Parades celebrate our history
In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and in small towns everywhere, parades are a common occurrence at 4th of July, Memorial Day and in conjunction with various annual festivals. Local bands are invited to march and community members show up in droves with homemade floats, livestock, and antique cars and tractors. The local police and fire departments always lead off and close the parade and sometimes a queen is crowned and rides with her royalty.
Parades are free and fun and bring a community together for a few hours to share their common love for a place and its history. Putting their differences aside, residents come together just to enjoy the company of their families and friends and the place they call home. It’s hard to be unhappy when you’re watching a parade and seeing the joy and anticipation on people’s faces, young and old alike.
The town of Tapiola, just a few miles from Manninen’s Cabins, brought back a 4th of July parade tradition just a few years ago. Tapiola is a very small village (population <100), with only a handful of active businesses, including a small market and one restaurant. You’ll also find a volunteer fire department, a sportsmen’s club and ball field, senior center, church, and the long-abandoned K-12 school known as Doelle (pronounced dole-ee), which graduated its last class in 1968.
A large, nondescript, red brick building, Doelle is a prominent landmark, which really has come to define the town. For many years prior, the Finnish settlers who lived at Otter Lake and nearby Askel schooled their children in one-room schoolhouses, which taught in both Finnish and English as that was the only way the children could learn.
Tapiola is known as the home of the forest king. The village was founded by Finnish-Americans in 1891 and named after Tapio, the mythological spirit of the mysterious, remote forests of northern Finland who figures prominently in the Nordic folklore called Kalevala.
My father and all his siblings graduated from Doelle. That generation is largely gone now but their legacies and those of their parents and grandparents are really what built this community.
It was early in 1890 that a small group of woodcutters from the Bootjack area, who had recently come from Finland, heard of a freshwater lake rich in fish somewhere up the Sturgeon River, not far from the town of Chassell. These inquisitors made the journey and found Otter Lake, as described, and its stunning resemblance to the lakes and lands of their native Finland.
Celebrating their pioneering spirit is reason enough to have a parade.
For those who plan to be in the area for 4th of July 2022, the Tapiola parade is scheduled for July 2 at 10:30 a.m. I’ll be there along with a float celebrating the proud history of our ancestors and Manninen’s Cabins.
