What is a Finntown?

Abstrakti

A phenomen of the Finnish-American life and culture, especially in the first half of the 20th century, was the finntown. This pattern included both work and leisure time, typical features being a group of emigrants from Finland working together and: boarding-houses, ethnic churches, temperance and labour movement societies with halls for meeting, groceries, co-operatives, public saunas etc. In the finntowns there were also bands, choruses, drama groups and many sport activities as well as ethnic newspapers and publications. Most of the first generation immigrants worked in industrial and domestic work, and there were only a few professionals, until the second generation. The finntown also maintained an interrelationship, not only with Finland, the old country, to get new arrivals, but also with Finnish settlements in the surrounding rural areas and other finntowns. (1) For the immigrants from Finland the finntown was a result of the challenges of the new country, especially the foreign language and culture. But also emigrants from other countries from Europe or other continents developed their own ethnic agglomerations, examples being many Little Italy suburbs and Chinatowns in the United States. The theme of the finntown is so wide and polyphasic to present in a short article as it covers all the aspects of the human life. Consequently only some appearances of the finntown will be discussed in the following presentation.