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Hanka Homestead Exhibits Finnish Values
by Bill Lagerroos
This summer I was on vacation from life as I know it in Madison, Wisconsin. While driving towards Baraga on Route 41 in the upper peninsula of Michigan, I saw a sign that pointed me to a Finnish homestead - the Hanka Homestead. I stopped.
I knew that Hanka has wonderful credentials. It is a cooperating site for the Keweenaw Historic National Park and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The destination was six miles away on my map, and some of those would be over dirt roads. But dirt roads and history tally to more than distance. I would be going to a place set 80 years back in time. No way would I skip this voyage. I turned off the main highway.
As I drove I was treated to a healthy forest whose canopy was so dense that little light reached it’s floor. But that mood served merely as prelude. At the end of this road there was no longer just forest.
A brilliant sun now shone on an open field. Yes, there were trees all around it. More dense woods. So dense that this open field, had to have been woods transformed by people with a purpose.
Towards the end of the field, some two hundred yards away, stood at least eight wooden buildings. I parked, and walked towards them.
At first they seemed - to this 2003 visitor - variously scattered about. Why this one here, and this one there? And some were framed and boarded while others were of logs, fitting at the corners. I got partial answers to this question. With a little thought - and as I looked closer - I began to realize that people with a very practical bent designed these buildings.
As I neared the first I saw it was built over a stream, and when I looked through the window I saw that that floor boards were lifted and the stream bed was visible. Was something cooled here? There was a cream separator to the side. How about a milk house?
The next was a cinch. It was dug into the side of a depression in the ground and then mounded with dirt on the roof and along the exposed sides. This had to be a root cellar.
The third had two sections. It was a barn with a stable for animals on one side and a storage area for hay on the other. These two “rooms” were separated by a “drive-through” for the wagon after it was loaded with hay from the field. No hamburgers here, though. Nobody said during haytime “Welcome to ..., may I take your order”. Instead, people drove a wagon full of dusty, ticky hay to it and sweaty sticky bodies forked it to the barn.
Easily the best crafted structure was the main house. It is the one whose logs lie atop each other the most snugly and whose dovetailed corners fit the most tightly. It had a second story and glass windows were on both floors. Somebody wanted this building to be around for quite a while.
Again, I looked through a window. There was a loom, rag rugs, and a simple bed. The floor planks were of varying widths, so different than what we are used to on hardwood floors today. But it made sense. The builders, who obviously didn’t get their wood from a lumber store, didn’t need to make them of the same width. They felled the trees from the woods and took the planks as efficiently as possible from their round trunks.
A chimney rose from a wood stove. Here I had a question I couldn’t resolve on site. “How did they keep the house from overheating in the summer time?”
I include some answers even though they came to me later.
Mona Usimaki, a good friend of the Hanka site, spent some time asking folks who know the site about this question.
Here is what she found out:
“When you have a wood cook stove, you usually burn poplar in the summer. (You get) hot heat quickly and it burns fast so that it isn’t hot all day.
“I talked to an 80 year old lady last night about cooking on the wood stove. She said that they also had lots of canned meat that they just had to warm up in the summer time. Also they made a fire with just chips and lifted the lid on the stove and put the coffee pot on the hole to make coffee. Where there’s a will there’s a way I guess.”
The early occupants of Hanka were practical people and excellent crafters who knew their environment well. One could call them wonderful low-tech engineers. Look at how they approached problems involving heat flow for instance.
But there’s more.
I found myself wondering about a sense of values involved in the life style of those people who farmed this land starting in 1896. And I built a speculative illustration involving how at least some of us live now in the year 2003.
I started withthe values of thrift and frugality, and happiness.
Suppose the Hanka family, looking from the window in the main house, saw me approaching - with more unnecesary weight on me than I care for, with no callouses on my hands, with, not a puukko but a cell phone hanging from my belt, and wearing a blue and white cap that said “Happiness is Being Finnish”?
What would these hard working people think about the notion of happiness?
For them, was it rooted primarily in the completion of their work, or was ethnic identification part of it? Did they even have the time to wonder about it?
Would they look carefully, if not skeptically at just how practical my cap was? Would they wonder about what we consumers of such caps might define as happiness, or even being Finnish?
What could we learn from the Hanka residents that would inform our lives today?
For instance, would we learn that drying apples and curing onions, potatoes and other root products that would make the food which we eat today - and which so often comes from thousands of miles away - taste better?
Did the care the Hankas must have taken in order to stay alive, especially through winters months, generate frugality? In these days of credit card debt, is there something about this trait that can speak to us?
If the Hanka family and a family in the year 2003 were to switch places, which of the two would have been able to adapt to their new environment more easily?
Is there a point at which people can, or should, cut loose from the past, and just forget it? Obviously, I feel that there is too much of value in that which has gone before not to want to ferret it out.
An awful lot of what we Finnish Americans are about is rooted at this homestead. FinnFest 2005 will be held in Marquette, Michigan, about 70 miles away. As you meander Michigan’s upper peninsula, before, during or after the Fest, I hope you make this place - which was once a home - a priority stop and find out what it might mean to you.
(Help putting this article together came from three people who generously spent time answering my questions: Mona Usimaki, a friend of the Homestead, Reino Lahti, president of the Hanka Board, and Milton Salo, who acted as guide on a subsequent visit and provided much information. I’ve also referred to Askel Means Step, a book of both history and wonderment about the homestead and the surrounding area by Gene Meier, 1983. It was printed by the L’Anse Sentinel. The cost is $10 plus $1.50 shipping from: Hanka Homestead, P. O. Box 58, Pelkie, MI 49958.)All of Bill Lagerroos’ grandparents were born in Finland, and he is grateful for having been dragged to many Finn Hall programs. Figuring out the good stuff of the Finnish American tradition is important to him now. Bill is retired from the U of Wisconsin, Madison, where he was a software developer.
