They called it Little Finland. Not on any road sign, and not on the welcome banners that hang over Lake Avenue, but everyone in town knew it. From the 1940s onward, if you walked the side streets of Lake Worth in Palm Beach County and listened, you would hear it: the soft, percussive run of spoken Finnish drifting out of a coffee shop, a hardware store, a Lutheran church. For a stretch of the late twentieth century, this small Florida beach town held what was often described as the largest concentration of Finns anywhere in the world outside Finland itself.
Lake Worth Beach: The Place
Lake Worth Beach sits on the Intracoastal Waterway in Palm Beach County, just south of West Palm Beach and immediately north of Lantana. A drawbridge carries Lake Avenue east across the lagoon to a barrier island, the public beach, and the neoclassical Casino Building first raised in 1922.
The town itself is low and walkable, built around a compact downtown of small commercial blocks on Lake Avenue and Lucerne Avenue, much of it now a National Register historic district. The housing is modest by Palm Beach standards: frame cottages, small stucco bungalows, mid-century motels. The city was known simply as Lake Worth until 2019, when voters narrowly approved adding “Beach” to the name.
How Lake Worth Beach Became Finnish
Before the Finns
Lake Worth grew up in the early twentieth century as a working town in the shadow of its glamorous neighbour across the water. Palm Beach was for the wealthy. The people who built and serviced those mansions had to live somewhere cheaper, and Lake Worth was where many of them landed.
Among the carpenters, cooks, and domestic workers who came south with the wealthy northern families in the 1910s and 1920s were Finns. They could not afford Palm Beach, so they bought lots and built houses in Lake Worth. That early labour migration planted the first seeds of what would become a full community.
The Finns Arrive
The community took organised shape during and after the Second World War. In 1944 a group of Finnish residents founded what became the American Finnish Club, and by 1946 they had built their own social hall. It is the oldest Finnish hall in Florida, and the members expanded it in 1955 as their numbers grew.
Many of the Finns who arrived in these decades did not come straight from Finland. They came in a second stage, having first settled in the cold industrial regions of the north: the copper country of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the mill towns of Massachusetts, the factories of Ohio. After years of mining, logging, and shop work in the snow, Florida offered warmth, and word of an existing Finnish community pulled the next family south.
This pattern of one person pulling the next is the engine behind almost every immigrant enclave. The Finns of Lake Worth built it the same way the Finns of the north had built theirs. If you have read about the copper-country Finns of the Finnish stronghold of Hancock, Michigan, you are looking at the parent community that fed much of Lake Worth’s growth.
Lake Worth at Its Peak
By the 1970s and 1980s the community was at full strength. The seasonal population of people with Finnish roots in the Lake Worth and Lantana area is said to have swelled to around 30,000 at the height of winter, fed by snowbirds who flew in from Helsinki and from the northern United States and Canada each year.
Daily life had a fully Finnish layer running through it. There were two Finnish-language newspapers, two social halls hosting dances and concerts, Finnish hairdressers and funeral homes, and at one point roughly thirty Finnish-owned motels catering to the winter visitors. You could live a week in Lake Worth conducting almost all of your business in Finnish.
Religion anchored the community as firmly as commerce. Finnish immigrants established three churches in town after the war to hold the culture together: an Evangelical Lutheran congregation, a Pentecostal congregation, and a Laestadian congregation, the last reflecting a strict revivalist movement with deep roots in northern Finland. Saunas, the non-negotiable centre of Finnish home life, went up behind houses across the neighbourhood.
In 1970 the community gave itself an institution it would lean on for generations. On 21 October 1970 the Finnish American Rest Home was incorporated, and in 1974 the Finnish-American Village opened at 1800 South Drive, conceived years earlier by Ed Jarvi and Dr. Aarne Suominen and organised into being by Sam Miller. It offered European-style elder care wrapped in Finnish language and tradition, and it remains open today.
The Change
The decline was gradual rather than sudden. The founding generation aged and passed away. Finland’s own economy grew comfortable and prosperous, removing much of the pressure that had once pushed people abroad in the first place.
The children and grandchildren of the immigrants grew up American. Many stopped speaking Finnish, and the cultural distance between the Finnish-born elders and the Americanised young widened. The Finnish Chamber of Commerce wound down, the count of Finnish motel owners fell from around thirty to a handful, and the snowbird flights thinned.
Even at the turn of the millennium the community still ranked. In the 2000 census, 1,026 residents claimed Finnish descent within the city limits, enough for Lake Worth to be described as having the largest concentration of Finns in the world outside Finland. Counted together with Lantana and the surrounding towns, the wider area held roughly 25,700 people of Finnish descent, one of the largest Finnish communities in the United States.
The Landmarks of Finnish Lake Worth Beach
American Finnish Club (Kerhotalo), 908 Lehto Lane, Lake Worth Beach. Founded in 1944, with its hall opened in 1946 and expanded in 1955, this is the oldest Finnish hall in Florida. Generations of dances, concerts, and coffee evenings happened here, and the building still carries the Finnish name Kerhotalo, “the club house.”
