A lot can change in 1,470 miles.
The landscape is different, as is the air density and the color of the sky.
Thirty to 40 years will also change a lot of things.
Businesses that once powered an economy will be different, as will the way children are raised.
And what are the chances that two people who grew up in the same town, but traveled 1,470 miles away would end up meeting each other decades later in the small town of Mahomet, Ill.?
This is how the story of the friendship between Brooks Marsh and Jessie DeHaan begins.
The Montana natives did not know each other as they grew up, but their stories led to their meeting in the Sandy Ridge Subdivision in the early 2000’s.
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DeHaan is a descendant of the Mitchell family, who owned the historic Ayrshire Dairy in Great Falls, Mont.
“My great grandfather started the dairy farm back in 1906,” DeHaan said. “He began milking cows in ‘08.”
“He had an ice cream shop in town, and he wanted to make the milk for the ice cream shop,” she continued. “That’s how it all started.”
Ayrshire Dairy used a mule and a wagon to bring their product to restaurants and grocery stores in Great Falls through the 50’s and 60’s. The milk processing part of the business was sold in the 1970’s. The milk was still bottled at the dairy until the late 1980’s when the operation shut down.
“The farm is still there, but it’s not anything like it used to be,” DeHaan said.
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Growing up in the most desolate part of Montana, near the Canadian border, Marsh moved to Great Falls in the fourth grade after his parents were divorced.
His family grew timothy, alfalfa and multing barleaf, which was sold to Coors, but primarily farmed hay. The ranch had close to 2,000 cattle and 400 sheep at its peak.
“You’d graze cattle in the field, then you could graze sheep behind cattle,” Marsh said. “But over the years, we had everything: We had turkeys for a while.”
The Marsh family also had pigs.
“My brothers convinced me when I was little that it was cool to be able to deliver all the baby pigs overnight, so that was my job,” he said.
“Pigs pretty much birth themselves, but you have to cut their little pin teeth off so that they don’t hurt mama.”
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Eight years older than DeHaan, Marsh never went to school with her, but he believes some of his younger brothers may have.
“We were 400-500 kids in a class,” DeHaan said. “You didn’t know everybody like you do in Mahomet.”
But almost every student in the Great Falls area knew Ayrshire Dairy.
Each year, kindergarten students visited the farm to watch the cows be milked, and see it bottled before they got a half-pint of chocolate milk to drink with their lunch on the playground.
“To this day the kids, who are adults now, talk about going there as a kid,” DeHaan said.
In 2017, the barns, which held all of the memories for those students, were deconstructed to be repurposed for flooring, interior paneling and furniture, according to the Great Falls Tribune (Aug. 4, 2017).
Before Montana Rustic Lumber came out to pull the barns apart, the Mitchell family cleaned the signage and marketing materials out of the facilities.
“We posted an open house,” DeHaan said. “All the people came out in the community to share stories.
“We employed a lot of the people in the plant area, either processing or hauling milk to town. A lot of those children and grandchildren came to tell stories of their memories.”
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While Marsh was too old to go through the dairy tour by the time he moved to Great Falls, he still remembers the product, and even carried a Ayrshire Dairy milk bottle with him 1,470 miles away to his home in Mahomet.
Stuffed with baby bottle brushes, the milk bottle that stood on the Marsh’s counter when the DeHaan family brought food over to greet them as they moved into their new home in Sandy Ridge in the early 2000’s, grabbed DeHaan’s attention.
“(Jessie) said, ‘That’s my dad’s farm!” Marsh recalls.
“The first thing I said was, ‘I didn’t steal it!’
“I instantly felt somehow guilty,” he continued.
But DeHaan had already been told by another neighbor that someone in the Marsh family might be from Great Falls.
And like the few other times in her life when she met someone from Montana, she felt like she might know Brooks.
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“When you go out away from Montana, you hear someone is from Montana, you automatically think, ‘Well, I’m going to know them.’
“And half the time you might.”
Prior to moving to Mahomet with her husband in the 1990’s, DeHaan spent one year of school away from home in Wisconsin.
Wearing a Montana State jacket to a concert, DeHaan was stopped by a man who asked if she grew up there.
“And I was like, ‘Yeah.’
“He said, ‘Do you know Harry Mitchell?’
“And I was like, ‘That’s my dad.’”
DeHaan and Marsh admit that they even look at the numbers on Montana license plates to see where the owner of the vehicle is from.
“The first two numbers are the county,” DeHaan said. “Any time I see a car out here from Montana, I look to see where it’s from because you think you’re going to know them.”
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Marsh, who has been in the grocery store business for most of his life, spent the majority of his time as an adult traveling with SuperValu before landing in Champaign County.
He started in Great Falls, and then moved from Billings, Denver, Mississippi, Champaign, Minneapolis, Kenosha and back to Champaign before purchasing the Mahomet IGA and raising his family.
On a trip from Milwaukee through Montana on Highway 2, Marsh’s driving companion noticed that only three cars had passed in the 200 miles they drove.
The man asked what would happen if their car broke down.
“Those cars would have stopped,” Marsh said.
“People are more trusting.
“I’m happy to have had that beginning in Montana. It makes me more positive and trusting than I probably should be sometimes.”
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But the shared experiences are more than common faces.
“We never had a snow day,” Marsh said.
“If you couldn’t make it to school, you just didn’t go.”
Marsh also recalls missing school in the late summer months as the crops came time to harvest.
DeHaan and Marsh never took a family vacation as children. Instead, they spent their days making memories outside.
“You played in the streams and the mud; a mud fight was a good day,” Marsh said. “If my mom didn’t want us around, the horse would be all saddled. We’d be gone all day. We’d go down the little streams and swim in the holes in Canada. No one worried about anything.”
DeHaan’s farm ran on its own water system. A pond sat on the top of a hill on their property; and when the winter months rolled around, the overflow would freeze at the bottom of the hill.
“When we’d get all this snow, that was the coolest sledding hill,” she said.
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But it wasn’t until Marsh and DeHaan spent time outside of Montana that they realized why the state is known as the “Big Sky Country.”
“I never understood that,” Marsh said. “But the fact is if you go up to the Bear Tooth Highway, I would argue it’s one of the most beautiful views in the United States.
“The difference between that and other places where you go two miles up in the air, you don’t have other mountains around you, and you can see Spanish peaks, which is 180 miles away. It’s because there is no moisture in the air to reflect light.”
DeHaan said, “you cannot describe the color of blue.”
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With family still in the area, Marsh and DeHaan have been able to share parts of their childhood with their children.
DeHaan’s dad still lives on the farm, and her sister lives in her grandmother’s old house.
Marsh’s family still owns the ranch near the Canadian border.
After 9-11, the government came out to mark the Canadian border.
“The amazing thing is how close the fences were to being accurate. It was the late 1800’s when they put those fences up,” he said.
Marsh recalls a thrashing combine located on his family’s property that he used to pretend was a ship when he was little. The rusted machine still sits on the property; as his children were growing up, they pretended it was a spaceship.
Since moving from Montana, DeHaan has visited Yellowstone and Glacier National Park, which are just a few hours away from Great Falls. She said no matter where you live, there are always things you don’t do.
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But for Marsh and DeHaan, getting together 1,470 miles away from their childhood home is something they enjoy doing together.
“We love each other,” Brooks said.
