YOU WERE IN FINN COUNTRY - Martin Seppala

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.

Oops! Forgot Some Interviews

I discovered that I forgot to include some of the interviews from the YOU ARE IN FINN COUNTRY section of this Oral History account. I’ll be including them in the next series of postings, starting with Martin Seppala who gave some interesting comments about the hurricane of 1938.

Fallen tree near the residence of Mrs. Carrie Wheeler. Photo given by Carolina Lowe.

Martin Seppala

The Seppalas are from a place in Finland called Härmä: we grew up in Rindge, New Hampshire. But here’s my whole memory of childhood: it was Depression times and hard for us to get clothes and things like that. But there was one thing we never doubted, and that was that Mom and Dad loved us. There were five boys and four girls. My dad was very ambitious: I inherited some of that. I do not remember him ever lying down or even sitting back and relaxing. He worked almost every day of his life. And when he’d get home, he might grab a quick meal and then did farming on the side. We only had four acres, but we rented lots of land for hay. My father had the first milking machines, milk coolers, and on and on. He put the barn up. We had silos and everything. He was never one for fishing or hunting and I took after him. We were the first people that I know of who had running water in the house; the first who had inside bathroom toilets. And we were the first ones I knew of who had a refrigerator, washing machine, dishwasher, and on and on. My dad always was the first. He and somebody else from Jaffrey built a tractor that I drove. And they put a side-cutter bar on it. It was something that nobody else had. It was like a prototype of a haying machine for cutting grass, cutting brush on the side of the road. Before that, it was the farmers pulling the mower with the horses or the tractors. But my dad had the mower right on there and away you’d go. Then later on, a company came out with a machine like that. My dad did countless things: he was everything. He worked on automobiles: he was a mechanic. He was a mason, he was a painter, he was a carpenter, he was a plumber. I’ve been proud of him after he was gone. At the time I didn’t realize it: we took it for granted. My mother was just an angel. She was a friend of the young. If we had water fights, she might join in or if she didn’t join in, she would laugh at us. I had the happiest childhood a person could ever have. I’ll tell you how it was with my mother: I was positive I was the favorite child. But when we grew up, we talked about it and every child in our family was positive that they were the favorite. My mother had that way about her. One of things our mother made that we really liked, we called it in Finnish, ilmapuurua [‘air’ porridge]. It was made out of cranberries and she’d whip it up and get a lot of air into it and I don’t know what she put into it to thicken it: it became fluffy. And did we children love it! She made that often. I’ve never know of anybody else to make it. It was like a mousse, but it had a little more of a grain to it. I’d love to have some, but I don’t know anyone who knows anything about it; even my sisters don’t. My brother Edwin was innovative and he’d make skis and was the leader in that. We had a lot of fun building tree houses and what we called ‘ski jumpers.’ It was all done out of barrel staves. We’d just take a wooden barrel apart. That was the hardest job; trying to sand down the staves so they’d be real smooth. Then we’d nail on straps that our feet would fit through and ice the runs down so we’d actually be able to make the ski jumper go. All the barrel staves weren’t the same width. The ski jumper was made out of one wider stave and my brother made a little seat for it. He raised it up with two-by-fours and it was a real trick to sit on that seat attached to one ski and you tried to balance as you went down the hill. Like anything else, after awhile, you get to be able to do it fairly well. With us children, it was a competition to see who could get the furthest down the hill without falling. We had hills in back of the house and put water on them at night to freeze into ice. But if you ran a ski trail down a hill, you could keep going down the same trail and it would be slippery. In the winter, especially when there was snow and then rain, and it seemed like we had that more often when we were children, the rain would freeze into a crust, and we’d slide down on cardboard. We hardly even had sleds. Whether these inventions worked or not, we had fun trying to come up with them. I grew up speaking Finnish at home. Even though both of my parents were born in America, my oldest brother didn’t even know a word of English when he went to school. But I already knew English when I went to school; as soon as the first of the children went to school and started learning English, the others did, too. I went one year to Conant High School in Jaffrey and quit. I went to work. In those days, you did. There were some other factors: Rindge did not have a high school and the town did not provide transportation to the closest high school, which was in Jaffrey. So it was a matter of finding your transportation and that was a burden on families to have to do this. During the Hurricane of 1938, I was in the little house in Rindge and I remember it clearly. I was 12. The window; even now I know that the glass size was 24-by-24 inches. And I remember my dad saying that because we kids broke windows, he put in what they called ‘double-strength’ glass. But I can remember seeing the wind bulge the window. The glass would bow in a little. Then when the wind was at its height, that’s when we thought our house was going over. We had a chicken coop; the wind took that coop and smashed it right into the corner of the house. I don’t remember if there were chickens in it; there must have been. I remember going to bed that night. We didn’t sleep. ‘Course the lights went out and we didn’t have electricity for many weeks afterward. But when we got up the next morning, right next to our place had been this huge forest. And when we looked out, it was all down. It was an eerie feeling, like some mighty giant with one big breath blew it all over. It was next to impossible to make a road in there ‘cause the stumps were standing in the way. So they had to log them off. It wasn’t that easy as cutting a tree down. Most of all the forests were gone; absolutely flattened. And then the government came along and paid people to cut those trees up before they rotted because a lot of it was good pine. And then they would put the logs into the lakes ‘cause the water preserved the logs. Crow Croft and Pearly Lake were filled with logs. And there was so much, there was no way in the world they could cut it up fast enough. And you could physically walk across the pond, or at least a certain percentage of it, on the logs. Crow Croft, I think, was about 100 percent full of logs. And the thing that I’ve often thought about; I remember when we were little, before ‘38, we went to swim in Pearly Lake and it was crystal clear. After they put logs in there; the bark came off and disintegrated and went to the bottom. And it seems to me the water’s never been clear since. It was called Pearly Lake because it was such clear water. Even today, it’s not that clear. Probably within the last 10 years, I’ve had dreams of that hurricane: how devastating it was.

[Next - Oliver Niemi ]