Students connect with West Paris’ founding Finns

LETTERS TO THE HOMELAND — Students in Theresa
Koskela‘s fifth-grade class at Agnes Gray Elementary School,
 including (L to R) Prentiss Kurtz, Kate Wilson, Taye Brown
and Matt Hankey, craft letters to pen pals in Kuhmo, Finland,
 from which many West Paris families emigrated.

WEST PARIS — At Agnes Gray Elementary School, in West Paris, students in Theresa Koskela’s fifth-grade class are connecting with cousins many didn’t even know they had.

On a recent Friday morning, while sitting at desks, curled in corners and sprawled on the floor, Koskela’s students worked to craft letters to students their age at the Kontio Katu 2 School, in Kuhmo, Finland. 

However, this project is quite unlike the typical transatlantic extension of friendship. 

That’s because the small village of Kuhmo, in eastern Finland near the Russian border, is where many West Paris families emigrated from, at the start of the 20th century. 

What started with a single immigrant in the late 1890s grew by 1910 to more than 400 people.  Before the next decade was out, one could drive down most any road in West Paris and find every farm there sporting a Finnish name. 

By the second and third generation, the Finns had largely assimilated into the community, and spread across the region.  Still, almost any native of West Paris today can still trace at least one branch of his or her family tree to Finland, and the region around Kuhmo.

The founding hobo 

Old timers in West Paris still swear to a story which may not be true, but should be. 

In the late 19th century, rural Finland was largely divided into four classes — the farmers, who owned their own land, the tenant farmers, who rented and cultivated that land, the cottagers, who paid rent to live on the land but had to hire themselves out as laborers to eek out a living, and the vagrants, who simply did the best they could.

Most of those who left the homeland for greater opportunity in America were the younger sons and daughters of the tenant and cottager classes.  For $32 they’d get third-class passage to Hull, England, and from there, they’d make their way to Dominion Line ships in either South Hampton or Liverpool.  Those who traveled to the states from South Hampton became part of the great mass of humanity filtered through Ellis Island.  However, those who departed from Liverpool might step off the board anywhere from Boston to Montreal, including ports in Portland, Halifax and Quebec.

One of those who appears to have wound up in Canada was Jacob Mikkonen, who quickly anglicized his surname to McKeen.

Although most Finnish immigrants at the time were young men, McKeen was in his 40s and left behind a wife he reportedly never saw again. 

As the oral account goes, McKeen could find no work in Canada, and so hopped a train heading south.  Somewhere between West Paris and South Paris, he was discovered and summarily tossed out the boxcar door.

As he walked along High Street, McKeen is said to have spotted a farm — in the area of the railroad crossing, near where Paris Elementary is today — with a large pile of unsplit wood in the front yard.  McKeen walked up and went to work on the pile, in hopes someone would repay him with a meal.

As luck would have it, the owners of that far gave that and more, including a job and regular board.  Before long, McKeen had a farm of his own on High Street — the one currently owned by SAD 17 director Nick DiConzo.

McKeen started a family — it’s not certain whether his first wife was still alive when he remarried — and eventually saw a son elected to the Maine legislature.  He was established long before that, however, and soon began sending for relatives.

According to Dale Piirainen, a director of West Paris’ Finnish-American Society, the 1900 census lists 13 people in Paris (West Paris did not become a separate town until 1957) who “self-identified” as Finns.  All but two, say Piirainen, were close relatives of McKeen.

Those first 13 sent for more relatives — you had to have a sponsor to emigrate in those days — who then sent for more.  Some stayed just long enough to earn a pile before returning to buy property in the homeland and join the higher social strata.  However, many stayed, and, by 1910, Paris had 423 Finns, largely concentrated in what is now West Paris.

Becoming one people

The Finns assimilated quickly into Western Maine culture.  Although they kept to themselves to a certain extent, establishing their own churches and cemeteries and stores — the West Paris General Store originally was a co-op owned by Finnish farmers — they took pains to fit it.  Many even went so far as to adopt family names found in the area. 

Thus, in some cases, Komulainens became Cummings, Pyykkonens became Pikes and Hytonens became Whitmans.

The Finns had a couple of advantages which eased their assimilation.  For one, industrialization in the decades after the Civil War had led to a mass westward expansion.  Many locals, unable to compete, gave up the ghost and headed for cities in search of work.

Many local properties fell into disrepair and property values plummeted.  However, the Finns were willing to buy up the farms that remained, and work the rock-strewn fields.