Finnish-American Village, 1800 South Drive, Lake Worth Beach. Built on the foundation of the Finnish American Rest Home incorporated in 1970, the Village opened in 1974 and gave the community a place to grow old in its own language. It still operates as a not-for-profit offering skilled nursing, assisted living, and home care.
Bryant Park, on the lagoon off Lake Avenue. Every winter since 1983 this waterfront park has hosted the community’s signature festival, first as Finlandia Days and, since 1999, as the Midnight Sun Festival. The name nods to the endless summer daylight of the Finnish north.
The Midnight Sun Festival. Founded by Lake Worth mayor David Hinsa, himself Finnish-American, the festival runs each year over a late-February or early-March weekend. It is gloriously specific: the Florida Championship Wife Carrying Contest, FINtango dancing in the ballroom style Finns made their own during the war years, smoked salmon, meat pies, and an ocean of strong Finnish coffee.
St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church. One of several congregations that held the community’s faith and language together, the Lutheran church remains a touchstone for older Finnish-Americans in the area, alongside the Pentecostal and Laestadian congregations that arrived after the war.
Palm Beach Bakery and Cafe, Lantana. A short drive south in the twin Finnish town of Lantana, this bakery, co-owned by former professional hockey player Mike Vaskivuo and baked by his father Jouko, has kept pulla, the sweet cardamom-scented bread, and Finnish rye on the shelves for a community that refuses to let them disappear.
Where the Lake Worth Beach Finns Came From
The Finns who reached Lake Worth carried two different geographies inside them. The first was the homeland. Finnish emigration to America had drawn heavily on Ostrobothnia, the flat western coastal province hit by the great crop failure of 1867, and over the decades it spread inland and east toward Karelia. Lake Worth Beach is now a sister city to Lappeenranta in South Karelia, a link that reflects how many families traced their line back to that lake-stitched eastern region.
The second geography was American. A large share of Lake Worth’s Finns came south not from Finland directly but from the older Finnish settlements of the north, where their parents and grandparents had mined copper and cut timber. The same northern current that built the Finnish enclaves of Brooklyn and the Pacific Northwest fed Florida too. If your family passed through the Finnish enclave of Sunset Park in Brooklyn or through the fishing-town Finns of Astoria, Oregon, the road to Lake Worth was a familiar one: cold work first, sun later.
Lake Worth Beach Today
The Finnish layer of Lake Worth Beach is thinner now, but it has not vanished. Estimates put the permanent Finnish-descended population at somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000, down from around 12,000 a generation ago. The two newspapers are gone, the motels are nearly all sold, and the elders who built the place are mostly gone with them.
Yet the institutions hold. The American Finnish Club still gathers, the Finnish-American Village still cares for Finnish elders, and the Midnight Sun Festival still fills Bryant Park each winter with wife-carrying races and the sound of FINtango. The town’s word for what keeps it going is sisu: a stubborn, unglamorous resilience, the refusal to quit no matter the odds.
What remains is a community in transition rather than collapse. The Finnish-born generation is passing, and their American-born descendants carry the heritage more lightly. But once a year, on the lagoon where the snowbirds used to land, Little Finland still raises a coffee cup to where it came from.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Finns settle in Lake Worth Beach, Florida?
The first Finns came in the early 1900s as carpenters, cooks, and domestic workers serving the wealthy estates of nearby Palm Beach, settling in cheaper Lake Worth instead. After the Second World War the community grew as Finnish retirees and workers moved south from the cold industrial regions of Michigan, Ohio, and Massachusetts, drawn by the warm climate and a community that already spoke their language.
Is Lake Worth Beach still Finnish today?
Yes, though the community is smaller and ageing. The permanent Finnish-descended population is estimated at between 5,000 and 7,000, down from around 12,000 a generation ago, and the American Finnish Club, the Finnish-American Village, and the annual Midnight Sun Festival all remain active in Lake Worth Beach.
What are the most famous Finnish landmarks in Lake Worth Beach?
The American Finnish Club hall, opened in 1946 and the oldest Finnish hall in Florida, and the Finnish-American Village retirement community, opened in 1974, are the two enduring institutions. Bryant Park hosts the Midnight Sun Festival each winter, the signature celebration of the Finns in Lake Worth Beach, Florida.
Where in Finland did the Lake Worth Beach Finns come from?
Finnish emigration to America drew heavily on the western coastal province of Ostrobothnia and, over time, the eastern region of Karelia. Lake Worth Beach is a sister city to Lappeenranta in South Karelia, reflecting strong family ties to that eastern part of Finland, though many residents arrived by way of older Finnish communities in the northern United States.
When did Finns first arrive in Lake Worth Beach?
The first Finnish workers arrived in the 1910s and 1920s alongside the wealthy northerners building Palm Beach. The organised community dates to the 1940s, when the American Finnish Club was founded in 1944 and opened its hall in 1946, with the largest waves of settlement arriving from the 1940s through the 1970s.
If your family’s story passed through Little Finland in Lake Worth Beach, or any of the places the Finns made home, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the lakes of South Karelia to the copper country of the north, to the warm lagoon of Lake Worth, every move is part of one story. Explore your story →
Sources include the Lake Worth Beach entry on Wikipedia and reporting from WLRN public radio.