A short history of the Finnmark

The first Finns who moved here came from eastern Finland, from an area called Savolax. They arrived in the seventeenth century, when Finland belonged to Sweden, after the king had encouraged people to colonise the inland areas of Sweden with a promise of seven years of exemption from taxes. They came by boat over the Gulf of Bothnia to Stockholm and Gävle, but did not stay in the towns. Instead they continued farther inland to the great forest wilderness, to areas where they could carry out slash-and-burn agriculture on land suitable for clearing and reclamation. The reason for the emigration was that the inner areas of Finland had expanded in a very short time and become populated to breaking point. Farms and villages grew up everywhere in the slash-and-burn areas. This cultivation technique and the colonisation movement was now transferred from Finland to the forest areas of central Sweden.

The Finns who came to Sweden chose to build on the high land, since there one was not affected by frost in the same way as in the valleys. Usually they built on the mountainsides, preferably facing south. The cottages they lived in were called "pörten". "Pörte" = kitchen in Finnish. A pörte had no flue from the fireplace, but the smoke was allowed to remain under the roof and now and then a sliding aperture was opened to let it out. In this way people were, for the most part, free of bedbugs, which were otherwise a dreadful source of trouble at that time. The first settlements in Nås Finnmark were established around 1620.

During the early period relations between Finns and Nås parishioners were rather tense, but soon relations quietened down. The growth of the population varied, since years of crop failure and epidemics occurred fairly often. In 1665 there were 21 people living in the Finnmark, while in 1865, i.e. 200 years later, the population had risen to 572. Now the Finnmark is being depopulated once more, for reasons that are well known, e.g. the fact that all manual forestry work has disappeared.

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