Manisteee News Advocate Article (1/30/03)

Like swampland real estate, River City Boys Bands and the Spice Girls, the town of Kaleva was born out of an ingenious marketing scheme.

But nowadays, nobody has to be sold a bill of goods to visit the town where history converges with modernity and where community pride is served up as a side of nisua, the sweet Finnish bread.

“We have more and more visitors every year,” said Cindy Asiala of the Kaleva Historical Society. “They see us on the Internet, they hear about us and come to see our grasshopper and Bottle House.”

They come to visit the town with a memory that stretches back to the first Finnish written epic.

The town’s namesake stems from the “Kalevala” a poem of epic proportion. With battles of good and evil, nature goddesses and world creation, the “Kalevala” rivals any Greek myth for a fantastic story line.

“Its as wild as any Stephen King novel,” said Asiala.

The poem is so distinctly Finnish, that it was used to ensnare Kaleva’s first European settlers, who came hundreds of miles to “Kaleva” - a Finnish utopia promised to them by the land agent Jaako Saari.

However, what Saari promised the Finns was as fantastic as the poem itself.

“They were told that Kaleva was the land of milk and honey with fertile soils and winters so warm that you could go outside in January in your shirtsleeves,” Asiala said. “What they found instead was a desolate stumpland that had been logged over and abandoned. It was a dustbowl with pine stumps.”

The first winter found the Finns determined to scratch out a living, but after a year of hardship and toil, many returned to the bigger cities to work.

But others stayed on, raising children and slowly, but surely building a community to nurture them.

“They were a very determined people,” Asiala said.

Her husband Dennis can vouch for that, especially in regards to his Finnish grandma.

“As a boy I would run away from my school to ‘Mumu’s’ house, where she would give me fresh bread with a thick slab of butter. When the school officials would come for me, she would hide me behind her skirts and insist that her “hyva poika” wasn’t there.”

But the Finnish were not alone in Kaleva. Beginning in 1910, the Finns were joined by the Germans and Czechs, who fortified the Kaleva’s structure and strengthened the town.

Nowadays, even though some estimate that the population of Kaleva is less than one quarter Finnish descent, folks continue the heritage of the community, which is celebrated in a multitude of ways.

Helga (Hazel) Hulkonen is a member of the Tuesday morning Senior’s Circle, whom hosts a Finnish service at the Lutheran church once a month.

Hulkonen also buys cardamom by the pound to feed her habit of baking nisua, a traditional Finnish bread and the hottest-selling item in any Kaleva bake sale.

“Nisua must be baked by hand,” Hulkonen said. “I do it two times a week and I love baking it. Even the young people are learning how to make it.”

This news was heartily received by Asiala, who wanted to work up a trade of bread for sauna - for that Finnish tradition is also kept steaming in a few Kaleva homes.

Besides these traditions, physical evidence of community pride stand testament throughout Kaleva.

Murals and sculpture abound. The old railroad grade is now a Centennial Walkway, along which a 18-foot, 500 pound metal grasshopper sculpture stands. The grasshopper represents St. Urho, who drove the grasshoppers out of Finland just as surely as St. Patrick rid Ireland of her snake problem.

Kaleva is home to the Historic Bottle House, which doubles as the historical museum and houses the only known pictorial rendition of the “Kalevala.”

A log cabin, once occupied by one of Kaleva’s first settlers was restored and provides a backdrop for weekly summer concerts and a library designed in the Finnish tradition is also in the works.

Throughout the year, a number of festivals are held to commemorate Kaleva. Kaleva Heritage Days, the fourth weekend in August, carries the town through its pioneering history, with crafts, music and presentations.

For the summer solstice, Kaleva residents invoke Juhannus, a summer celebration centered around a “kokko” (bonfire) with music and food.

During the winter solstice, the Kaleva cemetery is alight with luminaria to honor those buried there.

Although the settlement of Kaleva was due to misinformation and scheming, what Kaleva is today comes of fantasy, hearty Finnish farmers and those who came after, who make the tiny Michigan community a special place to live and visit.

“People look at us funny at first and they wonder about our strange street names,” Asiala said. “But many adopt the history and culture as their own. They admire the Finnish “sisu” - the guts and determination that brought the first settlers here.”