On the second Saturday of September, when the birch and maple of Bayfield County begin to turn and the air carries the first sharp promise of a Northwoods autumn, a small log farmstead on Muskeg Road comes alive one last time for the season. The Oulu Fest, held at the Oulu Cultural & Heritage Center just outside Iron River, Wisconsin, is the grand finale of a summer spent keeping a remarkable piece of Finnish-American history alive — a day of raffles, ethnic food, and pioneer demonstrations, all set among buildings that tell the story of a community that grew up among the stumps of a logged-over forest.
The festival is the closing act of the Heritage Center's season, which runs from late May through mid-September, with the grounds open to the public on Wednesdays and Saturdays from noon to 4 p.m. and guided tours at 1 p.m. On September 12, visitors can wander the grounds at their own pace, take in demonstrations of pioneer skills, sample the ethnic food that has been a hallmark of the event, and try their luck in a slate of raffles. The next day, September 13, the center closes for the season except by special appointment, making Oulu Fest the last chance of the year to step inside its doors.
Those doors first opened in the summer of 2012, when the Oulu Cultural & Heritage Center, developed in partnership with the Oulu chapter of the Bayfield County Historical Society, began its mission of preserving and sharing the unique immigrant history of the town of Oulu and the surrounding countryside. The center grew out of a remarkable family restoration project, and its heart is the original Palo homestead. In 1908, Finnish immigrant John Palo — born Palomaki — bought the logged-over property, and in 1917, after a few years working in the copper mines of Arizona, he and his wife Justina "Tini" Pollari, herself an immigrant from Finland, returned to Oulu to raise their three children and build a farm. After John's death in 1949, Tini, affectionately known as "Äiti" — "mother" in Finnish — lived on alone in the simple log home, without indoor plumbing and with only wood heat. The farm sat vacant for 26 years after her death, until 1997, when her grandson Duane Lahti bought the property and began the ambitious family project of restoring the deteriorated buildings. The work earned state and national recognition, and it sparked the enthusiasm that led to the creation of the Heritage Center itself.
Around the homestead, the center has gathered a remarkable collection of buildings, each with its own story. The Pudas House, a large log home built in 1899, had a long and storied life in section nine of the Oulu township. While it was under construction, a tornado picked the house up and set it down eight feet from its original site — left totally intact, it stayed at the new location with a new foundation, because the deeply religious John Pudas believed "God meant it to be there!" For years one of the largest buildings in early Oulu, it hosted community events, church services, and temporary lodging for travelers before slowly deteriorating. In 2011, the Duane Lahti family, along with Dan and Harry Pudas and their crew at Oulu Log Builders, dismantled the dilapidated structure and moved the house and its logs more than six miles to its new home at the Palo Homestead, where it became a central part of the Heritage Center.
There is also an authentic Finnish savu sauna, or smoke sauna, originally built on the former Korhonen farm in the neighboring town of Waino and donated by the Dennis Smet family. In this primarily Finnish community, the sauna was often the first building raised on a homestead, serving as the primary source of family hygiene, the place where babies were born and the sick were cared for, and, as the center's history puts it, the place for "delousing the spouse" after months at the logging camps. This style of sauna was commonly used for Saturday night baths until indoor plumbing became more readily available in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and many families still enjoy the warmth of wood-fired saunas today. A Finnish proverb captures the reverence for the ritual: "The sauna is a poor man's drugstore."
Cooperatives were another pillar of Finnish community life, and the center preserves that legacy in the former Northern Co-op Store, which operated from 1931 to 1957. The first Oulu Cooperative was a creamery organized in 1910 that helped local farmers market their dairy products, and other cooperatives followed — the Waino-Oulu Telephone Association in 1913 and the Rural Electric Cooperative in 1945, which still provides electricity to the area, including the Heritage Center grounds. After a half-century of storage, the old store building has come back to life on the Heritage grounds, housing cooperative exhibits and serving retail purposes during center events.
Education, too, was a priority for Oulu's early settlers, who supported fifteen different one- and two-room schools between 1891 and 1949, with as many as seven operating at once from 1918 to 1935. The center's Fairview Schoolhouse, built by the Kopplin Lumber Company in the neighboring town of Tripp at a cost of $600 to $700, was one of three schoolhouses in that town. The success of the center's summer school program, jointly sponsored with the South Shore School District and begun in 2014, made a functioning one-room school a natural addition to the grounds.
All of this history is rooted in the town of Oulu itself, named for the fifth most populous city in Finland. As early as 1889, Finnish immigrants were leading the way in homesteading the land that would become the town, and close to 75 percent of the original homesteaders were of Finnish descent, with an even higher share among later settlers. According to the 2000 census, 40 percent of the town's population still claimed Finnish as their primary ancestry, and Finnish surnames like Elonen, Heikkila, Lahti, Maki, Pudas, Rantala, and Tuura remain common on mailboxes throughout the community.
For a small town of just over 500 people, Oulu has become a destination for those curious about the Finnish immigrant experience in America, and the Oulu Fest is its warmest welcome. It is a chance to wander through a century-old log home, to stand in the smoke sauna where generations were born and healed, and to share a meal and a raffle ticket with the descendants of the settlers who built a community among the stumps. As the season closes and the leaves begin to fall, the Oulu Cultural & Heritage Center offers one last, unhurried afternoon of Finnish sisu — that stubborn, resilient spirit that carried a people across an ocean and into the Northwoods.