Old Missoula

First Woman Clerk in City – Mrs. J. L Chevigny (Angelina Menard)

Fifty years ago this month Missoula’s first woman store clerk came to Missoula. Unaccompanied, she left Montreal, Canada, Monday, April 23, and arrived here the following Saturday night. Her name was Angelina Menard. Today she lives at 411 West Pine street, her name being Mrs. J. L. Chevigny.

Her brother, Joe Menard, had come here five years earlier, in 1883, and was employed as an implement clerk in the Missoula Mercantile. C. H. McLeod, head of the firm, needed a woman clerk who could speak French – there were many new French settlers in Grass valley and the Frenchtown area. That was how Joe’s sister came from Montreal. When she entered the Mercantile company’s employ, she was the first woman clerk in the city. She started work May 1, 1888.

That was in the days when the placing of two planks along storefronts on North Higgins was a decided public improvement. Mrs. Chevigny recalls that there was just room for two persons to walk side-by-side on the walk.

Her first social event was the grand ball to celebrate the opening of the old Florence hotel. Jim Lister, later Missoula’s postmaster, took her to dinner.

Next year she was employed by the D. J. Hennessy company in the Higgins block. She has photographs which show that the block then looked much the same as it does now.

Eighteen ninety-one was a big year in Missoula’s history. Marcus Daly completed the construction of the old Donohue building at Higgins and West Main, recently torn down. The building was occupied by the Hennessy company. D. J. Donohue came up from the Bitter Root in 1896 and became owner of the store. Miss Menard had made such a record with the Hennessy people that they took her to Butte with them. In 1897 she married J. L. Chevigny, a Butte contractor, and three years later she returned to Missoula.

Mrs. Chevigny tells with great pride of having made sales totaling $1,500 in three days. The store manager kindly gave her a day off in recognition of her work.

Frank L. Darbee, 628 South Fourth street, west, is the only Hennessy store manager now surviving, so far as Mrs. Chevigny knows. “I think he was about the best manager the store ever had,” she declares.

A. J. King, now associated with the advertising department of The Missoulian, was a clerk at the Hennessy store when Mrs. Chevigny was there.

Mrs. Chevigny lives in an apartment here. Her daughter is in Butte and her son is in Los Angeles.

The above article appeared in The Sunday Missoulian on April 24, 1938.

A photograph of a young Angelina Menard also appeared with the above article.

Angelina Chevigny, 81, died in Butte, Mt. in June of 1945. She lived with her daughter, Mrs. Albert J. Boyle at that time. Her son Hector became a prominent writer of historical fiction and was a successful radio and TV scriptwriter.

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