Finally, there has been a Finnish relief committee, which Alex Jackon served as chairman, and even more recently a chapter of the MFAHS, started in December 1946 at a meeting at which 12 persons were present and chose Matti Erkkilä chairman, Andrew Aho secretary and John Ketola treasurer.

The population of Angora was 225 in 1910 and 392 in 1920. A significant percentage of them were Finns, but they did not succeed in making their mark on local administrative affairs the way their Finnish neighbors to the east of them did.

Alango

Finnish settlement began in Alango, which lies west of Angora, as well as in Field, which lies north of it, and in Sturgeon, which lies west of it, in significant numbers and at about the same time as the settlement in Angora. The Township of Field, named after James A. Field, was the first to be incorporated, in 1906, with incorporation coming the following year in Sturgeon, named after the river flowing through it. Alango came last, in 1910, with a Finn, Elias Matson initiating the move. The name of Alango, also, is Finnish; it means a lowland or dale, and locally it is said to have had its first use in 1906, when Heikki Anias, first pastor of the local church, proposed that name for the congregation which was just getting its start because to him the whole stretch from Ely and Sandon was `like walking through a dale.'

The first inhabitant of Alango was Henry Jacobson, who built his cabin here in 1902. The following year he got as neighbors Fred Saari and family. Two Finns from Ylistaro, Finland, who had been neighbors in Chisholm, where they worked in the same mines, chose to become neighbors in Alango, too, in a part of the township which the Finns called `Wilderness village' but which later was called North Star Community; these two Finns were Kusti Kujala and Matti Pohto. Another Finn, John Ketola, who had first lived in Sturgeon, was also a surveyor of sorts and helped newcomers to pick out available lands. When he himself moved across to the Alango side, he got as neighbors Nestor Vainio (in 1904) and Charles J. Johnson and Matti Beirson, who all came from Chisholm.

What they all came to was a wilderness difficult to get in and out of or to move around in, because there were no roads to speak of, except the old Tower-Itasca road, probably an old Indian trail, which eventually did become a state highway. If

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