Patrick Driscoll Course Blog

Patrick Driscoll. 12/10/17

So this was probably one of the best classes I have ever taken. But when I first starting taking this course I did not think that that would be the case. The reason I took this course was because I had WordPress experience. I had created another WordPress site for another course on The Reverend Crocker, who was a Freedom Rider from Boston and Providence. I figured that because I already knew how to create a good WordPress site I would find the class to be very easy. Interestingly enough the work itself wasn’t the hard part, it was the massive time commitment that was required to getting the WordPress site up and running. But I’ll start from the very beginning.

The first week of class I was very nervous. For one thing, I did not realize until the last second that the class started a week before my other classes, and I was not on campus yet. I had not tested my headset microphone in weeks, so I had no idea if it still worked or not. I also had no idea what the course was actually going to be about, or what I would be expected to do in terms of coursework and homework. I just checked my student email account, found the code for zoom, and then I realized I didn’t know the name of my partner and got her confused with one of the students from Massachusetts Public College of Liberal Arts. In my defense I got Kaitlyn and Kerrin confused, so I was at least on the right track. They are both from Massachusetts, so I had my states correct. My problem was and still is to this day a bad memory for names and faces. I honestly did not know much about Kerrin before I did COPLAC’s migration and immigration class, so I felt bad that I did not know her name when she knew mine. After the initial embarrassment I felt I introduced myself and the general introduction continued.

The first few weeks of class I felt like I was not really doing anything in the course nor outside of the course. I just showed up, clicked on the Zoom class ID, and listened for 75 minutes. Then we were told about the project websites and that we had to build a site that discussed past migration and/or immigration into our local region. My first thought was, “well this is going to be impossible” Keene is a town in Western New Hampshire, surrounded by hills and nothing really surrounding it, minus Swanzey to the South and Marlborough to the east, and those are small towns. I thought I would have a really difficult time finding any history of any kind of migration or immigration to Keene. Turns out I was right.

Kerrin and I went to the archives at Keene State and we had no idea what we wanted to do for a topic. The hotbed of immigration in New Hampshire was Manchester, (and really the only known center of immigration in New Hampshire) so we figured we might find out something about Manchester. We did see quite a few books about Manchester, one that caught my eye was a book about Lebanese immigration to Manchester. However a book that caught my eye immediately was a book by Olli Turpeinen called The Finns in Newport. I have no idea why, but I immediately wanted to do a project based on this book. Something about it spoke to me, maybe it was the fact that it was bigger than the other books we were presented, maybe it was because I never heard of Newport (I have lived here for twenty-one years and somehow in this small state there was a town I was still unfamiliar with). Whatever the reason I was convinced almost from the get-go that this should be what Keene State’s project was about. It also happened to be about twenty minutes closer than Manchester, so it made for a better argument as well that it was closer to our college. Kerrin was not convinced at first, and was interested in looking into the Lebanese community or the Hispanic community of Manchester. I argued that the Hispanic community was already well-known, if not as thoroughly researched as it should be, and the as for the Lebanese community they were a little outside of what we should be studying. Nothing against the Lebanese, but Manchester is a bit over an hour from Keene (, so it seemed a little too far to be studying. If we were doing this project from where I grew up, I would have been convinced by Kerrin and agreed to do the Lebanese.

Kerrin agreed with me, and we both decided to do the Finns. We now had a topic but we still had a problem. Someone needed to go to Newport and find more information. Kerrin and I both decided to do the first trip together and see what we could find about sources. To our profound relief, there was quite a lot of information available that would later end up creating the project website. However, we would need a lot of research days, and Friday was the only day that worked for me because it is a fifty minute drive to Newport. I don’t know how many times I wished Newport was about fifteen minutes closer. Because if it was it would require zero planning, and I could travel there any day of the week. It was just far enough away that I could not go to it long enough to make the day productive if I went on a Tuesday for example (all of my classes are 2pms 4pms and a 6pm). Weekends were off limits because the library was not open for very long on Saturday, and as for Sunday it was closed. So Fridays became a ritual of travelling to Newport for research. Kerrin had to work those days, and quite frankly had a much busier schedule than I did, so I went by myself.

