At a time when the established, producing mining companies could least afford it, the copper region was experiencing a labor shortage. Just when more men were needed, too few were available. The Civil War had created a sudden demand for minerals, copper among them, and throughout the copper region, new mines began springing up like weeds. While the population of the region did not decline, the increased number of start-up mines drew labor from the producing mines; there was more mining than there was miners.

The Quincy Mining Company, just north of Hancock on Portage Lake, took a gamble in its attempt to alleviate its labor shortage. In the spring of 1864, the company sent one of its office workers to Norway to recruit skilled laborers from the mining districts in that country. It was probably this office employee who had come up with idea of recruiting Norwegian workers. His name was Christian Taftes and he was an immigrant from the Tornio River Valley of Norway; he spoke both Swedish and Finn fluently and he knew the mining districts there.

A few months later, over 100 of Taftes’ recruits arrived in Hancock. Most of them were Norwegians from the Kaafjord and Alten mines of Finmarken and Tornio. Among the Norwegian recruits were a few Swedes, but also a few Finns, and these were the vanguard of thousands of Finns that would soon follow.

Finland had been under Swedish rule for hundreds of years before being acquired by Russia in 1809. While labor issues in Vaasa occurred, the wooden ship building industry was collapsing as advancements in ship-building technology brought about steel-hulled ships. While employment and economic situations declined in Finland, a famine that began in 1862, and lasted for six years, was met with increasing oppression from Russia, which was beginning to implement the Russiification of the country. It was under these circumstances that letters arriving from Michigan began to give hope to people who had long run out of it.

From those first Finns who had arrived at the dock in Hancock as part of Taftes’s Norwegian recruitment effort, letters home discussed an abundance of work at good wages, the varieties of fish and game, and even of possibilities of free homestead land. Michigan sounded very good to a people most of whom had known little other than poverty, famine, and increasing Russian oppression.

The earlier arriving Finns had spoken from the perspective of skilled laborers, however. Having come from Norway and northern Sweden, they were experienced miners and mine workers when they wrote those letters home, they had not stopped to consider that their relatives in Finland lacked those mining skills so sought by the Michigan copper and iron mines.

The later Finns who arrived met with distinct disadvantages not mentioned in letters home. The Finnish language was unlike those of Europe, which shared at least some commonalities. The Finns found learning the English language difficult and slow to learn. Such a language barrier caused mining companies to relegate Finns to the lowest skill-level jobs that did not require an abundance of communication. That they were hired for unskilled labor was also due to that Finland was largely an agrarian country, and the new immigrants were not familiar with industrial work, and knew even less about hard rock, deep-shaft copper mining.

Just as Quincy had constructed Swedetown in an isolated location some two or there miles from the mine site, in 1900 the company did the same when it platted what it called the “Quincy Hillside Addition.” Located between the mine site and the village of Hancock, the hillside addition consisted of substandard houses built on a steep and rocky hillside, on land considered otherwise useless. Quincy Mining Company’s ethnic neighborhoods such as Limerick, Frenchtown and Hardscrabble, consisted of frame houses arranged in neat clusters that included streets. Quincy Hillside Addition, as writer Gary Kaunonen described it was, “a haphazard collection of houses, barns, and hovels along winding dirt lanes.” The hillside addition could be viewed as a statement by the mining company. Situated between the mine and the village, Finnish immigrants were placed between the two, yet remained apart – for now.

When the Finns arrived, they found people from Cornwall, Ireland, Germany, Wales, and the United States already here. These groups were already established in the district. The Finns, however, began to find themselves locked out, separated partially by language barriers and cultural dissimilarities, as well as religious differences. Some Finns, dissatisfied with the New World and unwilling to learn new ways and language, simply gave up after a brief time and returned to “the old country.” Many more stayed, though and their presence would soon make a marked difference in the culture of the districts.

Editor’s note:?Graham Jaehnig can be reached at gjaehnig@mininggazette.com