Visiting the Guest House Museum in Fort Bragg is a quick way to transport yourself back in time. Built in 1892, it is a gracious building that was originally the private home of the original owners of the Fort Bragg Redwood Company, the Johnson family. Built mostly of coast-grown redwood, great care was taken with details that make a building beautiful. Remembering that this was long before power tools, the craftsmanship exhibited is even more remarkable. The name “Guest House” comes from the fact that important people doing business with the lumber company were lodged and fed here when visiting the Fort Bragg lumber mill. The museum website states that 67,000 board feet of lumber were used in the construction of this house.
On my first visit to the house, my primary memories are of the stained glass windows, the enormous steam whistle (no longer functional) that once told mill workers when to start and stop working and an array of books on the history of the Mendocino Coast.
Of these books one in particular caught my eye, “The Nelson Brothers, Finnish-American Radicals from the Mendocino Coast” by Allan Nelson. A cover photo of the two brothers, Arvid and Enoch Nelson, with their blonde hair and light eyes reminded me very much of similar photos of my Swedish-American immigrant ancestors. I recently purchased and read it.
The early years of the Mendocino Coast’s development is full of high drama as any pioneering history is. The author of this book, Allan Nelson is the son of Arvid Nelson. He had access to correspondence between the two brothers. The fact that both brothers were Socialists underscores much of what is shared in the book which is divided between the memories of Arvid Nelson, Part 1: “A Rare Kind of Finn,” and Part 2: “Enoch Nelson and the Road to Soviet Karelia.”
Arvid lived his life promoting the socialist cause in America while Enoch returned to Soviet Finland in an idealistic effort to form a more perfect place for workers. Anyone with an abiding interest in the political, labor or domestic life of Fort Bragg’s early years will find much of interest here. Bruce Anderson, Editor of the AVA, reviewed this book around the time of its publication. (See review below.) My purpose in reading the book was to explore early pioneering activity as seen through the eyes of Finnish immigrants.
I was very surprised to learn that as of the 1940 census Finnish people made up the largest ethnic group in Fort Bragg. My expectation was that the Italians or the Portuguese would have topped the list. The Finns have a rich history and were instrumental in creating the Fort Bragg we know today. Recently artist Lauren Sinnott painted a large mural in downtown Fort Bragg as part of the Alleyway Project located off the 300 block of Franklin Street in downtown Fort Bragg which reflects different pieces of Fort Bragg’s Finnish history.
For example they built a 7,500 square-foot hall called Toveri Tupa (210 Corry Street) that was used for many community functions. This building stands today and is know as Eagles Hall. Finnish people were oriented toward cooperative effort, a tendency that enriched the town by providing spaces for concerts, meetings, dances and commerce that survive to this day. Also pictured are Kalevala Hall (now called Lions Hall at 430 Redwood Street), the Consumer Co-Op (Redwood and McPherson Streets) and the Finnish Lutheran Church (Redwood Avenue and Correy Street). Also pictured is a traditional Finnish style Sauna where families gathered to bathe, socialize and share food. The inscription on the mural reads, “Finnish immigrants valued cooperation, equality, organized labor and connection to nature.”
It is interesting and sad to think that this once thriving community that contributed so much to the early days of Fort Bragg is not very well known or acknowledged. History has a way of disappearing like waves erase letters drawn in wet sand.
To learn more you can search for “Finnish Immigrants on the Mendocino Coast” in your Internet browser and have a look around. In doing this I stumbled upon a website that posed a question about moving to Finland from the USA today. The question was whether the benefits of universal healthcare and other progressive social programs would offset lower wages and long winters. The answers include both pros and cons. The interesting thing is that this dialog is still active today on the merits of staying or going after all these years. I guess some things never change and for some people it is always greener on the other side of the ocean.
(Photos, courtesy of the Fort Bragg Mendocino Coast Historical Society.)
WHEN THERE WERE RADICALS
by Bruce Anderson (2008)
The history of Mendocino County is told in fits and starts in family memoirs, old timer interviews and in what seems like whispered references to long-ago scandals only hinted at by the newspapers of the time. The Nelson Brothers: Finish-American Radicals from the Mendocino Coast, by Allan Nelson, the son of one of those radicals, is unique in that it fleshes out a pivotal chapter of early local history in a scholarly, fully documented manner. The only other systematic attempt to make sense of early Mendocino County history is the local classic ‘Genocide and Vendetta’ by Estle Beard and Lynwood Carranco, the story of the murderous campaigns, one of them state-funded, by the first white settlers on the Indians of the Eel River watersheds from Covelo to Eureka. That book was litigated into silence soon after it appeared in the middle 1950s when it was successfully alleged by the descendant of an old Indian killer that the authors had used his grandfather's diary as a source for their book without permission.)
In The Nelson Brothers, Allan Nelson draws a fascinating portrait of his father, Arvid, and his doomed uncle, Enoch, whose unusual trajectories — tragic in Enoch's case — are illuminated by Fort Bragg-based scholars Russell and Sylvia Bartley who skillfully explain the complicated revolutionary politics that cost Enoch his life. As he tells the stories of his father and uncle, Nelson also gives us a vivid picture of Fort Bragg in the early 20th century when immigrant radicals, dreaming of a just world, were plentiful enough in Fort Bragg to establish their own institutions, a thriving community of socialists and independent idealists, people who worked hard, most of them Finns but with a fortifying admixture of Italian immigrants in a town whose contemporary “radicals” are mostly an incestuous crackpot crew of neurotics and exhibitionists.
