One early photo owned by Minot photographer Wayne Johnson shows the flooded Broadway bridge and water over the roadway back in 1923. It is a sight that is all too familiar to Minot residents – including those who weren’t born in 1923 – who have experienced subsequent flooding of the Souris River.

There were other floods in the 1920s, and many people still remember the flood of 1969 and, of course, the devastating Souris River flood of 2011.

But Broadway has seen more than flooding over its years of existence.

Ben Tollefson, lifelong Minot resident and former state legislator from Minot, said he well remembers some of the changes in landscape that occurred on the roadway long before it was even called Broadway.

Submitted Photo ABOVE: The bridge that is now called the Broadway Bridge flooded in 1923.

“That was not Broadway,” said Tollefson. “It was Second Street (west).”

The roadway, the major north-south route through the city of Minot, did not become known as Broadway until some time after Tollefson’s youth. It is also U.S Highway 83.

In the early years, the main activity on the thoroughfare was in the northern part of town, not the south half as it is today, said Tollefson.

The farthest store to the south was Swenson’s Furniture. The landscape past that was largely farmland.

Some mainstays on Broadway still stand, but they have different inhabitants these days.

For instance, Tollefson said today’s Tractor Supply store at 1325 South Broadway used to be a Red Owl grocery store.

The Town and Country Shopping Center on Broadway was the first big shopping center for this part of the state.

It, too, housed a number of different businesses before it became largely a medical complex for Trinity Health.

The Trinity CancerCare Center in Town and Country was the site of a Piggly Wiggly grocery store as recently as the early 1980s. The mall was also home to the B. Dalton Bookseller and an ice cream shop at one time. The mall was built in 1963 and was called the biggest shopping center in North Dakota. Tollefson said the mall was built by the Westlie family.

Scheels, now located at Dakota Square Mall, once occupied a building at the corner of Burdick and Broadway. According to the blog entry by David Lehner at minotmemories.com, the building was formerly the home of Ace Hardware. It was a grocery store before that. Now it is occupied by a mattress store.

Tollefson remembers a big Texaco station near Minot State University, which is off Broadway.

“Down from that was the Nifty Nook,” said Tollefson. “He made the best hamburgers in town.”

He also well remembers the Service Drug on North Broadway where his family used to go for treats at the soda fountain after church.

“At that time there were quite a few residences on Broadway yet,” said Tollefson. One local doctor had a clinic in his house on Broadway.

“Broadway also had a lot of auto dealers,” said Tollefson, recalling Hugh Nelson Motors and Frosaker Motors, a big Chevrolet dealer that was located at Broadway and First Avenue.

Before World War II, when Tollefson was growing up, he said there were a lot of families that had small neighborhood grocery stores, some in walking distance of where he grew up.

One grocery was owned by the Maragos family, across the street to the south of where Sammy’s Pizza is located now. Tollefson said George Maragos Sr. had three grocery stores at one time.

Tollefson said the flood of 1969 caused some stores to move. For instance, he said Mowbray and Sons Plumbing and Heating used to be located at the bottom of the viaduct going south and had to move after the flood.