Those research days in Newport were both very fun, and very stressful. There was so much information to digest, and only so many hours in the day. The library closed at 6pm, and I usually arrived around 11am so seven hours should be enough to get all the information I need on one trip right? I ended up doing three of these six to seven hour trips in total, and I spent my entire workday on the road and in that library. I’m not complaining, it is what had to be done. I met on my first personal trip alone Mary Lou McGuire, to whom I owe all of the visuals for this project. Without her, the website would be a wall of text. Parts of it still is due to lack of visuals about Newport (it’s a small town). Anyways, McGuire was very interested in my project with Kerrin and I talked to her about what we were doing. I mentioned the photos I was finding, and she offered to scan them. I owe her as many thanks that are humanly possible.

Kerrin was extremely useful when it came to making timelines, figuring out what we should do with visuals, and the overall organization of the website. I may have done most of the research, and the pages that have walls of text, but she organized all of it into timelines someone can read and actually understand what the website is about. Without Kerrin, this project would be very bland looking, and there would not be any timelines that digest the information I found while researching. She also created the wonderful introduction page that will actually catch the attention of some people into reading my paragraphs of research that only a handful of people are even aware exists. I just checked, as of 12:03 12/11/2017, the words Finns, Finland, and Finnish do not exist on the Wikipedia page for Newport, New Hampshire. Kerrin and I have truly made something special.

A lot of our information comes from our initial source, so I think the biggest challenge for Kerrin and I was justifying why anything we were doing was important, new, or why it mattered. What Kerrin and I did was we put Olli Turpeinen information on the internet for anyone to read. We did not just do that however. What we have done indirectly is gotten Newport’s history before the Finns to talk to Newport during and after the Finns. I could never find direct evidence about this on the website, but something Kerrin found in her research is something I have noticed as well. She commented on her timeline that Finns needed to be declared white by a US federal judge, and his name is William A Cant.[1]

Turpeinen does not talk about this much, but I got the impression that Finns were separated from the rest of Newport for decades. He talks about how the Finns “discovered” tomatoes, ketchup, and pizza, and various other foods and condiments throughout his book. He says it was because of the language barrier, and while that is a part of it, it just feels incomplete. They were also from another country, which is certainly part of it. Turpeinen does not want to talk about anything negative about the Finnish community nor Newport’s other residents, they might as well not exist when the Finns are around. Other than the fact he admitted that they were poor and that there were massive political debates between Socialists, Communists, and the Finnish temperance movement, everything seems too perfect. It is my personal belief, (although I don’t have proof) that there was more prejudice than Turpeinen lets on between the Finns and the other non-Finnish resident of Newport. I wish I could of expressed this, but I had no sources other than instinct and a general understanding of American history of anti-immigration.

I have run into quotes saying that everyone loved the diversity, according to Finns, or people of Finnish descent that were not adults during the time of the Finnish community, which heavily declined after World War II. This is the United States during a time period of intense Nativism and anti-immigration policy, and yet other than the fact that less Finns started arriving, everything still seems okay. It paints the best picture of the Finns in Newport, and rarely mentions the other people in Newport even for a moment. There’s little evidence that the Finns ever existed in Newport, most of it is in Turpeinen’s work and the Richards Free Library. It might just because Newport is a small town, and that might be all there is to it. One thing is clear, and that this Finnish community was at least one third of Newport’s population at its height. There is no way residents were not aware of this. Yet, it is now a forgotten memory, preserved by Turpeinen, and my website that I created with Kerrin. Hopefully, this project will inspire a few to look into their own local history. If Newport has history, anyone’s town has history.

[1] Turpeinen, 6.

