Did you know that there is a small township in northern Wisconsin called Oulu?  It’s quite small, with about 540 inhabitants, and it does seem to be very likely that this hamlet was founded by Finns from this area.  The records show family names such as Huhtala, Hukkanen, Kallinen, Kangas, Marjamaki, Rantala, Saari and Tikkanen lived and died in the area. These (burials) date from around 1905, with the first Finns having arrived in 1889  the place names show that the area was settled by quite a few Finnish and other Scandinavian immigrants. Like many immigrant-settlers before them, they named the place in North America in which they settled after the place that they came from in Finland. (In fact, there are several places in Canada and USA named Finland, Finlandia or Suomi!). In the phone book today, their descendants appear to still live in Wisconsin, some in the Oulu township area too!

You can see the diagram map of Wisconsin, and its various counties from the 1920 census of the USA, and the area in which Oulu is located is in the county of Bayfield, right on the shores of Lake Michigan, with Canada across the other side. Many Finns liked to settle in places which reminded them visually and climate wise of their home country. Lehto Lake, Kurikka Creek, and Harju Airport, are also in Wisconsin.

It’s possible to see, if you go to the online site of Ellis Island, the little stories of many Finns who left Scandinavia for North America – for instance - doing a search on the Finnish name Moilanen, showed several from places such as Puolanka, Suomussalami and Oulu.

A young lady named Elin Moilanen, 160cm, with black hair and grey eyes was aged 21 and single. From Uleaborg Finland she left her father (Yrjo) and mother on Ratukatu 19 (opposite our present day bus station) and then from Gothenburg (Sweden) on the ship ‘Stockholm’ which sailed into New York on Nov 21st, 1916.  She was a ‘steerage passenger’ (3rd class) so conditions on board would not have been very glamorous, and the SS Stockholm could take 1,800 3rd class passengers for the journey on its 180x18 metre lower-decks.  Elin was listed as a domestic servant, and she could read and write. Her ticket was bought for her by her cousin – Anna Määtä, and since Anna’s address is listed as on NewYork’s 5th Avenue, I’d take an educated guess that she was a servant herself!  So, Elin arrived on Ellis Island with $25 in her pocket, and would have found herself in busy New York living and working somewhere similar to this photo of a brownstone townhouse in that same area of 5th Ave.

So, for those immigrant inhabitants around Oulu Wisconsin, many probably arrived just as Elin did – leaving the main of their family behind in Finland, traveling to Sweden or England, then onto a large steam ship for 14 or 16 days before catching sight of the statue of Liberty on Ellis Island as they arrived in bustling New York, and then sometime after to head inland to find somewhere just like home to settle!