Process: Sudbury Saunas

My interest in placenames started quite early at our cottage on Lake Panache in Whitefish, Ontario. As a youngster, I remember familiar sights all along the dirt roads off of Ojibway Road: tree trunks covered pêle-mêle with handmade signs. The cottagers’ names were as varied as the trees in the area with French Canadian, English and Italian names amongst many other ethnic groups. I always wondered why there were not more Aboriginal names in the area considering the proximity of the Ojibwa Whitefish Lake First Nation.

 

The ride to the cottage itself also piqued my curiosity about the neighbouring cottagers: we would pass a series of mailboxes on Little Panache road with unfamiliar names to me such as Juutinen, Kauhanen, Kannakko or Salmi. At the time, I did not know that these names were Finnish, though I suspected that they were Scandinavian. Still today, street names in the Louise Township are both Finnish (Salminen, Nurmi, Makala, Kusk and Suikkola) and French-Canadian, with names like Panache, Desormeau and St. Pothier — a country road where my maternal grand-mother grew up on a farm.

It was to increase my limited knowledge about Finnish settlements in Sudbury that I recently read Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A Historical Geography of the Finns in the Sudbury Area by Oiva Saarinen (1999).

 “Reading Between a Rock and a Hard Place was a moving experience for me, as names and faces of people who were part of my childhood are not only placed in the historical context, but given respect and honour.”
— Judy Erola, former minister of State for Mines (1980), minister responsible for the Status of Women (1982) and minister of Corporate and Consumer Affairs (1983).

Judy Erola lived in the cottage beside ours. Though I knew that at one time she had been a federal Member of Parliament for Nickel Belt, I was unaware of her Finnish heritage. She was the grand-daughter of Thomas Jacobson, described by Saarinen as the "First Pioneer" in the Sudbury area. It was sad to say, but I didn’t know much about the history of Finnish immigration to Canada: this, despite counting several Finns as friends in art college and having lived in the Donovan for a period of time — a working class neighbourhood with a high mixity of different ethnic groups including a Finnish community.

 

 

A walk through the Donovan today still displays this interesting social mix with the Ukrainian Greek Orthodox Church of St. Volodymyr, the Croatian Centre and the Serbian Club within a couple of blocks from each other. For a historical tour of the Donovan in the first half of the 20th century, I enjoyed perusing this wonderful website Sharing authority with Baba: A collaborative History of Sudbury’s Ukrainian Community, 1901 – 1939 by Dr. Stacey Zembrzycki.

 

 

My only window into Finnish culture was a handful of Arto Paasilinna books in my library, translated into French. This, and the sauna. Since all the cottages on Panache seemed to have a sauna when I was a youngster, I naively assumed all French-Canadians carried this family custom. I didn’t realize that it was the Finns who brought this tradition with them when first settling in the area.

 

 

Between a Rock and a hard Place proved to be a very interesting read. According to Saarinen, it was the Swedish-Finnish explorer Pehr Kalm’s Travels in North America, published in English in 1770, which first introduced Canada to Finland. However, the first wave of Finnish immigrants did not immigrate to Canada until early in the 19th century by way of the United States when workers found temporary employment in the construction industry: Montreal’s Lachine canal and the Welland, Ontario Canal between 1829 and 1887 (5). Direct immigration to Canada from Finland did not start until the 1880s despite recruitment campaigns that dated back as early as 1874. The Canadian Pacific Railway, amongst other companies in need of cheap labour, had sent representatives to Finland to entice people to immigrate and join the workforce (10). While Finns did work in the railway constructions camps from 1882 – 1883, Saarinen notes that the first site of permanent Finnish settlement was not Sudbury but Copper Cliff, a company town.

As the Canadian Copper Co. (CCC) owned 75% of the area, occupational segregation was used to establish dominance: the labour force was distributed through sections of the town according to a “hierarchy based on occupational status”. In this way, Copper Cliff, Orford and Evans housed the Anglo-Saxon miners and mine officials, Shantytown gathered the Finns, Poles, Ukrainians and French Canadians in one area, and Crow’s Nest was reserved for the Italians. However, this ethnic concentration also helped to created a thriving “Finntown”, that is, a close-knit working-class neighbourhood. The first Finnish hall was constructed in 1895 and commercial enterprises like general stores, public saunas, a bakery, a shoemaker, a tailor shop and even a movie theatre and billards room sought out the business of what was generally young single males. Saarinen emphasizes this fact to account for the popularity of the many rooming or boarding houses known as poikatalo (37).

Canada then saw a second wave of immigration in 1921 due in part to immigration restrictions in the States (16) as well as the promise of employment in the mining and construction industries North of the border where unskilled labour could command high wages (30). Between World War I and World War II (1921 – 1951), the largest non French/English ethnic group in the Sudbury district was Finnish, soon taken over by Italians in the 50s (29).

There were also Finnish homesteads in rural enclaves such as Wanup, Waters Township, and Louise Township. In 1923, Oiva Svensk, Kalle Hotti and Rev. Heinonen applied for provincial help for the construction of a wooden bridge across the Vermillion river enabling the recreational development of Little Panache Lake (82). Finnish communities began to settle in the Louise Township, located around Grassy, Kusk and Little Panache lakes while French-Canadian settlements were concentrated in the northern parts of the township (84). In 1934, the construction of a bridge across Little Panache and the opening of the road to Marina Bay made it easier than ever to commute from Sudbury to Panache (84). Judy and Voitto Erola bought the marina in Dieppe township in 1971, renaming it Erola’s Panache Landing before selling it five years later to Louis Dozzi. My cousins and I were frequent visitors to Penage Bay Marina in the summer, slowly making our way across the lake in our beat up pedal boat.

More so than the marina or the Finnish placenames, it is the sauna that remains the surefire symbol of Finnish culture in the Sudbury area. Saarinen describes how “[i]n rural areas such as Beaver Lake and Wanup, it became part of a circular farmstead featuring a house, barn, hayshed, ice shed, milk house, woodshed, tool/implement shed, root house, outhouse and garage” (248). What I found surprising was that the rural tradition followed suit in urban centres: before World War II, a slew of public saunas were in operation such as Copper Cliff Finnish Baths (Jaakkola’s Sauna), Sudbury Steam Bath (Sepällä’s Sauna) and Alavo Steam Baths amongst others. After World War II, the sauna tradition flourished and other ethnic groups adopted the practice in cottage country (251). Still today, a canoe ride on Panache is not complete without seeing the many saunas — with the telltale puffs of smoke — dotted all along the shoreline.