So I was able to go to Newport last Thursday and gather more research for the project. I just have one more trip to do this Friday and then I should be done travelling up there and back. I learned a lot about what came before the Finnish arrival and more information about the Finns itself. I now feel like I have just about everything I need to  complete this project, the only problem now is finding the time to upload all of the information I have to the project website. Some of it will probably not be included, but I want to add as much as possible to the story of Newport’s immigration aspect or at least one part of it. As I learned last Thursday, there was also a Greek and Polish community at one point in time in Newport, but sadly Kerrin and I do not have time to explore those communities.

Goals for Next Tuesday 11/21/17

Complete all first draft information on the Finns before Newport.

Complete all first draft information on the political, family, and working life of the Finns in Newport.

Start the section on Finnish cultural History.

I’ve a lot to do between now and next week, but I think it can be done if I set my mind to it.

So due to me not feeling well, I did not go to Newport Friday. I will be going this Friday no matter what to get so more research on the culture of the Finns. I know a lot about what came before, and what it was like for the first and second generation to live in Newport, but I only know about their political history and that they worked in mills. I need to upload all the information I already have, my bibliography, and some timelines. I still have unanswered questions. What was it like to work in the mills every day, what was it like to not speak English for the first generation, and what was there culture like? There are even more questions I have that sadly I will most likely not find answers to. Significant progress has been made on uploading all of the portraits of the Finns that I have discovered on my various trips up to Newport. I did not get as far as I would like, so I’ll have to keep uploading them on Tuesday. Tomorrow I will be working on uploading the rest of the photos and Wednesday, and Thursday I hope to make significant progress on Newport before the Finns arrived to the area. It’s not as much as I would like to have done for Tuesday, but it is progress. By the time we meet for class Thursday there will be a lot more updates coming to the website. This coming week I plan on devoting all of my free time to working on the project.

I will once again be travelling to Newport for the third time. While I have familiarity with the sources I have, there are more sources up there that will contribute greatly to this project.  I also have a lot of photographs that will serve as great visual guides for the rest of the project. In addition, these photographs will also serve as a great collage of photographs. What I plan on doing before I go up to Newport is uploading all of the photographs that I have to the website.  If Mary-Lou McGuire is available when I am up in town that day, I would like to get the remaining photographs scanned. I’ll go through the collage on the website to the photos I have that way photos aren’t scanned twice. If she is not available on Friday that is okay, because there are still loads of sources that I have only glanced over. These sources will provide more information about The Finn Hall, the Finnish Boarding Houses, and the Finnish cuisine. Also this weekend I plan on updating and adding in as much information to the project website as I can, and hopefully some timelines.

The project website is now under construction and Kerrin and I are now working on building the website. Our plan is to divide the website into roughly four parts as of this point in time, and this is subject to change as we complete the project. The four categories are this.

1. What came before the Finns? Newport, New Hampshire was not always a Finnish town. Like all towns and regions in what would later become the United States, the Newport area was once home to a Native American tribe, in this case the Sunapee. They left the region when white settlers came in and many died from European diseases. Newport, NH itself was chartered in  1761 and this is when white settlers and colonists first started to move into the region. This section will cover up until the first arrival of the Finns.
2.   The Arrival of the Finns:  This part of the project will cover the early arrival of the Finns up until the 1940’s. This is when the Finns became a dominant immigrant group in Newport. This part of the project will also explain why these Finns didn’t settle in a place like Manchester, a bigger city with more potential from job. Naturally not all of the Finns that arrived in the United States went to Newport or even New Hampshire, but this part will explain at least why Newport was an attractive town for the Finns to live in and settle.
3. The Culture of the Finns: This part of the project  will explain what the day to day life of the Finns. Work life, home life, boarding houses, religion, the Finn Halls, and anything else Kerrin and I can find on daily life for the Finns in Newport.
4. Lesson plans: This was Kerrin’s idea. Basically what she was asking how can we translate this information to make it useful beyond this semester? So why not make a lesson plan to explain how to teach this information for teachers? It could also be useful to do a lesson (s) on a school’s own local community and how it came to be.

