On a quiet bend of Scott Road, behind a low wooden function hall, a sauna sits waiting for steam. For more than a century the Finns in Fitchburg, Massachusetts have gathered here at Saima Park to bathe, sing, argue politics and bake pulla bread. The city’s mills are mostly silent now, but the Finnish thread woven through this old factory town has never quite snapped.
The Place
Fitchburg sits in north central Massachusetts, about fifty miles northwest of Boston, where the Nashua River once turned the wheels of paper mills, machine shops and textile works. The river dropped fast through a narrow valley, and that fall of water made the city an industrial powerhouse in the nineteenth century.
Heavy industry pulled in waves of European labour: Irish, Italian, German, English, Welsh, French Canadian and, by the 1890s, Finnish. Each group settled close to its own, and the neighbourhoods they built still carry traces of those origins.
The Finns clustered in the streets around Elm Street and Mechanic Street, a district that locals came to call Finn Town. It was here, among triple deckers and corner stores, that one of the most influential Finnish American communities in the eastern United States took root.
How It Became Finnish
The first arrivals
Finnish migration to America surged in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, driven by famine, land hunger and Russian pressure on Finnish autonomy. Many landed first in the mining and lumber country of the upper Midwest. A smaller stream turned east, towards the mills of New England.
Fitchburg’s factories needed hands, and Finnish men found work in the machine shops, foundries and paper mills. Women took jobs in domestic service and in the textile trade. By the 1890s there were enough Finns in the city to sustain their own institutions, in their own language.
In 1898 a group of these immigrants formed the Saima Society, named for Lake Saimaa in eastern Finland. It began as a simple social club, a place where newcomers who shared a language and a homeland could find one another in an unfamiliar country. The society met at Saima Hall, built in the early 1900s, and its athletic branch, Reipas, gave young Finns a gymnasium and a team.
A radical press is born
The Finns who came to Fitchburg arrived steeped in the labour politics of their homeland, and the city soon became a centre of Finnish American socialism. On the first day of 1905 a mass meeting of local socialists resolved to start a newspaper.
Weeks later, on 31 January 1905, the first issue of Raivaaja, meaning The Pioneer, rolled off the press at 164 Elm Street. Edited at the outset by Taavi Tainio, it became a mainstay of the Finnish Socialist Federation and, after 1906, of the Socialist Party of America.
The paper grew with the community. Its circulation climbed from about 2,000 copies in 1905 to a peak of 10,000 in 1927, reaching Finnish readers far beyond Fitchburg. It was the voice of a movement, and for decades it gave the city’s Finns a national stage.
The cooperative experiment
Politics on the page found a practical echo on the shop floor. Like Finnish communities across the Northeast, the Fitchburg Finns built cooperative stores, owned by their members and run for their benefit rather than for profit.
In 1919 six of the leading Finnish cooperatives in the region, including Fitchburg, Gardner, Worcester, Maynard, Quincy and Norwood, pooled their capital into the United Cooperative Society, a venture grand enough to be nicknamed the Million Dollar Cooperative. The Library of Congress holds photographs of its Fitchburg grocery store and warehouse, ordinary buildings made remarkable by who owned them.
The grand merger did not hold. Unstable post war prices and political splits among the socialists brought losses, and within a couple of years the central office in Boston closed and each store resumed its own affairs. Yet the cooperative habit endured locally for decades, a quiet expression of the Finnish belief that working people could organise their own economy.
A statesman in exile
The community’s most extraordinary member arrived as a fugitive. Oskari Tokoi, born in Kannus in 1873, had in 1917 become chairman of the Senate of Finland, making him the world’s first social democratic head of government.
When the Finnish Civil War turned against the left in 1918, Tokoi fled, travelling through Russia, England and Canada before reaching the United States in 1921. In Fitchburg he was briefly jailed as a suspected anarchist, and only after the Department of Labor cancelled his deportation warrant in April 1922 was he allowed to stay.
He settled into the life of the city’s Finns and became an editor at Raivaaja, the very paper born of their socialism. Tokoi lived out his years in north central Massachusetts and died in nearby Leominster in 1963. He is buried in Forest Hill Cemetery in Fitchburg, a former prime minister at rest in a New England mill town.
Parks, halls and the sauna
As the community prospered it acquired land. In 1912 the Saima Society bought a farm on the edge of the city, and by the early 1920s it had been renamed Saima Park and fitted with a new hall and stage for dances, plays and summer festivals.
In 1946 a younger, English speaking generation chartered the Finnish American Club of Saima, ninety one members strong, with a mission to preserve the Finnish culture their fathers had carried across the Atlantic. By 1947 the new club was managing the park, and in 1966 the old society deeded the property to it outright. A sauna was built on the grounds in 1957.
The Landmarks
Finnish Center at Saima Park, 67 Scott Road. The beating heart of Finnish Fitchburg. The current function house was completed in 1980, after a 1977 fire destroyed the old dance hall, and the grounds hold a sauna, a library and a small sauna museum. President Urho Kekkonen of Finland visited the park in 1970.
Raivaaja building, 164 Elm Street. For more than a century this Elm Street address was home to The Pioneer, the Finnish language socialist newspaper that gave the community a national voice. The paper printed its final issue in April 2009, undone by rising postage costs rather than by any failure of nerve.
