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Immigration trends threaten ethnic status quo

As the number of mining companies along the Lake Superior copper region increased in the latter part of the 19th century, so too did the number of immigrant workers coming to the region from eastern Europe. At the same time, new technology was being introduced, particularly underground. While the ethnic composition of the workforce was changing, so too was the way mining was done.

Most of the immigrants coming into the region were not miners, but farmers and small businessmen. What began as a trickle in the 1860s, when the first Finns were recruited to work at the Quincy Mine in 1864, became a flood just 20 years later. The first Finns were miners recruited from the mines in Sweden.

The Quincy Mining Company took a gamble in its attempt to alleviate its labor shortage, caused by the Civil War along with the opening of many mines, creating the shortage. In the spring of 1864, the company sent one of its office workers to Sweden 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 the workers. His name was Christian Taftes and he was an immigrant from the Tornio River Valley of Sweden. 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.

In the following decades, however, Finnish immigration increased dramatically as more and more people felt compelled to leave their homeland rather than continue to endure the economic, religious and political turmoil going on in eastern Europe and Scandinavia.

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 time-consuming. 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.

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.

Like the Swedes before them, the Finns found that while mining companies wanted their labor, they did not want them around. 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.”

What few, if any, in the Lake Superior region understood, or maybe cared to, was that while culture and language separated the Finns from the Cornish, Germans and particularly the Irish, the Finns had more in common with the Irish than not. The treatment of Irish by the British Crown was not much different than what the Finns experienced at the hands of the Russians.

For centuries, Sweden had ruled Finland. But early in 1808, Napoleon, in his quest to conquer Europe, tried to persuade the Swedish to participate in a blockade against England, wrote Walfrid John Jokinen in his dissertation titled “The Finns in the United States: a Sociological Interpretation,” a graduate-level dissertation, written in 1955. When Sweden refused, Napoleon met with Tsar Alexander I of Russia, inducing him to declare war on Sweden. In the fall of 1808, Sweden was forced to surrender Finland to Russia, Jokinen wrote. Alexander declared that Finland was now an autonomous Grand Duchy, but affairs to were to be managed by the Swedish-Finnish upper classes. This, of course, caused a rift between the Finns and the Swiss minority in Finland.

In the meantime labor issues in Vaasa began in consequence of the decline of the wooden ship-building industry as advancements in technology brought about steel-hulled ships. This also started a decline in the industry of tarring wooden ship hulls along the Bothnian coast.

Alexander, sadly, knew almost nothing about Finland. In fact, when he forced the country’s surrender, the Tsar thought Finland was a duchy of Sweden. Finland, however, had not been singled out. While Russia was subjecting the Finns to a Russification program, between 1876 to 1905, the Ukraine suffered under similar programs. Famines in the northern region became common, while in the southern regions, farmland became more and more limited as sons who married remained to work a share of their inheritance, even before the father and mother died. In many instances, people had no choice to but emigrate. The main concern was where could they go?

Graham Jaehnig has a BA of Social Science/History from Michigan Technological University, and an MA in English/Creative Nonfiction Writing from Southern New Hampshire University. He is internationally known for his writing on Cornish immigration to the United States mining districts.

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