This savusauna, a simple structure built in 1868 near Cokato, Minnesota, is the oldest extant example of a Finnish immigrant sauna in North America.

If you are traveling along a county road in wooded country regularly interrupted by small clearings, and intersected by roads with names that end in i or ala or nen, you are in the heart of North American sauna country. Any buildings you see that are similar to the structure just described have very likely been used as a family bathhouse.

Text excerpts and photographs taken from The Opposite of Cold: The Northwoods Finnish Sauna Tradition by Michael Nordskog, photography by Aaron W. Hautala. Published by the University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Copyright 2010 by Michael Nordskog. Photographs copyright 2010 by Aaron W. Hautala.
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The Cokato savusauna, built in 1868, was moved from its original roadside location because non-Finnish neighbors complained about public nudity and demanded its removal. It is now a proud monument to Finnish pioneers at a well-traveled rural corner.

In the 1960s, University of Minnesota-Duluth cultural geographer Matti Kaups found that the presence of outbuilding saunas on farms in the region was a telltale marker of ethnic identity. Ninety percent of Finnish American farmsteads had a sauna (a higher percentage even than on farmsteads in Finland), and saunas were common at all types of Finnish residences. Kaups casually observed that the sauna competed favorably with television as an evening activity among Finnish Americans.

The hearth, or kiuas (pictured, left), in the Cokato savusauna is representational but not functional. An open fire would heat the stones, and all smoke exited through vents in the log walls before the fire died out and bathing commenced. Vihta and vasta (pictured, right) are regional Finnish words for bath whisks, most commonly made of birch twigs harvested throughout the year. North American immigrants used other deciduous species as well as northern white cedar (Thuja occidentalis).

An indelible historical imprint endures in the Finnish American settlements of the upper Midwest, places like Cokato, New York Mills, Embarrass, and Esko in Minnesota; Oulu, Brantwood, and Marengo in Wisconsin; Calumet, Misery Bay, Negaunee, and Kiva in Michigan; and Ontario locations ranging from Thunder Bay to Sudbury. A vast inland sea dominates the middle of this region: Superior, the highest, freshest, coldest, and greatest of the Great Lakes.

These humble structures provided a warm place for births and the application of remedies, allowed farmers to dry their grain, and hosted the preparation of the dead for burial. Bathhouses of such construction may have been built on North American shores over a thousand years ago in the Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. While no such hearth has been identified at that site, the foundations of a structure essentially identical to a Finnish savusauna, or smoke sauna, have been unearthed at Sandnes, the Viking farmstead on the southwestern coast of Greenland, complete with wooden platforms for bathers and "enormous quantities of badly scorched stones." More certainly, the Swedish colony on the Delaware River in the present states of Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New Jersey featured saunas: the residence of Governor Johan Printz on Tinicum Island, an area now dominated by the Philadelphia International Airport, included such a bathhouse.

"A Finnish immigrant family in front of their first shelter in which they lived and bathed while the house was being built. Later it was a sauna." Photograph and caption from the papers of University of Minnesota Duluth geographer Matti Kaups, who studied Finnish immigration in North America. The photograph depicts the Aho family of Karvenkylä, north of Chisholm, Minnesota, around 1905. Courtesy of the Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota.

The Hanka farmstead near Tapiola, Michigan, serves as a living museum to Finnish immigrant settlement of the Lake Superior region. Among the familiar characteristics of Finnish farms are modestly scaled buildings, their intimate arrangement, and the ever-present ladder on the roof.

Sauna was crucial to the Finnish farmstead, and the common wisdom that Finns settled the land by first erecting a structure that eventually became their bathhouse is buoyed by a sea of family stories. If a neighbor's sauna were available, then perhaps that project could be delayed. But for the trail blazers, building a first, small structure in which they could live protected from nature seemed like a smart and prudent progression. Ludwig Bajari, who grew up on the northwest shore of Cokato Lake on his immigrant parents' farm, put it plainly: "No respectable Finn could live in the wilderness very long without a sauna.... The sauna was really the heart of the farmyard just as the kitchen was the heart of the house. Finns always felt sorry for the 'other language' people who didn't know enough to build one for themselves."

The Hanka savusauna is the best example in the region of a Finnish immigrant bathhouse. The wooden shaft that vents through the roof is a distinctive feature of savusaunas of the past.

On Erick and Sophie Bajari's 1870s farmstead, the sauna had many important functions beyond bathhouse: it served as a laundry in the winter, it heated a cauldron of water for butchering and other important needs, and both meat and fish were smoked and cured within. "If one was not careful while bathing, he would need an extra scrubbing to wash away the soot where he had touched the wall," Ludwig recalled, for these early buildings were all savusaunas. Unburdened by the extra expense of a stove and chimney, this immigrant structure was perfectly adapted to a pioneer economy.