Eagle's Hall, still standing at Alder and Corry, was erected by revolutionary Finns, and famous Finnish intellectuals made Fort Bragg a stop on their speaking itineraries. An early Rossi, we learn, was a communist and a great friend of Arvid's and Enoch's, and undoubtedly the first and only Fort Bragg Rossi hostile to capitalism as a form of social organization. Eagle's Hall was then called Toveri Tupa or Comrades' Hall, and the Nelsons, some of whom, we learn, were born at Whitesboro and then at Tunnel Hill east of Fort Bragg.
There's a Whitesboro Grange on Navarro Ridge, but until about 1920 there was a village of Whitesboro at Salmon Creek, just south of Albion, one of many disappeared settlements that once thrived in Mendocino County, little towns like Hop Flat near Navarro, Mina north of Covelo, and Whitesboro, which the Finns called Kala or, in Finn, Fish, the Finns being great ones for getting right to the point. The little town of Whitesboro was complete with a sawmill and a dog hole port and, at one time, an old country sauna Arvid Nelson built in their home for his mother.
The Nelsons arrived in America as the Poukkulas. They became Nelsons, of course, because if they hadn't their descendants would devote part of each day responding to, “How do you spell that again?” Arvid Nelson was a self-taught intellectual of the type once common in the country when formal education was restricted to people who could pay for it, and immigrant Finns and Italians were lucky to get a few years of elementary education. Arvid went on to become a well-known writer and illustrator for Finnish-language publications of the leftwing type. Enoch, a gifted engineer, also self-taught, joined the exodus of Fort Bragg Finns, inspired by the Russian Revolution, who returned to the motherland to devote themselves to building the new world. Enoch was eventually murdered in the Stalinist purges as “an enemy of the people,” but posthumously rehabilitated during the Kruschev era as a man who had been executed on the basis of zero evidence against him, one of millions to meet that sad fate.
The Bartleys’ afterword carefully explains the complicated politics of the purges that claimed Enoch whose earnest, American-nurtured idealism killed him in Russia, one of many West Coast Finns who'd gone home to make the revolution only to be eaten by it.
The Nelson family, in the person of Don Nelson, a retired woodworker's union rep at the extinct Fort Bragg mill, still lives at the Nelson homestead at Tunnel Hill which, like Whitesboro, once embraced a whole neighborhood of Finns. Dale ‘Crawdad’ Nelson, a grand nephew of Arvid and Enoch Nelson, and also a well-known writer who grew up in Fort Bragg, tells us that Tunnel Hill “is 1.9 miles out Sherwood-Oak from the main gate of the mill. It's called Tunnel Hill because the Pudding Creek-Noyo tunnel crosses under that point. I can say,” Nelson continues, "that Finns were instrumental in starting the commercial fishing industry out of Noyo, but I can't really say to what extent. I do know when those great uncles of mine were out of work in the depression, they used a raft to fish for steelhead in the Noyo, near the tunnel, and salted the fish for sale in other markets. They were known for boat-building. For instance, the Cluny, a Eureka boat, was built by two Finn brothers who built a boat every winter during woods layoffs, and named it after the liquor they used for motivation during that particular job… The Maki family in Noyo is a prominent boat-building and fishing Finn family. Howard Maki always used to have a dragger under construction at the top of South Harbor Drive — I don't know if that's still going on, but they once built a steamboat for the City of Petaluma, and my sixth-grade class took a field trip to watch them christen the North Star around '69 or '70.”
The first Nelsons on the Northcoast grew up in an area dominated by the Union Lumber Company. To say that class warfare was intense understates the case. There were frequent strikes and even a shooting not far from Tunnel Hill which apparently occurred when striking loggers, all of them immigrants influenced either by socialists or anarchists of the IWW, tried to return to their logging camp to retrieve their personal belongings only to be fired on.
Union Lumber shared the prevalent attitude of capital, circa 1910: “You shall employ no union man.” Socialists and the IWW were just as blunt: “Direct action will place the working class in possession of the economic power, the means of life, in control of the machinery of production and distribution, without regard to capitalist masters. There can be no harmony between employer and employee.”
These days, capital is as ruthless as ever but subtler at protecting its interests through front people like Congressman Mike Thompson, Barack Obama, Wes Chesbro, and the two political parties.
A particularly self-righteous Fort Bragg banker, we learn, a man who went way out of his way to make life difficult for Red Finns, turned out to be an embezzler, and in that Fort Bragg hasn't changed much. The town's subsequent history is replete with bribed city councils, arsons for profit, crooks in high places.
Much local history has been lost. This important book fills in some important blanks. It's a terrific story, well-told, and masterfully put into political context by the Bartleys. The Nelson Brothers is published by the Mendocino Coast Historical Society and the Mendocino County Museum in association with the Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota.
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