California Finnish Cooperative Farm, 1912–1932

Editorial draft: This is a provisional English translation of the supplied Finnish manuscript. It has not been reviewed by the author or a professional editor and must not be published in its present form. Names, quotations, dates, and bibliographic details require editorial verification.

Despite its name, Redwood Valley is not a redwood forest but a valley enclosed by the Coast Ranges of Northern California. When I arrived there in 1979, the view on the valley floor seemed distinctly American: a gas station, a bar, and a few commercial buildings.

The bar was called Vicki’s. Its owner, Veikko Soinila, had spent his childhood on the Finnish cooperative farm. Veikko had retained his Finnish well, while his sister Signe already switched easily into English.

The bar was lively on a Saturday afternoon. Veikko played pool with his customers and closed before the official closing time because the atmosphere was becoming a little too spirited. The business had evidently done well: Veikko Soinila owned one of the finest houses in the valley.

At that time, it was still possible to meet people in Redwood Valley who remembered life inside the Finnish utopian community.

Founders from the Knights of Kaleva

The idea of a Finnish cooperative farm in Redwood Valley arose at a meeting of the Kalevan Ritarit, or Knights of Kaleva, lodge in Butte, Montana. The founders were miners. Anaconda Copper had laid off workers, and the unemployed Finns wanted to establish an enterprise of their own.

Kalle Lampi, Matt Jacobson, John Marsyla, and Aate Turula set out to find a suitable farm. They first looked in Oregon and then in California. In San Francisco, the Finns turned to a real-estate agent and ultimately found their way to Redwood Valley.

The farm offered for sale comprised 1,453 acres. It came with buildings, eight horses, 136 pigs, chickens and turkeys, four dairy cows, and a herd of 85 beef cattle. Kalle Lampi wrote the agent a cheque for the $5,000 down payment.

Arranging the rest of the financing was difficult, but the purchase price of nearly $60,000 was eventually raised. The agreement was signed in May 1912.

The first arrivals from Butte were seven families, among them the Soinilas. Their belongings travelled by rail, along with two cows. Other families later arrived from Nevada and Oregon.

Altogether, 33 families lived on the cooperative farm during its years of operation. People came and went, however, and no more than about twenty families lived there at any one time.

The Finnish Colony Inc. was formally incorporated in October 1913. Its term of operation was optimistically set at fifty years.

Redwood Valley was a labour-movement project. Socialism was discussed frequently, particularly in the early years. Everyone received the same pay for their work: one dollar a day. The company had five managers who rotated in office, but Alex Kauhanen gradually proved well suited to the task and led the community for many years.

Veikko Soinila described Kauhanen as “a very good man, but a little too easy-going.” The children also remembered the imposing Kauhanen in another role: every Christmas he had to play Santa Claus.

Housing and meals were communal. Six families lived in a large two-storey bungalow. The building burned down two years later, and the families lost their possessions. The replacement bungalow survived into later years as an ordinary residence.

Farming fails

The cooperative farm’s greatest problem was simple: the miners had bought poor agricultural land and knew little about farming.

No one could fault them for lack of effort. They first grew hops, but abandoned the crop when its price fell. Pear trees suffered from disease. They experimented with alfalfa and corn. Grape cultivation was defeated first by problems with water and later by Prohibition.

The farm kept chickens as well as dairy and beef cattle. It also raised horses, but the spread of automobiles caused demand for them to collapse. The herd eventually had to be sold at a loss.

In addition to farming, community members worked in the forests. Railway ties were hauled by horse to Ukiah, from where they continued by train to San Francisco. Breakfast might be eaten as early as three in the morning before a long day’s work.

The farm’s threshing machine was also hired out to neighbouring farms. The men operated the machine and the women prepared meals for the workers. A harvest celebration marked the end of the threshing season.

Water was a problem alongside the soil. The valley’s small river was dammed every summer to supply the fields. A second dam was later built to irrigate the alfalfa. When alfalfa cultivation ended, the reservoir became a swimming place.

It developed into a popular picnic spot where Independence Day was also celebrated with fireworks.

A Finnish summer destination

Although agriculture did not produce the hoped-for return, Redwood Valley acquired another significance. It became a popular summer and weekend destination for Finns from the San Francisco area.

Visitors also brought much-needed income to the farm. There was dancing in the bungalow, plays were staged at the school and in the yards of the houses, and excursions were made into the surrounding hills.

The sauna was used almost every day. The community’s children were washed there too, which was no small undertaking. At its largest, the child population exceeded sixty, and twenty-one children were born on the cooperative farm.

