Former city folk love life in rural Eastern Montana

“God works in mysterious ways,” Terri Juliano said, as she explained her family’s decision to move from Delaware to eastern Montana.

Terri and her husband, Larry, wanted to escape the noise and rat race of the big cities and find a quiet, safe place for their four children: 14-year-old Joe, 13-year-old Tony, almost 12-year-old Ed and 10-year-old Sierra.

“We prayed for a good, quiet place and God brought us to Montana,” she said, adding, “We have no desire to go back.”

When they started looking for a more rural location, they were thinking some place like West Virginia but after research and prayer they felt led to Montana. When they typed in “Montana” on an Internet search engine, “Circle” was the first place to pop up. They came out to visit and loved it right away, she said.

After one or two days in Montana, the children told her she could go back home and pack up their things. They would stay in Circle with Larry, she added.

It didn’t take them long to discover they had definitely left the rat race behind. The house they bought was 13 miles north of Circle on a gravel road. Their nearest neighbor lived two miles away and they were seven miles from the highway. “It was kind of neat,” she said.

The 100 acres they had purchased sounded like a really big farm to them until they started talking to neighbors and discovered most of them owned thousands of acres, she added.

They wanted to fit into the community and not look like outsiders so they paid close attention to all the little details of life and tried to dress, speak and act like everyone else.

“We didn’t want to stand out, but we did anyway,” she noted.

One of their biggest challenges was getting used to Montana slang. Terms such as “jockey box” or “high centered,” left them puzzled. A “visit” to the doctor sounded really strange to them. When Terri took her vehicle into the garage, the mechanic made a comment about some problem with her “outfit” and she quickly looked at what she was wearing, trying to figure out what was wrong with it, she said.

It was also a surprise to discover how “everybody is related.” Her high school had 5,000 students. There were 1,000 in her graduating class and one church they attended had a membership of 6,000. “We were used to a lot of people,” she said.

Classrooms in public schools in the East often had 60 students to one teacher, so Terri had started home schooling their children and decided to continue that in Montana. When she called a home school contact person in Bloomfield to talk about joining a local home school group, she was taken aback to receive a dinner invitation, she said.

Her first response was to say, “No, thanks,” but then she thought again and realized this was part of the friendliness and sense of community in eastern Montana. She accepted and the dinner invitation led to a great friendship. The Bloomfield couple have become real mentors for them, she said.

Neither Terri nor Larry had any farm experience before their move to eastern Montana. They had been involved in real estate, buying houses, renovating them and reselling them. When they started buying houses they hired contractors to do the renovation, but worked alongside them so they could learn the skills they needed to do the work themselves, she said.

They brought that same willingness to learn new skills to their life in Montana. When they moved to the farm in Circle a friend gave them six chickens. Terri enjoyed them so much she bought some more and then began selling eggs. Not everyone in Circle could remember her name, so she became known as the “Chicken Lady,” a title she has kept with their move to Glendive, she said.

In August 2007, the I-94 Trailer Park came up for sale and they decided to purchase it and move to Glendive. Larry assumes primary responsibility for the trailer park while Terri’s main interest is her chickens and goats.

When they bought the trailer park, they also bought a small house with a couple acres of land close to the trailer park. They named their place the “Hodgepodge Farm” because they have a hodgepodge collection of chickens.

Terri is not sure of the exact number, “They don’t stand still long enough to count,” but estimates she has about 100, she explained, adding that she would like to buy a larger place and build that number up to 400 if there is enough local demand for all natural eggs from pasture chickens.

Sierra is the “second in command” of the chickens. She feeds them, collects the five to seven dozen eggs they lay each day and goes with Terri on their Wednesday delivery route. Terri is a licensed egg grader and an inspector visits the farm for random checks, she said.

While she put out some flyers around town, most of her customers have found her by word-of-mouth, she added.

Along with the chickens, she has some Nigerian dwarf goats: two bucks, two does and four bucklings which she plans to sell as soon as they are weaned. She chose the miniature goats for their gentleness and their size.

“They are cute and fun,” she said.

The goats are all double registered pure breds. The does came from New Mexico and the bucks from California. They were flown into Billings where she picked them up at the airport, she said.

They are very affectionate and playful. When she sits on the ground, they crawl up on her lap. “I love them to death,” she said.

Eastern Montana is a different world from the home they left in Delaware. While there were many more people back East, their personal connections were often fairly superficial. Here she has learned to depend on people and establish strong relationships.

“I am definitely not the person who moved out here,” she observed, adding that she has no desire to go back East, even to visit friends.

By Cindy Mullet
Ranger-Review Staff Writer

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