Corner of Cedar and Stevens by Deane Jones
If you were to ask someone at random how to get to the corner of Cedar and Stevens streets, you’d probably get a blank stare or a bit of head-scratching depending on the vintage of the guy you asked.
If he’d been around here a dozen years or so ago, he could tell you where Stevens was, one block west of Higgins, before they changed the name to Ryman. That change was made because some people confused Stevens Street with Stephens Avenue, a major diagonal route on the South Side.
But if the guy you asked hadn’t been around more than 40 years, he probably couldn’t answer the Cedar bit. The present Cedar Street is only two or three blocks long angling off from Broadway about 11 blocks west of Higgins.
But up until 1928 Cedar Street was the main east-west route through Missoula, the present Broadway. Joseph M. Dixon, a power in Missoula politics, and in state and national politics as well, had considerable business interests on Cedar Street. When the Yellowstone Trail, Highway 10, was being improved in 1928, there was some talk of routing it up toward Spruce Street and along west near the Northern Pacific rail line. Dixon exerted his influence, got the name of Cedar Street changed to Broadway, and kept the Yellowstone Trail intact. Or so I’m told.
Anyway, the proper answer to the question of Cedar and Stevens would be Broadway and Ryman.
Louis Henes, in going through some storage space in the basement of the Bonanza store at Broadway and Ryman the other day, came across some old invoices and receipts, dated in 1919 from the McCullough Motor Co. and the Paxton Garage at Stevens and Cedar. He wanted to know a bit about their history. Well, that’s about it. McCullough Motors was quite an automotive landmark, and handled the Hupmobile among other makes. It occupied that location for years, and even after the Missoula Motors, with Joe and Les Bain, Fred Turmell and Don Moore at the wheel, took over at Cedar and Stevens, McCullough Motors was still listed there, renting the space to the firm. Massey McCullough and his father, Dr. G. T. McCullough, pioneered the firm.
So that should place the location rather definitely.
The above article appeared in The Missoulian on January 15, 1971
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