Located near the community of Embarrass, Matt and Kaisa Hill’s farmstead was one of a collection of rural properties in central St. Louis County that exemplified Finnish immigrants’ imprint on the cultural landscape of northern Minnesota in the early 1900s.
When Finnish-born Matt Hill (also recorded as Matt Hilli) and his wife Kaisa (or Kate)* began to improve a 160-acre homestead in rural Pike Township in the final years of the nineteenth century, they joined a community of immigrant farmers near the small community of Embarrass who were introducing the rural settlement patterns of their native Finland to Minnesota.
The Hills were among the many thousands of immigrants from Finland who made new homes in Minnesota around the turn of the twentieth century. Available historical sources do not reveal why Matt Hill sought to make a new home in Pike Township, although he had previously lived in Biwabik, where he may have been employed in the Biwabik Mine. Farming would have offered Hill a less dangerous livelihood than the mines in the Mesabi and Vermilion Iron Ranges, where many Finns found work when they first arrived in the United States. The 1862 Homestead Act allowed American residents to establish farms on land obtained from the federal government for a nominal cost, so long as the applicants settled on the granted properties and made improvements within their first five years there. Like other immigrants to the US of the same generation, Hill sought a homestead to strengthen his family’s foothold in their new country.
In 1897, Hill applied for 160 acres in Section 26 of Pike Township. Situated on a bluff above the Pike River, the land lay in the “cutover region”—meaning lumber companies had already removed its first-growth trees. Farmland in the cutover region was viewed as having poor quality, but for this very reason it remained available for homesteads at the turn of the twentieth century.
During the next five years, the Hill family cleared sixteen acres of rocks and tree stumps. They converted five acres into arable land, where they grew hay. To transform the property into a true home, however, they erected a collection of buildings in their clearing, including a dwelling, sauna, and several outbuildings loosely arranged around a central courtyard. This layout reflected a settlement pattern often found in rural Finland, although simplified for a small subsistence farm.
The house (tupa) contained just two ground-level rooms, a loft, and a cellar, so it was not spacious for its six inhabitants: Matt, Kaisa, their three children, and Kaisa’s mother. Even so, the house was expertly constructed of logs hewn into planks, which were laid horizontally and joined at the corners with double notch joints. The cattle barn (navetta) and the original smoke sauna (savusauna)—a fixture of Finnish farmsteads—lay north of the residence and were built using similar methods. The double notch joints allowed the logs to fit so tightly together that no chinking (sealant) was added between logs. The cattle barn contained animal stalls and a hay loft. The sauna lay the furthest distance from the center of the farmstead, most likely because it posed a fire danger to the rest of the buildings.
The Hill family’s farm also featured a well (kaivo) and a hay barn (lato), which was constructed of unhewn logs with saddle joints. Hay barns were common on Finnish farms and allowed farmers to store hay next to their fields. Accordingly, the walls of the Hills’ hay barn had spaces between logs, which let in air to dry the hay that was stored inside.
Matt Hill completed the homesteading process in 1903, when he certified he had lived on his property continuously for five years and made the necessary improvements. Census records indicate his family remained in Pike Township until at least 1930, and they continued to add buildings to the property, such as a chicken coop and a second sauna. The farmstead was not electrified or otherwise altered substantially well into the twentieth century. Although the region’s harsh climate took a toll on the buildings, the farmstead retained its physical integrity and—along with several other Finnish American agricultural properties near Embarrass—was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1990.
*Editor’s note: The 1990 National Register nomination form for the farmstead identifies Matt Hill’s wife as Emma rather than Kaisa. Accordingly, it calls the property the Matt and Emma Hill farmstead. The 1905 Minnesota state census, however, shows that in that year, Matt and Emma Hill were living in Morse Township, and the occupants of the Pike Township farmstead were the family of a different couple, Matt and Kaisa Hill. To reflect this fact, this article refers to the Matt and Kaisa Hill farmstead.