The caption to this engraving, "The Black Finns," from On New Shores by Konrad Bercovici (1925), addresses the perception that the Finns were uniquely alien among North American immigrants; their peculiar language, penchant for radical politics, and practice of communal bathing set them apart.

On New Shores includes a chapter called "The Finns of Embarrass, Minnesota," and the writer strives from the outset to expose scandal while visiting the fiercely Finnish community in northeastern Minnesota, fueled by the prejudices of his local guide.

In Embarrass — and in the Finnish communities through which Bercovici traveled by auto from Duluth — the starkest symbol of this resistance was clear to him in the arrangement of the farmstead: "[A]lways there was one little building too many. Generally, it was a square, squat log house, which seemed to be half in the ground, with a wide door and a blind window." The writer fails to find any sin beyond a certain standoffishness in the Finns he talks to, but he freely quotes the guide, a man named Hall, for a more sinister view of these people of the marsh edges: "[T]he Christian Finns are all right... like the Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes we have in this State.... But the black Finns of Embarrass are not Christians at all. They believe in witchcraft. Every family has its own witch-house close by its living-quarters. And as often as a good Christian says his prayers, these black Finns visit their little witch-houses. It is a funny sight to see the whole family, each one wrapped in a large white sheet, going to this little house to pray to some deity. Now these black Finns, too, are good workers, but we know enough about them to keep away from them."

Bercovici confirms that this was not a singular impression, stating that other locals were convinced that the sauna was a place for strange and exotic worship. Wandering north from St. Paul, he had first visited the Danish community of Askov, Minnesota, and praised the disciplined order of the community's Scandinavian immigrants, who were eager to assimilate, perfecting their English faster than any other nationality. But he paints a stark contrast in Finnish Embarrass, where no two Finns and no two houses are alike.

Bercovici predicted that it would take at least two generations for Finns to shake the sauna habit.

The Ollila sauna in Brimson, Minnesota, is one of many on the shores of a spring-fed lake developed by a group of Finnish American families who built recreational retreats here in the 1930s and 1940s. The sauna is on property still owned by a family member.

Noted journalist of the civil rights movement Carl T. Rowan (left) was named U.S. ambassador to Finland in 1963. Prior to assuming his post in Helsinki, Rowan enjoyed a sauna in Virginia, Minnesota, with the local Finnish club president. Rowan had earned his degree at the University of Minnesota and began his career at the Minneapolis Tribune. Photograph by Chuck Brill; copyright 2010 Star Tribune (Minneapolis-St. Paul).

Sauna became known and practiced throughout the [United States], particularly during the 1950s and early 1960s, after the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, Finnish President Urho Kekkonen's 1961 visit to the White House during the Berlin crisis, and a flock of articles in magazines and newspapers promoting the exotic healthful practice. In 1962, a Wall Street Journal headline confidently announced, "Relaxing Sauna Baths' Growing Popularity Lifts Equipment Sales." In early 1963, Life proclaimed, "U.S. Takes Up Sauna Bake-bath: A Hot Fad from Finland."

Some Finns of the Lake Superior region saw a clear opportuenity to assert their authentic claim as a local source of sauna supplies. In March 1963, John F. Kennedy's newly appointed U.S. ambassador to Finland, Carl Rowan, was invited to the Iron Range and presented with an electric sauna stove locally manufactured by Ronald Lahti for delivery to President Kekkonen. With U.S. Senators Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy in attendance, the Iron Range marked Carl T. Rowan Day in honor of the first African American to reach the highest echelons of national diplomacy. Rowan experienced his first sauna at the residence of Mr. and Mrs. Wayne Luopa of Virginia, and gamely shared that "there are people in Washington waiting for a report on this." The new ambassador was offered a birch vihta but cautiously responded, "I don't intend to join any Birch Society." The Mesabi Daily News reported the next day that Rowan had lost four pounds during his initiation.

Sauna etiquette sometimes requires explanation: Maplelag Resort in Callaway, Minnesota, a popular crosscountry skiing destination, offers guests a choice between "suit" and "no suit" saunas, and this list of guidelines.

Saunas became popular across most of the continent due more to Life magazine and home-and-garden shows than Finnish ancestry. They are a standard feature in any health club that dares to put an umlaut on its name, and they sprout near hotel pools like cedar seeds in hothouse soil. But the sauna as a distinct building in the landscape is still a largely regional phenomenon.

A timber frame sauna built at the North House Folk School in Grand Marais, Minnesota, commands a rocky Lake Superior shore.

A century past the peak of Finnish immigration to North America, sauna is now the one word of Finnish that, depending on the pronunciation, most Americans and Canadians would recognize (too much authentic "ah-oo" and you lose plenty). Any debate over whether it is a healthful practice should succumb to that very fact. Finnish immigration did not fuel this widespread popularity as much as the Helsinki Olympics in the 1950s, the dawning awareness of the commercial potential of wellness in the 1960s, and the sprawling basement prosperity of the subsequent decades.