YOU WERE IN FINN COUNTRY - 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
My mother went to the old Apostolic Lutheran church up on Poor Farm Road, and as kids we were playing outside during the service. The people were very devout Laestadiustalaist [Laestadians] but the men, for some reason, didn’t go in. Just the women were in the church. Then, when the service was all over, my father and the rest of the guys went into the near-empty church and sat. My father said, “You sit in here like in a pot!” I don’t know why the men didn’t go in for the services.
Years ago, one Finn from New Ipswich was a very devout Communist. He finally decided to go to Russia during the period of Karelian Fever. He sold his farm, bought a brand-new tractor, took it with him, and believed he would have a good life. He traveled first and his wife and sons followed. But the old man was kind of a quick-tempered guy and one night he just disappeared in Karelia. And that was the last his family saw of him. One of the sons had been suspicious of this whole venture and had sewn a 50-dollar bill into the inner lining of his overcoat. And that ended out being the only way he was able to get out of Russia. His brother also was kind of a spunky kid and escaped to Finland, but the Finns thought that he was a Russian spy and put him in jail for a while. After they returned to the U.S., I saw one of the sons up at a Finnish dance at Holmes Park in Gardner, Massachusetts. He had just come back from Karelia, and boy he was really laying it down on the line about just what had happened over there. Somebody came up to him and said, “You’d better shut up. There are people here tonight that are sympathetic to ideas over there in Russia.” I’d have helped pay for their tickets if they wanted to go.
We were self-sufficient in the winter. My father used to buy 100 pounds of flour in the fall so that we didn’t have to worry about running out. We’d have a hog butchered: all salted. Sometimes we’d butcher a calf, but couldn’t do that in the summer because there was no way of keeping it. My father was a great hunter; he’d get a deer almost any time of the year.
There were supposed to be 100 acres on our farm and we had roughly a third of it in fields. My father made a hay scoot, a very good idea. Hardwood runners and we dragged it behind a homemade tractor. You could load a lot of hay on without it getting too top-heavy. Initially we did all the unloading into the barn by hand. Everybody was shoveling; we’d work in stages at different levels. I’d be the smallest one, poking hay into the corners of the loft. When you had to feed the cows you would get that hay back down, and what a job that was. They started baling hay long after I left farming.
Leonard Aho had an old barn he wanted taken down, so I volunteered. I had our homemade tractor. In 1927 my father had bought a one-ton Model T truck. Later we converted it into a tractor, which had a worm-gear differential—we added another transmission. I was going to tie into one of those barn beams and really go with the tractor and rip that barn apart. Instead, when I got to hooking that chain up to a beam, the barn pulled the tractor backwards. It was mortise-and-tenon construction, hickory pegs. You could almost bend that wood in two and it wouldn’t break. We had to saw every one of them off.
I worked at United Cooperative Farmers in 1938. One of the farmers came in to get some grain and it had already been pouring for days. He said, “Weatherman says there’s a storm coming.” I left to go home and there were utility poles going down. You had to dodge them, driving over other people’s yards to get home.
My father had got the tractor stuck in a field. He was a little concerned about how he could get it out and while I was talking with him about this, there goes the chicken coop! Then the hayloft doors flew open and he said, “We’ve got to go in there.” We weren’t able to hold them closed. And I think it was good because the whole barn was shaking. The minute we would shut those doors, they’d almost pop right out.
Back at work a few days later, I went along on the delivery truck to help bring grain to farmers. We delivered to a place in Greenville. It was owned by a guy named Pihjalaviita and he said at the height of the storm, his house rose off its foundation. They could see daylight all around the edges of the floor. Then it came back down and, as far as he knew, landed right back where it used to be. But it broke all their piping and plumbing and everything.
I know a couple of people ran stills during Prohibition; in fact there was this fellow that distilled pure alcohol. Then he’d put flavoring in it like juniper berries to make it taste like gin. It was sold to barrooms and they’d put in some sort of coloring to make it look like whiskey. And guys would down that. Then if they ordered ‘gin,’ it was the same stuff, but it had juniper-berry flavoring.
Someone told me it wasn’t bad at all—well-refined. But there was a fellow up on Page Hill Road near us who made some of his own stuff. Hoo, boy! Tärpättiä [turpentine]. Pretty-good proof. I wasn’t much
of a drinker, but I guess no-one could tolerate that stuff. There was a layer of grease on top of it. You could also take your apples to be pressed at the cider press in Ashby and just put it in a good barrel. People would often use wild apples from trees that had been planted in colonial days and had become feral for cider. There was a Frenchman who worked at Simond’s when I was working there and he said he put in I-can’t-remember-how-many pounds of sugar into a barrel. And then he would cut a two-by-four and put it against the plugged hole and a floor joist. And he said every once in awhile; you’d hear that barrel go boom! He brought some in at Christmas time over to the shop for us to have a taste, but I wouldn’t drink it. They’d freeze the barrel, then drill a hole into the center, and drain the liquid out. The water freezes and only alcohol is left. I guess it was pretty potent: they called it ‘applejack.’
Interesting, he never told me that story. Thanks for posting it.