Provenance - Learning the History of My Finlander Barn Loom

Okay, now for Part 2 of the ongoing saga of my Finlander barn loom. 

If you read my blog post from yesterday, you will recall that a Menominee Range Historical Society member promised to get the director to dig through the museum donation records. They promised they would forward any provenance or information about the loom to me, if anything was written down when it was donated.

A few days later I had received a informative email with this intake form letter from when the loom was donated!

So let's see....

It was donated in 1992 by someone from the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, who lived near Detroit. How on Earth did it get up to the Menominee Range Historical Society at Iron Mountain, MI?  That area around Detroit really isn't really known for it's Finnish Population? 

Next, it says that the loom was owned by this person's grandmother? But no name of her? 

It says it was used in Ironwood, Michigan. Well that is about 130 miles away from Iron Mountain, Michigan, where the museum is located. So this really isn't a local resident's item put up for display?

It does say it's over a 100 years old. So that is very interesting. 

But I had a lot more questions!

Wellllll if you have questions, where do you go? I went to Google! And when I Google'd the name of this particular person who did the loom donation, I came up a good lead. I am hoping that he and his wife are both still alive, (I didn't see any listed obituaries) and it shows them still living at the same address. They are now both in their eighties!

I figured I had a pretty good chance of contacting these people to see what further information I could get.

I found some Facebook identities, and popped off a message to each of them.  It didn't look like they posted anything recently.  But I know on many formats for Facebook, you don't get the private messages from people who are not in your Friends List. They are sometimes hidden under a tab called "other".

So then I did the next best thing. I took out an old fashioned piece of paper, an envelope, and a stamp! I wrote a letter. I explained how I got the loom and how I was looking for any further information about his grandmother that he had listed on the intake paperwork.

A few days later the phone rang! Sure enough, here was this kind hearted gentleman calling me from Detroit. Oh my goodness! I grabbed a clipboard and a pen and started scribbling down everything that he was able to tell me. He was delighted that there was somebody that had gotten the loom rather than having it be discarded. But he was sad that the museum had decided to get rid of it. A few years ago, he had tried to go and see the loom on display, while visiting the Upper Peninsula.  Sadly, there weren't enough volunteers to open that particular building. He had visited the other two museum buildings at the two other different locations. But he was disappointed that there wasn't anyone to open the old library location.  He had really wanted to see his grandmother's loom.

Well now the questions from me started:

First of all, who was his grandmother?

Her name was Sanna Marie Salamaki Kangas.   Ahhhhh a Finlander!

And now the information started to flow. She was born in 1874 in Finland, was married there and had 2 children, then emigrated to the United States to Ironwood Michigan and had three more children.  She lived in Ironwood her entire life, in the same home. She passed away at the age of 78 years old in 1952.

She was married to a gentleman named Matt (Matti? Mathias?) Kangas, and he was a hard working miner in the iron ore mines of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He passed away in 1937, 15 years before she did. She always wore black clothing after that, for the rest of her life, a mourning widow.

Her grandson remembers her fondly, because he spent a lot of time with her,  and his family lived with her for a number of years during the Great Depression.

She always spoke Finnish, and never learned English. She would have the Finnish newspaper delivered each week to keep up on current events. Her social community was all of her Finlander friends and family.  Neighboring women would come and rent "loom time" from her. They would come to her home to pay to weave on the barn loom. Rather than moving the loom from place to place and renting it out that way, how enterprising it was that she would have them come to her home! Not only would she earn a little income from renting out the "loom time" and the loom was already threaded up with warp thread, she also got the pleasure of having people visit her. This kept her connected with the outside world. She never drove a car, so she depended on others to help her along, just as so many widows did in that day and age.

The home had no running hot water, only a cold water line into the house. There was no refrigerator. In the winter, they would keep things on the porch in pails and buckets of ice. In the summer, they had things kept cool downstairs in the cellar. 

She had a large garden, essential for providing for a family. She canned vegetables to sustain them through the long winter months. Her grandson especially remembers picking blueberries. They would journey into Wisconsin to pick blueberries together, and then go back home where she would can them into jars. He remembers wonderful bowls of blueberries, opened up from a jar in the middle of a cold snowy winter. They would eat them right out of the bowls. What a treat that she was proud to serve to her family.

Not only was she a rug weaver, she was also a prolific knitter. Her grandson remembers holding open long looped skeins of wool yarn between his hands while his grandmother rolled the yarn into perfectly round balls in preparation for knitting. He remembers her winding up the most perfect nice round balls of yarn. He said she was the best yarn ball winder that he ever knew. 

She was known to sit on her front porch and knit wonderful hats, sweaters, and the most warmest thick woolen hunting socks. Necessary of course for the winters in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Her grandson recalls her sitting on the front porch in her rocking chair, happily knitting away, singing religious songs in Finnish.

She sounds like the most delightful person to have known. I wish I had known her. She sounds just like me. Besides my weaving, I also knit, can vegetables, and sing (somewhat badly). And I do love my rocking chair on the front porch!

