Saima Tuominen arrived on Ellis Island in 1904, when she was six, accompanied by her mother and her younger brother. They had left Finland in the twilight of the Russian Empire’s occupation, crossed the Baltic Sea, the North Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean, and lost a nine-month-old along the way. None of them spoke a word of English. But in Saima’s mother’s palm was a postcard she held out to strangers. It read: “Franz Tuominen, Wellfleet, Massachusetts.”
This story is one of dozens preserved on VHS videotapes filed neatly on a shelf at the Wellfleet Public Library. In one labeled “The Finnish Presence,” Saima Tuominen Laycock tells her story at 90 to Elizabeth Lovely.
Jack Hall, the designer and mover of modernism, started out as a journalist and, it seems, tapped that past after he settled in for good on Bound Brook Island by looking into the Finns. Hall is interviewed by artist Peter Watts in another video called “The Finnish Community,” made in 1989.
The family came to Wellfleet to reunite with Saima’s father, who had followed his sister to Cape Cod years before.
Franz Tuominen was here to make a living. He first took up work planting cranberries in Sandwich. He met a couple of fellow Finns there, and they all found work on the Old Colony Railroad. The three men — Tuominen, Jacob Maki, and the third, whose name Saima never knew — lived on a train car that traveled up and down the Cape. They saw Hyannis, Orleans, Eastham, and Provincetown. One day, when the train stopped at Wellfleet, the men decided to get off.
The three took up quahogging. They lived in the caboose of a sidetracked train near the station on Commercial Street. They changed their names to sound like the names of the other men who dug clams: Franz Tuominen became Frank Thompson and Jacob Maki became Jacob Hill. Soon they moved into a duplex near Uncle Tim’s Bridge. Now named the Bradford, back then the apartments were called “the Block.”
Thompson sent a letter to his wife in Finland to bring the family.
From Ellis Island, Saima, her brother, and their mother took three more boat rides: to Fall River, then to Buzzards Bay, and then to Wellfleet. They became the first Finnish family to settle in town. Jacob Hill and the third Finn went to Hyannis and brought back two women. Wellfleet’s first two Finnish weddings followed.
By the 1930s, the Finnish community in Wellfleet had swelled to 15 families. Some lived on Billingsgate Island, others on Commercial Street in the center of town. Most of the men made a living on the flats, raking quahogs from catboats with fishnet baskets hooked at the end of long poles.
They earned a fair wage, it seems: Amos Eemeli Poikenen, the last person to live on Billingsgate Island, moved back to Finland to purchase a grist mill with the money he made from fishing.
They were a hardworking lot, says Jack Hall in the video interview. The Finns built a dike at Duck Creek to provide gardens for surrounding houses.
Some also took part in the construction of the Chequessett Neck dike in 1909, according to late local historian Earle Rich, who wrote about Wellfleet’s Finns in the Cape Codder on June 10, 1977.
“At that time in Wellfleet history all the skills needed to complete a project this size were to be found right here among the local residents, and I might add without the use of any power tools,” Rich wrote. “Such hand tools as the broad axe, ship’s adze, or a jointer plane in the hands of such experienced men named Jacob Hill, Otto Pentinen, or Frank Thompson would put any power tool to shame.”
The women wove traditional Finnish rugs with a loom Jacob Hill’s wife Edla constructed out of hemlock. She passed the loom around until striped, scruffy rugs became abundant in town, according to Laycock.
Finns who settled here were quick to bring another aspect of their culture to Wellfleet: they built up to six saunas around town. Jacob Hill assembled the first one on Cannon Hill across Uncle Tim’s Bridge.
“Finnish families in Wellfleet cheered when he built the first sauna,” said Aina Carlson Hill, the daughter of Jacob Hill, in the Cape Codder article. Cannon Hill was thus nicknamed “Sauna Hill.”
Dug into the sandy slope, “all that showed was the front and the roof, and a chimney where smoke came out,” Laycock said in her video interview.
Saunas became the hub of Wellfleet social life in the early 20th century. Jacob Hill and Carl Honga opened their saunas to the public every Saturday. Edla Hill would start the fire to heat the stones at 1 p.m., and by evening a line would form outside the doors. As families waited their turns, they drank coffee and gossiped, Carlson Hill said.
For the Finns, the saunas were part of a sacred bathing ritual. They stripped down, beat themselves with birch branches to improve circulation, and rubbed soap over their bodies. After leaving the sauna, they would either jump into snowbanks or rinse off in hogsheads filled with cold water.
“Folks were quiet, almost stolid,” Carlson Hill told the Cape Codder. “This bathing was a very serious business.”
Indeed, the rules of the sauna were strict. An old Finnish adage translates roughly to “One must behave in a sauna as one would behave in church.” Hall thought of the ritual as a purification on Saturday nights before the families went to the United Methodist Church on Sundays.
In modern Finland, the importance of the sauna is still evident. UNESCO included the Finnish sauna bathing tradition on its list of intangible cultural heritage in 2020 for its designation as a “church of nature” in Finnish culture. According to UNESCO, Finland has a human population of around 5.5 million and a sauna population of 3.3 million.
A Finnish political strategy called “sauna diplomacy” helped Finland maintain independence from Soviet incursions after World War II with negotiations between Finnish and Soviet leaders held in the sauna. To this day, saunas are as ubiquitous as conference rooms in Finland for diplomatic networking.
But Laycock said that most of the children of these original Finnish settlers left Wellfleet and its saunas for schools across the Northeast. Though some returned here to retire, most dispersed across the U.S., and only a few stayed behind.
As of 1984, only one sauna remained. It could be found at the back of Charles Frazier’s property at 15 School St. That was the year then-curator of the Wellfleet Historical Society Helen Purcell entered the structure in the Mass. Historical Commission’s historical building database as having been designed by Mrs. Oksa Lee.
Assessor Nancy Vail told the Independent on Dec. 1 that there is no indication in town records that the sauna still stands.
In the historical commission document, Purcell wrote: “The sauna is a reminder of the importance of the Finnish culture, which the Finnish community that began to settle in Wellfleet at the turn of the twentieth century kept alive … even while they were adapting to the Wellfleet life and becoming capable respected citizens of the town.”
