other places, the society soon came to an end. There has been no other organized Finnish activity in Mesaba.

Great Scott Township

West of Nichols Township and Mountain Iron lies Great Scott, named thus because the petitioners requesting formal organization could not agree on a name and heard the commissioner to whom their application was delivered a second time exclaim, "Great Scott! Still thinking of a name?" and then decided that this would have to do.

There is no certainty that there were any Finns among the original settlers - 108 persons in 1900 - but in 1910, when the population was 2,322, many of them were Finns.

All the mines in the township were limited to a relatively small area, where two centers of population developed, Buhl and Kinney.

Buhl

Forestry operations, begun on a moderate scale in 1890s, and developing into major proportions by 1900, were the start of Buhl: timber and mine props were in demand, and it was as lumberjacks that the first Finns came here: "Our people began to arrive in 1896, and soon there were hundreds of them," wrote Ilmonen. Shortly afterwards mining operations were begun by the Sharon Ore Company, whose president, Frank H. Buhl, gave his name to the village organized in 1901. Of the mines, the following deserve mention:

The change from a community peopled by lumberjacks to a mining town brought external changes and added considerably to the average wealth, to an appearance of a cultural center. In this development the Finns and their organizations played their role.

The community had not always been an exemplary one, and in 1905 the Työmies was still worrying that Buhl "had a dozen saloons but not a single church." Under such circumstances it was not surprising that the first Finnish endeavor there was a temperance society, the Rantakorven Kukka. It was at its most

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