I traveled up to Newport again to get more information for my project and to look at sources. What I got was something more than I could of expected, which was an interview with Marylou McGuire. Marylou McGuire coauthored and printed a book called Newport New Hampshire in Time and Place. It’s an extensive book that covers all of Newport’s history and includes a section about Finnish Houses. What’s more, is that Marylou McGuire sent extensive amounts of scanned photographs for the project that I will share with the class. These photographs show that there were many pictures taken of the Finns, but sadly most could not be identified. There seemed to have been days where a photographer was in town, and every Finn in town would get their photo taken. Two photos seem to suggest that, as both of them have the same pine tree in the background. Sadly we do not know the names of most of the people in the photographs, nor when the photos were taken. However they still provide insight into what the Finns looked like, and provides great portraits.

• Project Goals
• This project aims to explore the Finnish migration and immigration into New Hampshire.
• The focus will be on towns from Newport, New Hampshire to Fitchburg, Massachusetts.
• The project is focused on documenting the lives of the Finns in New Hampshire, and what their experience was impacting the state of New Hampshire.

• Another goal is to see if the Finns still live in the towns they first arrived to in the 1880s, and if their not where did they end up?

• If we find out they went to other towns and communities outside of New Hampshire and Fitchburg, Massachusetts we will investigate if there is any significance in their change in location such as a push factor and use that research to fuel its weight in the final project.

• We hope to bring to a wider audience the Finnish experience in New Hampshire.

• We also hope to contribute to a wider awareness of cultural diversity in a seemingly homogenous state population such as New Hampshire.

• Tools to be Used

• Storymap is a tool that we plan to use to map out the communities the Finns lived in. Storymap will also be used to help locate geographically where these Finnish communities were/are on the map.

• We also plan to use TimelineJS to illustrate various important chains of events in Finnish migration history in New Hampshire.

• We plan on using multiple pages on our website to organize information by subject, so that any visitor to the website can explore what interests him or her.

• We will utilize Twitter in various cases to conduct outward facing research and extend our project to additional platforms.

• Goals for Kerrin and Patrick

• Compile information from primary sources that are mostly from Newport, NH, and secondary sources from University of Michigan, Olli Turpeinen’s book on the Finns in New Hampshire to develop an in depth history of Finnish migration to New Hampshire and their culture and impact in the area.

• Conduct outward facing reliable research and project that is professional and informative on the Finnish heritage that exists in New Hampshire.

• Use a variety of resources (pictures, newspapers, books, magazines, interviews) across many platforms (WordPress, Twitter) to make our project more accessible and interesting to hopefully allow for more awareness of this history.

• Schedule of Milestones

• September 21st: Read half of Ollie Turpienen’s book The Finns in Newport, New Hampshire

• October 5th: Kerrin to request files from University of Michigan that will help facilitate research and support in project direction.

• October 6th: Patrick revisit Newport to cite and research the various sources that we know exist in the Richards Free Memorial Library in Newport.

• Week of October 12: Sort through, prioritize, and organize research and begin process of developing project website.

• Week of October 19: Continue developing and editing project site.

• Week of October 26th: Continue developing and editing project site.

• Week of November 2nd: Continue developing and editing project site.  By this time we will have visited Newport one last time if we find it necessary. This may be important for collecting more pictures, getting in touch with more people who are aware of Finnish history, or visiting cemeteries and searching for Finnish people.

• November 9th: Create our Storymap.

• November 16th: Final version of our TimelineJS(s)

• November 23rd: Start to put the final touches on the project website/ final editing.

• November 30th: Complete the project.

So apologies for not properly embedding. Here’s where I am at with my timeline.

https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index.html?source=1GPIV3Jn3m1_t7-TH6Y5jnL2tzQNN4Fv00rH1hAYVeQY&font=Default&lang=en&initial_zoom=2&height=650

Right now what I am thinking is creating multiple timelines. I like the format but dates are working against me. Besides the fact I should not exceed 20 events per timelines, things like to happen at inconvenient. I have about 3 dates I could have included about Finnish politics but they happened while I was discussing another event, such as the formation of the Finnish church. Multiple timelines will help me look at each topic about the Finns in Newport without other events interrupting what I was talking about.