“Not all of them were able to hold on to those farms,” says Piirainen, “but a lot of them did, especially those who had a lot of kids, because kids meant more hands to work the farm.”

Secondly, the Finns, in temperament, frugality and general sobriety, were not so very unlike the Yankees they mixed with.

“They were honest, they worked hard, they paid their debts,” says Piirainen, citing magazine articles of the day which praised the Finnish work ethic.  “Essentially, they got along well with the local folks.”

And while the first generation Finns tended to marry among themselves, the second generation, by and large, found their mates among the local stock.

“I think this is common of second-generation folks of whatever ethnicity,” says Piirainen.  “They see their key for advancement in becoming  as ‘American’ as they can, as quickly as they can.”

Koskela, who married into a Finnish family agrees, pointing out that suppression on Finnish culture often came at the hands of the Finns themselves.

“When my in-laws were growing up, Finnish was the first language in the home, but when they went to school they were not allowed to speak Finnish,” she says.  “They had to learn English, because their parents wanted them to be American.”

Piirainen notes just how quickly a culture can fade.  His grandmother, he says, spoke very little English.  Just two generations later, Piirainen can’t speak a word of Finnish.

“The third generation tends to wonder, who am I?” he says.

Preserving a heritage

By the early 1980s, the second-generation Finns could see in their children that much of their ancestral culture was being lost.  In 1982, a group of those children of the original settlers founded the Finnish American Society of Maine, eventually opening a museum at 8 Maple Street.

“What it really was, was a chance for those folks who, at that time, were in their 50s and 60s, to sit around and reminisce about what it was like when they were kids and to talk about their parents and to talk about what they knew about the old country,” says Piirainen.

For many years, that simple goal was enough.  However, now that its founders are in their 70s and 80s, the mission of the Finn-Am Society has shifted somewhat.

“They’re going fast,” says Piirainen, referring to his parents' generation, the sons and daughters of the original wave of immigrants. 

“The challenge for the organization is to transform it from what it originally was into something that can be relevant for third, fourth and fifth generation Finns,” says Piirainen. 

In an effort to “drag it kicking and screaming into the 21st century, Piirainen recently helped launch and effort to get the Finn-Am Society on the internet.  His daughter, Melanie Peloke build a website (www.mainefinns.org) from her Virginia home.

It was while researching topics for a kids' page for that site that Peloke got in touch with a Piirainen cousin, Marja-Leena Kempman in Khumo, Finland.

Noting that, “we’re as close as second cousins can be,” Piirainen says his family has bunked with the Kempmans while visiting the old country.  Although they’ve never met, Kempman and Peloke collaborated on the page. 

It was then that Kempman came up with an idea.

From Finland, with love

By the time students get to Kempman’s class at the Kontio Katu 2 School, in Kuhmo, Finland, they’ve been studying English for three years.  It was Kempman’s suggestion that her students launch a pen-pal initiative with their counterparts at Agnes Gray Elementary.

According to Agnes Gray principal Melanie Ellsworth, Kempman wanted to exchange letters the old-fashioned way, rather than over the internet, in part so her students could practice their English skills.

The letters left Finland in December and arrived in West Paris in late January.  There they were read aloud in Koskela’s class and assigned at random, with predictable results.

“We switched, like, three times,” said Prentiss Kurtz, who traded for a letter-writer who professed to be a fan of Hannah Montana, as she is.

“They have lots of stuff in common with us,” said Matt Hankey, noting references in the Finnish letter to The Simpsons, ice cream and hip-hop music, as well as Hannah Montana.

“Mostly they are all the same as us, with just little differences,” agreed Tye Brown.  “I thought they’d be more Finnish — be more like things we don’t know about.”

  

Almost universally, Koskela’s students cited excitement over the letter-exchange, particularly with the knowledge that they’d be help students their own age practice English skills.

The pen-pal program is a literacy project for the local students as well.  Each one drafted a letter in the daily journals Koskela has them keep, before transferring a final draft to stationary.

Noting the broken English employed by some of the Finns in their printed letters, Koskela’s students questioned whether their counterparts would be able to read letters returned in handwriting.  However, at least one, Logan Bru, found a way around that problem.

“I’m doing my letter in print for two reasons,” he announced. “One, I don’t think they’ll be able to read cursive, and two, I can’t really do cursive.”

Like Bru, about 20 percent of Koskela’s class can trace their family trees to Finland.  However, Piirainen notes, those are mostly just the ones with Finnish surnames.  Going back five generations to when their ancestors crossed the pond, each child can point to 32 forebearers.  Any one of those 32 might have come from Finland, with the passage lost to history. 

