Hanka Homestead Finnish Museum. Finnish immigrant pioneer life in the 1920's.

THE HANKA FAMILY STORY

The Hanka Homestead Museum, a heritage site of the Keweenaw National Historical Park, is an open-air museum situated on the former homestead of Finnish immigrant Mari Hanka. With her parents, siblings, and child, she developed the land as a farm and lived here until her death, passing the farm on to her family members, the last of whom died in 1966, resulting in the farm being abandoned. Following nearly 15 years of abandonment, during which time much of the personal property still present was removed and buildings on the property suffered the ravages of the area’s harsh winters, the property became the focus of a revitalization effort, resulting in its development as a museum.

Finnish immigrants Herman (1848-1933) and Anna Wilhelmina (known also as Miina, 1849-1942) Hanka married in Teuva, Finland in 1871 and started a family together as crofters before Herman came to the United States to establish a new home for his wife and four children (John, Herman, Mari, and Nikolai), all of whom later joined him in Michigan. Family history states that Herman first moved to Iowa to claim land but the unfamiliar climate (and likely the non-existent local Finnish community) caused Herman to go instead to the Upper Peninsula, where a sizeable local Finnish community, readily available jobs in the copper-mining industry, and available homestead parcels in the lands cut over by logging companies and of no use to mining companies, could help him establish a new life. By the late 1880s, his family had joined him and Hanka was working in the copper mines in Calumet until an industrial accident made him deaf. He and his family filed homestead papers for land in Misery Bay and established a working farm where three more children (Etvar, Lydia, and Jallu) would eventually be born. Their stay in Misery Bay, however, is not remembered as a happy one, and family history cites the isolation felt especially by Miina as the impetus to trade their homestead for a shotgun and seek a new start near the Finnish farming community of Tapiola.

After lodging with several families in Tapiola, the Hankas identified two forty-acre parcels adjacent to one another in an area that would come to be known as Askel (“step” in Finnish). As Herman Hanka had already taken a homestead claim, their eldest daughter Mari filed her own claim in April 1896, and her parents, siblings, and soon, a son, Arvo (1899-1977), would make their home on the Hanka homestead. In 1903, shortly after receiving her homestead certificate, Mari Hanka signed over the property to her brother Nikolai (Nik). While the birth and death dates are known with certainty for Mari and her siblings Nik, Jallu, and Lydia, three siblings’ dates of death are not accounted for and are only known to have taken place before August 1910, when family records created by Nik indicate that these three siblings were by then deceased.

A 1902 affidavit concerning the farmstead indicated that by May of 1896, four log buildings including the home, a barn, a root cellar, and a smaller “house” assumed to be the smoke sauna had been built. By the height of the farm’s productivity in 1920, there were approximately 14 structures, arranged in courtyard formations and using the features of the land, including a small stream and an adjacent mound, to best support the functions of certain structures, including the milk house which was built over the stream to make use of the cold water for refrigeration and a root cellar across from the milk house and close to the main house. The courtyard configurations of multiple purpose-built structures were similar to those traditional to the region of western Finland from which the Hanka family had emigrated, additionally employing the same building techniques, most notably through the use of logs with dovetailed corners of various styles. Such a configuration was designed to provide protection from the elements and wildlife, ease of access to spaces based on the functions of each structure, and even, in the case of the chimney-less sauna, distance from other key buildings in the event of fire.

Beginning in 1921 with the death of Mari, followed in 1923 by the death of Nik, the Hanka farm began to dwindle in scope of production as well as number of inhabitants. Herman Hanka died in 1933 and Miina in 1942. With Mari’s son Arvo living in metro Detroit, only Flora Lydia and Herman Hjalmar (Jallu) remained, with Lydia dying in 1958 and Jallu, the last Hanka to live on the homestead, in 1966. The property was inherited by Mari’s son Arvo, and later to Arvo’s widow Senia, though it was left abandoned following Jallu’s death.