When the Finns started to arrive in Newport, they started to slowly recreate the culture they left at home, and food was no exception. One of their main dishes was the soup. “Soups of all kind, beef soup, cabbage soup, potato soup, fish and lamb soup. Pea soup was a standard of the Finnish army and soup was served at Finnish social , at the halls, at the tract meets at the Finn Park” (p. 13). Another soup that was considered a delicacy was fish soup. All the fish used in Finnish fish soup was not bought at a store, the Finns instead caught it fresh in Newport. The way they did this was by violating fishing laws and the place they fished, “Ledge Pond called Silkkonjarvi (Sullko’s Lake) was prime fishing ground. The pond was secluded and John Sulkko a Finn, owned most of the frontage. They were no cottages, no outside interference, and the conditions were ideal for catching a fish extra fish for Sunday’s picnic” (p. 15). The fish soup was a borderline delicacy, and was one of the fanciest things Newport Finns ate.

Another stable of the Finnish diet was butter. If it did not have butter on it, it was not food according to the Finns. In fact when Finns picked up a bag of lunch before going to work if they did not have time to walk home for a lunch break, “The meal in the bag was same heavy diet, ham sandwiches with butter, minced ham sandwiches with butter, bologna sandwiches with butter… to begin making the dough for coffee bread Finnish  women through in a huge slab of butter. As a result of this butter-laden fat meat diet Finns had the highest rate of heart disease in the world” (p. 14). This probably is not true anymore, but it’s rather extraordinary that this was the case in the early twentieth century.  The Newport Finns were resistant to changing their diet, but overtime it became more Americanized. Corn on the cob became an instant favorite and after World War II the diet changed so much that the Finns eventually discovered pizza and, “As a matter of fact, it wasn’t bad at all, and on Saturday night the old-country Finn found himself waiting in line for a take-out pizza” (p. 14). The irony to this moment is that the Finns were already used to a high fat diet. They were already prepared for the future.

Turpeinen, Olli. The Finns in Newport, New Hampshire, United States: United States, 2000. Print.

I’m writing this blog post for the entire class, not just to do a homework assignment. If you are worried about violating fair use, don’t be. That being said don’t just randomly put in a photograph or an essay. The Fair Use checklist can be boiled down to three main categories.

1. Education & Research: We are doing our projects, and our work, for a class to inform the world about local migration and immigration in our communities and our surrounding areas. We are pretty spread out from as far northeast as New England, to as far south as North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas, to as far west as Missouri and Minnesota. We’re informing the world about migration and immigration in seven different states, with tech support in Virginia, so in total we are spread out between eight states.  Our projects inform the world about migration and immigration throughout the United States. The only thing I have to add is if in doubt, contact in whatever way you can the original author if you are concerned about violating copyright laws.

2. Citations: Where are we getting our information from? Who is the author, what is the title’s of the author’s work, who published it etc. We are using Chicago for this class so we are going to cite using that method. The main point is that we are giving credit to the original source for their information, and not claiming that we wrote the article, or the book, or the database entry etc., in question.
3. Profits, or lack of: Our projects are not intended to turn a profit, and therefore we should not use any article, photograph, or website to make money for ourselves to pay rent. If it’s strictly our own information and product it would be different, but that is not the case here. As long as everyone bares that in mind, (and personally I do not think that this is going to become a problem) then everyone will do just fine.

As for Creative Commons licensing, it is even more straightforward than studying what is fair use. Kerrin does an excellent job telling us how to use a Creative Commons license and how to set one up. The only thing I really have to add to Kerrin’s explanation of how to set up a Creative Commons license without repeating her, is why we add a Creative Commons license to our websites. Basically it shows that we are using everything we put on our blogs and our website under the definition of Fair Use. It doesn’t mean we own all the information we cite from, just that we have used it fairly. Fair Use and Creative Commons goes hand in hand, and if you use