No Room for Lazy People - Oliver Niemi
New Ipswich Historical Society
FINNS: An Oral History of Finnish-Americans in New Hampshire’s Monadnock Region
Excerpted from FINNS: An Oral History... by Patricia Kangas Ktistes, 1997, all rights reserved.
Oliver Niemi
The old Finns used to have a saying, “There’s a two-by-four in that tree.” I’ve seen photographs by Larry Willard, who took pictures in the back of where the Friendship Manor is, near the Central Cemetery in New Ipswich. You could see Loon Pond in Bank Village clearly miles away. It was all open. People used to work their fields; they’d cut the wood all around the stone walls. But now nobody works the land anymore; it doesn’t take it long to return to woods. You just take the cattleaway and leave it be for a few years and that’s it.
My father bought a farm near Page Hill Road; he paid $5,000. About 100 acres. And this Howe Lumber Company had timber rights. They came and took everything: all the pine, all the hemlock, and milked the land. I said, “Boy, that was a stiff price!”
Then in the Roaring 20s, Fred Somero was at Asiala’s, the blacksmith. Fred comes over, guys congregated there, and said, “Anybody interested in some land?” They said, “Yeah, how many acres you got, Fred?” “Oh, I’ve got 25 acres to sell.” “What you want per acre?” “One dollar.”
My brother and I used to cut logs; we had to look for work and went up to Rindge. Old Harry Rice said, “I’ve got nothing like that, but why don’t you buy a piece of land up there in the Binney Hill section of New Ipswich? There’s over 1,000 acres.
And I said, “How much?” “Fifty cents an acre.” I said to my brother, “Let’s buy it.” He refused. Later, that land went for about $1,000 an acre and they took a lot of timber out.
Sometimes people did clear-cutting; they didn’t leave anything then found they had created scrub land. Good for jack rabbits. Pine doesn’t sprout from the stump. It has to start from seedlings, but the hardwoods will start right from the stump again. All of a sudden, you’ve got shoots all around the stump. When shoots were just starting, there were tender leaves and the cows would even eat those and that kind of stunted the growth. But some of the shoots would finally start and get by the cows and become trees again.
Oliver was my uncle, his brother Veikko was my father. They were 2 very different men. I admired both for different reasons. My uncle could pass as a college professor. Well read, knowledgeable about many topics, eager to start a conversation, and willing to take financial risks. He wore glasses, dressed well, and had a taste for finer things. He was discriminating in his food and drinks (had to be Wild Turkey). He drove a Mercury when my father drove a Ford. He served on the Electric Light Commission and other committees in town. He was a chair builder and a finish carpenter at Simonds Saw & Steele, retired from Simonds at 55, and started a real estate business. My father sold his share of my grandfather's farm to my uncle for $1. That was a better deal than he could have gotten from Harry Rice. My uncle lived to 96 and died with no $ left to his estate. A well lived, well planned life.