The farm itself was a subsistence farm dependent on a short growing season of just 85 days, and the family, like many other Finnish farmers in the area, focused on producing sufficient garden vegetables, grains, and dairy products for their own use (with any extra perhaps being used for trading with or selling between neighbors), feed for cattle and horses, and additional raising of chickens and occasionally, a pig for meat. Herman Hanka was also known for his small orchard of Yellow Translucent apples, which family members sliced and dried on the roof for winter use, baked into pies, and shared with neighbors. This farm production was also augmented with traditional hunting and gathering practices; the Hanka family fished the nearby Sturgeon River using gill nets, hunted game birds and deer on their own property (often using the sauna as a deer blind and shooting through the smoke ventilation door), and picked raspberries on their field, and blueberries nearby. Other local foods typically foraged by Finns could include a variety of other berries (local thimbleberries perhaps being the most intriguing to nonlocals), mushrooms, fiddlehead ferns, and more.

The property itself was mortgaged in 1913 to fund the purchase of a Model “T” Ford and 40 acres were sold in 1914 to fund the purchase of a horse, Eli, who, according to community stories, was greatly beloved by Herman Hanka and treated with much kindness. In addition to farming, the Hanka family sold logging rights on parts of their property, and additionally, Mari Hanka took work as a cook sometimes during the winter at local logging camps, helping the family to fund its own needs with cash.

In 1979 events set in motion to save and restore the farmstead and turn it into the open air museum it is today. Alan Pape, a Wisconsin-based architect specializing in restoration, was working on behalf of the Old World Wisconsin open air museum, seeking an exemplary Finnish farmstead that could be dismantled and rebuilt on the museum grounds, joining similar structural display settings representing various ethnic groups present in Wisconsin over time. Seeing Hanka, though, caused Pape and his associates to consider the idea of purchasing and restoring the farmstead in situ, and so, by 1980, their firm, Superior Restorations, Inc., had purchased the property from Senia Hanka, and by the next year, work had begun, with the intent to restore the farm to what it had been in 1920, and using, whenever possible, traditional building methods to do so. Grant funds supported professionals who documented both the structures and the history of the property, and Ruth Longhern, the wife of a Hanka descendant, soon became a driving force in raising both funds and awareness about the site. The caretaker cabin at the gates to the homestead was constructed from other local historic buildings, and those hired on grant funds would stay there, resulting in many stories about mice, mosquitoes, and a porcupine who shared the home with these workers. From 1981 to 1985, intensive restoration work took place, making it possible for the museum to be opened to the public. Restoration work on the 9 existing structures (counting the four-part barn and storage complex as one structure) continues to the present. In 1983, Hanka was added to the National Register of Historic Places. In 1985, the museum opened to the public with a roster of traditional construction and craft workshops and events promoting the works of restoration and the potential the museum holds for traditional culture maintenance. In 1993, Hanka became a cooperating site (now known as a heritage site) of the Keweenaw National Historical Park, which had formally begun operations the year before.

While Pape’s full vision of the Hanka Homestead Museum as a site for teaching and learning traditional farming and crafting techniques has not succeeded over time, the museum has become an important representation of Finnish immigrant farmstead life, as well as an example of community curation bolstered by the support of community members, scholars, National Park Service resources, and more. Since the 1980s, the story of the family has been told through the buildings and materials they left behind, augmented by not only other items of material culture emblematic of the local Finnish immigrant experience, but also through the stories that neighbors and descendants of the Hanka family have shared as part of the restoration process. The Hankas are notable in the history in Askel because of their unique firsts: the first family to have telephone service and the first to own an automobile, and because of their unique personal stories: a young female homesteader who took out papers in order to support her parents and siblings and to raise her son as an unmarried single parent, three siblings who never married and stayed on the farm for their entire lives, and the parents who left Finland for something new, but replicated their Finnish lives on their own terms on their own family’s land. Also, and perhaps most notably to outsiders, the community of Askel was named by Nik Hanka himself during the process of establishing a post office for Askel Hill residents. Today, buildings at Hanka are continuously restored and artifacts (some originally owned by the Hanka family themselves, others donated by community members) contribute to the interpretation of the homestead and the lives of its inhabitants and co-ethnic neighbors.

Sources: Hanka Homestead Museum; Maier, Askel Means Step; See, “Keweenaw National Historical Park”; Vidutis, “Finnish Settlement Architecture.”

Citation:

Scarlett, Sarah F.; Hoagland, Alison K.; and Virtanen, Hilary-Joy, "Tour 3 Guidebook - From Farm to Kitchen: Rural, Indigenous, and Urban Places" (2024). Vernacular Architecture Forum 2024 Annual Conference. 1.