In 1881, a 19-year-old Louis Shodair stepped off a stagecoach in Helena, a small mining community only two years older than him.
He arrived with his mother, widowed when Louis was 8, to care for her ill sister. Later the same year the Shodairs moved to Butte and started The Butte Candy Factory.
“Louis Shodair has a new and improved method of making ice cream, which he is serving to his many customers,” The Butte Miner trumpeted in 1886.
Read more from the Billings Gazette here...