fairhope Avenue and Church Street — the building that housed the original Fairhope Theater, where “Gone With the Wind” played at its premiere era — and decided to buy it. He needed help with the technology of modern engraving, and his son, freshly back from earning a finance degree at the University of Alabama, joined up after a couple of years in banking convinced him the bank life was not for him.
The shop they renamed East Bay Engraving grew a retail personality along the way: sporting goods gave way to men’s gifts and apparel, with personalization as the signature. “Anything that can be personalized, we can do it,” Morgan says. “We do what we know. We know how to be men.”
The fire, and the rebuild
Then came November 19, 2010. An electrical fire destroyed the old Village Square building — a 95 percent loss, by Morgan’s reckoning, and the old saying about what the fire doesn’t get, the firemen do proved true. At the time, Morgan had an 18-month-old at home, a pregnant wife, and, suddenly, no job.
The recovery became the business’s defining chapter. East Bay Engraving was back in operation within three days, in a strip center on Fairhope Avenue near the post office. The next four years brought four moves, including a temporary stretch across from Ace Hardware. Salvation came from Vince and Lynn Boothe, who were planning a new three-unit retail building and offered the displaced family business the pick of the spaces. When Riverbend moved in — renamed for the Slay family farm on the Perdido River in north Baldwin County — it finally had a permanent home, and the Boothes earned a permanent place in the company’s story. “They stayed true to their word,” Morgan says, “and the space has been great.”
What’s in the store
Today Riverbend reads like a curated locker room: men’s apparel, gifts, gadgets, and a made-to-order side powered by an in-house graphics designer. The house brands of humor sell alongside the serious goods — the Jubilee shirt, the T-shirt with FAIRHOPE spelled backward (“It looks great in the mirror,” Morgan notes) — and the engraving, embossing, and embroidery operation handles everything from groomsmen gifts to team trophies.
The sports side has grown into a genuine second business: team jerseys, spirit wear, and awards for local schools and youth leagues, with the same turnaround discipline the engraving trade demands. “It doesn’t have the same meaning if the award isn’t available when the ceremony takes place,” Morgan says — a deadline philosophy that has earned the shop its role as the go-to for team sports orders in town.
The diversification is the survival strategy. When retail slows in January, back-to-school and team apparel pick up in August; when awards season runs, the engraving floor hums. “Our business is diversified,” Morgan says. “The retail side and the service side feed off of each other. We always have something to do.”
Fairhope’s downtown, and why it works
Morgan is quick to credit the ecosystem around him. Downtown Fairhope thrives, he argues, because the community supports its own — a civic habit that runs from the Tomato Lady to the Advice Ladies at Page & Palette to the shopkeepers who promote each other’s events. That eclectic spirit, he says, is what makes the town “unique and fun,” and it is also why a specialty men’s store with an engraving workshop in the back can survive — and grow — on Section Street for a quarter century.
His own engagement runs through local sports leagues, where he volunteers, and through the family farm north of town, where the business’s name was born. Between the store, the kids, and the community, the understated co-owner keeps the attention where he thinks it belongs — on the customer walking out the door with something that says exactly what they wanted it to say.
Riverbend is at Section Street and De La Mare Avenue in downtown Fairhope, with East Bay Engraving in the rear. Stop in for the men’s shop; stay for the story — or for the engraved gift that keeps the story going.