it, as close to his cabin as possible. A new post office was made available in 1909, and because the postmistress was named Olga Petrell, the whole countryside began to be called after her name. John Aho was the first mail carrier of the Petrell post office.

An earlier improvement had already made the ties between Brimson and the outside world a bit closer: a station house had been built at Breed, in 1906. Up to that time goods delivered by train had simply been unloaded beside the tracks, no matter what the weather, and had been left there to be picked up and hauled by the pioneers to their cabins as best they could : on their backs, if need be, over hills and across swamps, or hauled with ox and wagon.

Hjalmar Kaikkonen has related that when he came to Fairbanks in 1906 there was but one solitary horse in the village. Later there were more, usually at least one to every farmer. Sometimes this affluence also brought its problems, as appeared to one Finnish newcomer with a small, one-room cabin: when he bought a horse, he had no stall, and he finally decided to share his cabin with his equine friend.

The Finns in this area would have demonstrated their usual enthusiasm for clearing limitless stretches of land, but the soil proved so poor that it was not worth trying to bring very much of it under cultivation. Some tried dairy farming, but that did not prove profitable either, although there were breeding centers in both Fairbanks and Bassett. Primarily the Finns gained their livelihood from paid labor, for years from lumbering, somewhat less from the railroad, and then finally from mining.

Very early in this Brimson forest setting the Finns began to show the usual signs of group activity, with 1906 seeing the beginning of the first Finnish religious services in the area and the beginning of a group called the `Knowledge Society.' Representing the religious activity, the Reverend J. Rankila began to visit the community once a month to hold services, and in 1909 there was founded the National Church congregation with some 80 members. They built their own church in 1918 and have been served, in addition to Rankila, by pastors Ström, Rissanen, Hirvi, Vilenius, Ruotsalainen and E. V. Niemi. A second church, Congregationalist, was founded in 1935, but ten years later it had but 22 members; this church has had as pastor, Victor Holopainen.

The Knowledge Society, meanwhile, was transformed in 1910 into a chapter of the Socialist Party (with a membership of 28 in 1912) but was dissolved four years later in the wake of party dissensions which cast their influence even in this wilderness.

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