Still, even those students like Isaac Liimatta, who sat down with his grandfather and a Finnish dictionary to collect words for his peers to use in return greetings, rarely identify themselves as Finns.

“That’s to be expected,” says Piirainen.  “We’re talking about kids who are maybe one-eighth or one-sixteenth Finnish.  All I’m interested in doing is providing an outlet for those who are curious about their origins.”

The letter-writing, says Koskela, is doing much to foster that curiosity, even among the non-Finns in her class. 

When asked what they were asking of their pen pals, Koskela’s students expressed curiosity about what subjects Finns study in school, whether their houses are built differently than those in Maine, and — not surprisingly for the times — what they use for a monetary system.

“They didn’t write that much, but we’re writing a lot — like, three pages,” said Emma Files.

Local students also are quite curious to learn about “Finnish baseball,” which several students mentioned in the first batch of letters.

“I want to know if there is a difference or not [between Finnish and American baseball] and, if there is, I want to learn how to play it,” said Hankey.

Still, as Piirainen predicts, many local students have lost touch with their Finnish heritage.  Asked what they survives in their family, Liimatta and Ben Rainey could cite only nisu bread — a Christmastime tradition — and the fact that both refer to their grandmothers as “mu-mu.”

However, that revelation seemed to strike Dustin Henderson, also of Finnish extraction, as exceedingly odd.

“To me, a moo-moo is a cow,” he said.

Ellsworth notes that in addition to cultural understanding, the pen-pal program is extremely useful, educationally, on a number of levels.  It helps students on both sides of the Atlantic with literacy skills, as well as geography — many of Koskela’s students  found Finland on a globe for the first time.

“The cross-communication uncovers a lot of things they might not normally have talked about,” she explains. “It touches on a lot of bases.”

One unexpected learning opportunity, for example, is botany.

One of Koskela’s students knew Khumo is cold, having learned that it is less than 200 miles from the Arctic Circle.  However, when asked to describe what else he knew about Finland the student appeared to grasp onto the most foreign concept he could muster

“I think they might have different trees,” he said, “maybe ones like in Hawaii.”

Continued communication

Koskela and Ellsworth plan to continue the cross-continent communication for the rest of the year, and hopefully longer.  It is not out of the question, Ellsworth said, that Agnes Gray might adopt Kontio Katu 2 as a sister school, much as SAD 17 as a whole has done with the China's Zhejiang Normal University Middle School.

“We are quite isolated here in Maine,” says Ellsworth.  “There isn’t much diversity.  So, for our students to realize there are immigrant families who lived here, and still do live here, and that they also came from immigrants, it may help them to appreciate different peoples.”

Piirainen cites the Soliamis in Lewiston, as just one bridge that can be built by a little understanding.

“They don’t get that many opportunities to travel and experience many things outside their immediate surroundings,” said Piirainen, of local students.  “I think this sort of thing gives them an interest in what goes on beyond West Paris, or Oxford County.  It’s just a chance to help them broaden their horizon just a little bit.”

Piirainen began to get serious about his ancestry after retiring from the Navy, when he  followed his family to West Paris.  Before that, he spent much of his life in Southern Maine.

West Paris children, he hopes, may get a boost on life by questioning their heritage at an early age. 

“Who knows what can happen,” says Piirainen. “If you can light that spark under just one kid, to get them to think, hey it’s big world out there, and I need to learn about it." 

Certainly, Koskela’s class does not seem to lack for curiosity. 

Later this year, she plans a trip to the Finn-Am museum in town, as well as an in-class demonstration of the kantele, the lap-harp known as the “national instrument” of Finland.

However, with Finnish language-classes unlikely, Tye Brown is looking for other ways to learn new words.  In his letter, he says, he’s asking his pen pal to write back with identical letters in each tongue.

By using the English version as a sort of Rosetta stone, Brown hopes to uncover the meaning of more Finnish words, supplementing the list his classmate, Liimatta, put on the chalkboard.

“I only hope that they continue to demonstrate the curiosity that they have to date,” Piirainen says of Koskela’s class, “and I hope they get the opportunity to meet some of these [Finnish] kids.  I really do.”

Piirainen’s not alone in that wish.  Although they’ve written about how small West Paris is, compared to Kuhmo (pop. 10,000), some of the students are hatching plans that won’t come cheap, including an in-person visit.

“That,” says Files, “would be the best field trip, ever.”