Now... get this... the grandson promised to send me the family historical ancestry along with some photographs! Just wait until I get those! He said I will be really really pleased with what his wife is gathering together to send to me. Oh boy!!!!

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Now on to the loom:

The loom is over 100 years old. Sanna had it made for her by a local woodworker in Ironwood, Michigan. 

So that explains the obvious carpentry skills involved in making this loom.  I was correct in detecting that it wasn't just a rugged piece of equipment put together to help earn money on a farm.  It was a chosen piece of textile machinery that was created, planned, ordered and built by a skilled person.

She didn't live on a farm per se, but lived in a home with a big wood barn. Up North, everybody heated their homes with wood. And the loom was kept out in the woodshed or wood barn.

Her grandson remembers sitting with his little butt right next to her on that nice wide bench built into the loom. He would help her with the rag balls and he would wind the stick shuttles.

He was concerned if I had gotten the other equipment that came along with the loom, especially the stick shuttles. Ohhh yes, I did!

I got the big huge warping reel for winding warps that attaches to a beam in a barn. It is attached floor to ceiling, and rotates to wind up many yards of new warp to thread on the loom.  It's huge, so it's folded up in our garage for now. 

Also, I got the pile of various warping sticks, a warping raddle, some temples, (sometimes called stretchers), a jig for tying new string heddles, and of course plenty of the stick shuttles. 

A tin can full of bits and pieces,  hooks and tools...

 especially this little sley hook. 

 Many lovely stick shuttles and a jig for tying string heddles

 Temples, sometimes called stretchers,

to hold the rug at full width while weaving, 

so it doesn't draw in at the selvages

There were also a few little cute boat shaped shuttles

 that were used to weave the headers with warp thread.

Side note, I love weaving with stick shuttles instead of the thicker bulkier rag shuttles like many other rugweavers use. I have always liked stick shuttles and was very pleased to see a whole pile of them that came with this loom. Now I like Sanna even more! She weaves just the way I weave!

The grandson said that the rugs that were woven and sold to friends and neighbors, and people within the town.

Sadly, the grandson's family moved away from Sanna's home and went down to Detroit. Their father did not want them to grow up to become miners like his father before him. He wanted his sons to get an education and get out and see the world and have a occupation other than mining. So when the grandson moved away, he still fondly remembers visits back to see his grandmother. She only lived a few more years after they moved away to Detroit.

At that time upon Sanna's passing, the loom was disassembled and taken all of the way down to Detroit. 

It was set up at their home. I think at this point the sidebar was attached for multiple positions of braking on the back beam. I think also a different cross brace was put on for the treadles as well, because the wood is different, and newer than the rest of the loom. 

That answers the question of how the loom got down to Detroit. 

But now .... How did it get back up to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan?   And donated to a small historical museum in Iron Mountain, which is a 130 miles away from Ironwood???

The grandson said after his own parents passed away in the early nineties, he was left to clear out their home in Detroit. So he wrote letters to every museum in the Upper Peninsula, asking if they would like the loom as a donation?

Only one museum responded back! The Menominee Range Historical Society would love the loom. So he loaded it up and transported it up to the museum in 1992. The museum people gladly accepted it along with all of the pieces he supplied. Not only were there all of the tools and supplies and the big warping reel, but he even included a rug that had been woven on the loom. Everything was tagged and numbered and recorded in the files along with the paragraph of information shown on the 1st photo I put on this blog.

Now that I have come full circle with this part of the story, I anxiously await the rest of the family history as well as the photographs. That will make another blog post. 

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If you recall on my last blog post I said there was a partially woven rug on the loom when I got it. We were able to preserve the threading throughout the moving process to my she shed. We put it all back together again with the partially woven rug on the beam. I was able to finish weaving that rug because there was a ball of matching rags that was supplied with the loom as well. 

I don't know who started weaving this rug. Was it the grandson's own mother, Felona, the daughter-in-law of Sanna? I don't know that yet.

But what did I do with that rug?

Well, on Saturday I boxed it up with a little note and I sent it to the grandson and his wife down to Detroit. I think they would be really pleased to have that rug from the loom. 

I know I am pleased to send it as an offering of thanks for all of the upcoming information that will be coming my way in the mail soon.

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So I sit here now, at my loom, wondering about the woman who first owned it. 

I now know that Sanna really wanted this loom. She must have paid a considerable amount to have a carpenter create it for her. I know that she was somewhat isolated after her husband died and family moved away. By renting out "loom time" to other people,  it filled that need when she was not surrounded by her other family members. I know that she loved fibers and enjoyed her life by weaving and knitting and singing and rocking. I hope to learn a lot more about her, but for right now, I think she is probably one of the most delightful people that I would want to meet and go back in time to have a conversation with.

As my little grandkids sit by my side on the loom seat, with their little butts, I will think fondly of her grandson who took the time to fill me in on all the details of his beloved grandmother, Sanna Marie Salimaki Kangas.