was about to break up and leave, Raymond spoke up and said iii-, would only be fair if they stayed now and watched what he was going to do. Leaning against the bar, or sitting on barrels, the men were present at the first religious service held in Virginia, in the barroom, that Sunday of the 23rd of April 1893.

By this time the community had begun to grow, and buildings began to appear one beside the other, without any pattern or logic, and there was enough of this building going on to justify a small sawmill. Even with this growth, the main street was still pure morass, and even the lightest rain produced big puddles. However, it was learned that the Finlayson Company had negotiated for the purchase of 50,000,000 feet of logs from the area surrounding the community, so it was felt that getting out such a quantity of timber would demand the making of adequate roads.

With both mining and lumbering activity increasingly important, it was expected that a relatively bright future awaited the community, and a name for the place became a matter to be decided once and for all. At first it was proposed that it be named after A. E. Humphrey, the president of the company which had made the land sales, but then opinion switched: since the wilderness was a `virgin' area, perhaps this factor should be taken into consideration, and so the name Virginia was proposed. Since it happened also be the name of the state Humphrey called his own, the name was acceptable, and so the village of Virginia was officially incorporated in 1893, with the names of two Finns, N. Jappila and Isaac Koski, listed in the official petition.

By that time there were, of course, other Finns in Virginia, but the very first one had been Oscar Kupari, who had arrived there with a surveyor in the summer of 1888. They had put up their tent on a spot which later became the center of town, and their job had been to map the area for the state for a possible plan of settlement. Kupari was offered a piece of land there, but as a `wise man' he had not wanted to `waste' his right to a land claim by going into such a desolate wilderness; he chose to pick himself a homestead site in Orris. Although he had literally walked back and forth for three months over earth worth millions, he had not realized it at all; it remained for the Finns who arrived later to take part in the trial probes into this earth to be more aware of the wealth that was present. The Virginia Story, a history prepared for the year of the Minnesota Centenary, mentioned that in 1892 the arrivals to Virginia included Sophia

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