a center of railroad lines serving vast agricultural areas extending into the Dakotas, to become the site of businesses, colleges and universities, a city of great beauty with its numerous lakes and parks. For a long time the Swedes, Norwegians and Finns, whose numbers were estimated at one-third the city's total population, were the leading national elements in the city, and although members of nationalities from farther south in Europe later became predominant, the city is still strongly Scandinavian if the succeeding generations of Scandinavian descent are taken into consideration.

The first Finns in Minneapolis appeared in 1865, coming from Red Wing and pausing here on their way to the west. Within a few years others came back from the west, pioneers from their homesteads who spent their winters in the city to earn money; the brickyards, for example, used to employ many such immigrants. The earliest statistics of the number of Finns present in Minneapolis was made by the Uusi Kotimaa in 1881, which wrote that there was much work to be had, even by the Finns, at $1.75 the day, and that there were already about two hundred Finns living there and more arriving all the time. That figure was obviously exaggerated, because on Christmas Eve of that same year that same newspaper wrote that "there are more than forty Finns living at present in Minneapolis, most of them single persons. There are both men and women, and every so often there is another wedding." However, no matter how inaccurate the statistics might have been, it is obvious that the number of Finns was increasing. Again, although there were later estimates at the turn of the century claiming their numbers to be some three or four thousand, or even seven or eight thousand, a figure closer to reality was probably something over one thousand. The 1920 census lists 1,120, and since then a downward trend continued, so that the 1950 figures listed only 770 being native born Finns.

Religious Interests: Church activity began briskly in the 1890s. Although Pastor E. Bachman from Upper Michigan came to hold services in Minneapolis in 1880, organized religious activity was still a decade in coming. The followers of Laestadius were soon divided, splitting into two separate groups, with separate churches, one on Humboldt Avenue and the other on Newton Avenue, and there was even a third, independent apostolic group. Previous to the splits, however, the Minneapolis Apostolic Lutheran Church had even served as host for an annual national convocation, in 1913, with whole series of sermons, early morning business meetings followed by more sermons in the afternoons, and evening

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