The valley had a school where lessons were taught in English. Veikko Soinila recalled that his brother escaped through a classroom window on his first day. The boy could not pronounce the teacher’s name correctly, the teacher became angry, and the child fled. Naturally, he was taken back the following day.

The children gradually learned English at school, but Finnish was spoken almost exclusively on the cooperative farm.

Breakup and a second attempt

After the enthusiasm of the early years, equal pay began to cause problems.

“Some people worked harder than others, and that caused arguments,” Veikko Soinila recalled.

The work was arduous. Forest had to be felled and stumps cleared before the settlers could even try to cultivate the land.

After ten years, it was clear that the cooperative farm was not viable. In 1922, the company’s land was divided into separate farms, with the plots allocated by lot. Families leaving communal housing had to build their own houses and roads.

Seven families, including the Soinilas, Kauhanen, the Talsos, and Marsyla, nevertheless wanted to continue the cooperative farm. They took out a loan, tried to cultivate the land, and worked in the forests at the same time. Mothers in the families also had to find paid work elsewhere.

The second attempt continued for another ten years. The final blow came with the Great Depression. There was no longer enough money to pay the interest and principal on the loans, and in 1932 the bank took possession of the farm.

Redwood Valley nevertheless displayed clear features of a utopian community. Everyone received the same pay for work, housing and meals were communal, and governance was democratic. The fact that some members continued the shared farm after the first breakup shows their faith in the original idea.

Veikko Soinila still assessed the experience positively later in life:

“It was all right, a good idea. But we should have chosen better land.”

Much more fertile land had been available only ten miles away. The miners had not known how to assess farmland and never mastered its cultivation.

After the cooperative farm dissolved, most of the Finnish families nevertheless stayed in Redwood Valley. The warm climate made life easier, and there was enough food even during the Great Depression.

Peoples Temple

The history of Redwood Valley took an astonishing turn in the 1960s. In 1965, the Reverend Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple settled in the valley.

The same small Californian valley thus became home to another utopian community, one with a far more dramatic fate.

Jones also attracted followers among local residents. A tenant of Veikko Soinila joined the group and later died in Guyana. One of Signe Soinila’s neighbours also went there.

Local people did not yet understand where events would lead, but the group’s secrecy caused unease. The compound had wire fences, guard dogs, and armed guards.

Finnish American Wayne Pietilä was one of the Peoples Temple’s bodyguards. Veikko Soinila’s daughter and her cousin once gained entry to the church, but they were not allowed to sit together. There were dogs and armed men in the hall. The girls returned home shaken.

Redwood Valley eventually became too small for the movement. Peoples Temple moved to San Francisco and later to Guyana, where Jones established the Jonestown settlement.

When alarming reports about conditions in the community began to emerge, Congressman Leo Ryan travelled to Guyana to investigate. Ryan was murdered in November 1978. Soon afterwards, more than 900 residents of Jonestown died in a mass murder and mass suicide.

For the residents of Redwood Valley, the tragedy was not merely a distant news story. Among the dead were former neighbours and acquaintances.

“Of course we knew he was a bad man, but the mass suicide was still a terrible surprise,” Veikko Soinila recalled.

Epilogue

I returned to Redwood Valley in 2007 and 2013. In three decades, the valley’s Finnish character had nearly disappeared. Veikko Soinila’s former Vicki’s bar had changed its name. Other people lived in the old Finnish houses.

I met Veikko Soinila, then ninety-three, once more in 2007. His ability to speak had already weakened, but he visibly brightened when he saw old photographs of himself and of the cooperative-farm years. Veikko died in 2009.

In 2018, Finnish journalist Senja Larsen interviewed Marvin and Linda Talso, who had lived on the cooperative farm as children. They had gathered extensive information about the Finnish history of Redwood Valley and published a book about it.

Linda Talso said that as many as eighteen of her former pupils died in Jonestown.

Faith in the original cooperative-farm idea had not disappeared. In Marvin Talso’s view, the Finns had worked enormously hard and tried almost everything possible. Even decades later, he believed that if the community had managed to continue for a few more years, it might have become a success.

The Finnish utopia in Redwood Valley did not necessarily fail because of its utopian ideals. Poorly chosen land, lack of farming experience, internal disagreements, and finally the Great Depression were decisive.

The cooperative enterprise ended, but in its changing forms it lasted for twenty years. The same small California valley later saw a second utopian experiment, one that ended much more darkly.