trip06: Kaunisvaara
Excerpt from a PATREON post from OCTOBER 15, 2022
Kaunisvaara, where Wilhelmine's mother was born, is like many of the names you see on maps here, a small village where people live and farm. Kaunisvaara was more populated than other villages I traveled through, but not large enough to have businesses. Pajala is the place for that. However, Kaunisvaara is also known as a mine location ... which makes me wonder which came first (I can do that research of course) and how/why my ancestors picked this place.
As I drove past the Kaunis Iron plant, the building reminded me of those on the Iron Range. Oversized mining trucks brought me right back to the scale of mining in Minnesota. Too familiar.
For those who don't know, I was born in Virginia, MN and grew-up in a little 'village' called Parkville that is currently being consumed by MinnTac mines of Mt. Iron, MN. When I was 12 we moved to Duluth, but my formative years were spent on the Iron Range.
My mom, Gladys, was born in Hibbing and spent her formative years living in the Mahoning Location. Locations were neighborhoods/villages constructed by the mining companies so the workers could live close-by. Her father, my grandpa Helmer, was an electrician for the mining company, so it made sense they lived there. At some point in her adolescence Mahoning needed to go so they could mine the land under the Location. (I think they would move the houses? Need to look into that, too.) This is when her family moved out into the country to the house my grandfather built for them.
One of the common questions my friend, Sara, and I have asked as we planned our joint-but-separate trips to our ancestral lands, is the role that mining has played in our lives. (Sara was also born in Virginia, lived her formative years in Hibbing, and descends from Finnish immigrants.) I don't think I had fully grasped how far back this relationship with mining might go in my lineage. And, being here, feeling these places they left while imagining the conditions that caused them to leave, gives a context that is hard to hold given our modern abundance. The idea that we would pickup our entire lives ... on the hope of an idea of a means to survive ... is beyond many people, even as it happens daily in other parts of the world. The disconnect is heavy.
