Association. When those members who were left began to grow older and their former zeal for participation in the association '3 affairs began to lessen, even while the younger generation showed no desire to carry on in their elders' footsteps, it became impossible to keep the Opera going. In 1938 the hall was sold to a regional organization, the Range Co-op Federation, and the Opera got a new name : Virginia Co-op Center. The new owners repaired and renovated the building extensively. The ground floor was made over into a cheese and sausage factory, with office space in front. On the main floor, the hall and stage were retained, although the balcony space was taken over for other purposes. The hall remained available, then, for meetings and small gatherings, and the Workingmen's Association was still able to use on occasion what they had once owned outright. Activity, however, subsided almost entirely to attempts to bolster the Industrialisti, although after World War II the association did participate with other local groups in Finnish relief programs.

When the Range Co-op Federation terminated its dairy activities in 1953, and also ended cheese and sausage production, the building began to prove unsuitable for any of their other business interests, and so the Co-op Center was sold in 1955 to the Virginia builders' unions.

Sulkanen has written that after the rupture in 1914, a small socialist group remained in Virginia and tried for some time to keep up a Socialist party chapter and a program of activities. Lacking sufficient support, however, the chapter died, and some of its former members retired from any participation in organized affairs while a few were absorbed into the Communist movement which started after World War I. This leftist group tried to remain active, and for a while it rented the Roma Hall for its meetings and later still assembled in the North Pole Hall. However, they made little headway in Virginia, and the group gradually faded away. A few of the Virginia Communists emigrated to Soviet-held Carelia in the 1920s, when enthusiasm was still high.

Jukola : On the corner of Second Avenue and 2nd Street North stands a big, old three-story wooden building, almost as a memorial to a unique form of Finnish settlement at its most flourishing period : the Jukola residential hall for men. At the period of the greatest influx of immigrants there were several Finnish boarding houses in Virginia: Luoma, Luukinen, Tamminen, Lukkarinen, Ellison and Hämäläinen, but with ever increasing numbers of young Finns continuing to arrive, and with working class consciousness and cooperative ideas gaining ground, the

433