Forest Hill Cemetery, Fitchburg. The resting place of Oskari Tokoi, the exiled Finnish statesman who edited Raivaaja. Few American cemeteries hold the grave of a foreign head of government, and fewer still in a city of this size.
The Sauna Museum at Saima Park, 67 Scott Road. Restored over nine years from neglect, the museum traces the development of the sauna through the centuries and displays Lappland art and Finnish made objects. It opens for National Sauna Week each February, a nod to the bathing tradition that once supported eight commercial sauna studios in the area.
Finn Town, around Elm and Mechanic Streets. The old immigrant quarter where the Finns first settled among the mills. The triple deckers and corner lots that once housed Finnish families, boarding houses and the cooperative grocery still stand, even as the language has faded from the streets.
Fitchburg State University, 160 Pearl Street. The university long hosted a Finnish Cultural Center, one of the three local organisations that merged in 1998 to form the Finnish Center at Saima Park. Its community orchestra still performs at the park’s summer festival.
Fitchburg Historical Society, 781 Main Street. Keeper of the city’s industrial and immigrant record, including the story of the Finns who built so much of its civic life. It is the place to begin tracing a Fitchburg ancestor through the census and city directories.
Where They Came From
The Fitchburg Finns came chiefly from Finland’s rural west and centre, the farming districts of Ostrobothnia and the lake country to the east, regions that sent emigrants in great numbers between the 1880s and the 1920s. Oskari Tokoi’s birthplace, Kannus, sat in just this western farming belt.
They left a homeland squeezed by poor harvests, scarce land and the long shadow of Russian rule over the Grand Duchy of Finland. America offered wages, and the chain pulled tight: a brother already in the mills would write home, and a cousin would follow, settling on the same Elm Street block.
What they carried was not only labour but a worldview. The cooperative store, the temperance hall, the workers’ newspaper and the sauna all crossed the Atlantic intact, and in Fitchburg they were rebuilt in miniature, a Finnish society reassembled in a Massachusetts valley.
Fitchburg Today
The mills that drew the Finns have largely closed, and the city has weathered the long decline that hollowed out so much of industrial New England. Recent census estimates count around 671 residents of Finnish ancestry in Fitchburg, among the largest such populations of any city in Massachusetts.
The visible signs are fewer than they were. Raivaaja stopped printing in 2009, and of the eight sauna studios that once served the area, the commercial trade has all but vanished. The Finnish language is now mostly the preserve of the elderly and the enthusiast.
Yet Saima Park endures, and around it the culture keeps its rhythm. The Kesajuhla summer festival each June brings folk dancers, a chicken barbecue and the smell of Finnish bread to Scott Road. There are pannukakku pancake breakfasts, a St Urho’s Day celebration and a Sauna Week that opens the museum doors. It is a smaller world than the one the immigrants built, but it is unmistakably, stubbornly Finnish.
Across the wider Finnish American story, Fitchburg is part of a constellation. Its families share roots with the Finns who made their homes in Astoria, Oregon, in the copper country of Hancock, Michigan, and in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, as well as the snowbird community in Lake Worth Beach, Florida. Within Massachusetts, its immigrant story rhymes with that of the French Canadians in Lowell and the Irish in Milton, other groups who turned mill work into community.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Finns settle in Fitchburg, Massachusetts?
The Finns in Fitchburg, Massachusetts came in the 1890s for work in the city’s paper mills, foundries and machine shops. The Nashua River had made Fitchburg an industrial centre, and its factories drew immigrant labour from across Europe, including a large Finnish contingent that settled around Elm and Mechanic Streets.
What is Saima Park?
Saima Park is the home of the Finnish Center at Saima Park, the hub of Finnish life in Fitchburg at 67 Scott Road. It grew from a farm bought by the Saima Society in 1912, and today it holds a function hall, a sauna, a library and a sauna museum, hosting summer festivals and cultural events.
Who was Oskari Tokoi and why is he buried in Fitchburg?
Oskari Tokoi became chairman of the Senate of Finland in 1917, the world’s first social democratic head of government. After fleeing the Finnish Civil War he reached the United States in 1921, settled in Fitchburg, edited the Raivaaja newspaper, and was buried in Forest Hill Cemetery after his death in 1963.
What was Raivaaja?
Raivaaja, meaning The Pioneer, was a Finnish language newspaper founded in Fitchburg on 31 January 1905. It was the voice of the Finnish socialist movement in New England, reaching a peak circulation of 10,000 in 1927, and it printed its final issue in April 2009.
Are there still Finns in Fitchburg today?
Yes. Recent census estimates count around 671 residents of Finnish ancestry in Fitchburg, among the largest Finnish populations of any Massachusetts city. The Finns in Fitchburg, Massachusetts keep their heritage alive through Saima Park’s festivals, sauna museum and pancake breakfasts.
What Finnish events can visitors attend in Fitchburg?
The Finnish Center at Saima Park hosts the Kesajuhla summer festival each June with folk dancing and Finnish food, a National Sauna Week celebration in February, a St Urho’s Day event and pannukakku pancake breakfasts. The library and sauna museums are open to visitors during these gatherings.
If your family’s story passed through Fitchburg, or any of the places Finns have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the farming villages of Ostrobothnia to a sauna on Scott Road, to wherever you are now.