U.P. town works to keep annual community feast alive

HERMAN — One more year. In spite of all the challenges, the town’s tradition would go on at least one more year.

“We will be having the stew!” Terri Pirkola announced barely a week before the event, back when it was uncertain whether the annual community meal would even take place. Every year, it seems like it might finally fade away, much the way the town slowly did. Yet every year since she took over organizing it, she’s found a way to keep it going. So far.

“I used to just help,” the 50-year-old said. “But now I’m the one who throws it, because all the older ladies had passed away and nobody wanted to keep it going.”

It was a Saturday evening in November, the first weekend after deer rifle season began, and that meant it was the official day of the Hunter’s Stew dinner in Herman, a former Finnish settlement just south of the Keweenaw Bay, once briefly famous for having the largest snowfall in a single day in Michigan — 30 inches — back in 1996.

A few women were putting the final touches inside the old town hall where the meal would later be served. They placed fawn statuettes as centerpieces on the tables along with bouquets of autumn leaves and pine cones, and they strung maple leaf garlands along wood benches that had been painted in the blue and white of the Finnish flag, as crafts like scarecrow dolls and felt fabric owls and ceramic pumpkins were displayed all over the room. Just about everyone there brought something to contribute.

This dinner started ages ago as a welcome to the hunters who came to the area once a year — the town’s way of showing hospitality to its visitors by serving them a big feast. Nobody’s sure when it began, but it’s been taking place long enough that people in their 70s remember coming here as kids. And many who still live here feel a duty to keep it going in honor of those who started it.

“Oh gosh, it provides everyone who lives here with a sense of community,” said Catherine Andrews, 78, who brought pumpkin chiffon pie that she made from actual pumpkins rather than from the filling in a can. “Besides raising money for the hall, it’s just a good excuse for people from the community to get together, and also to welcome some of the hunters who visit us every year. It’s our tradition.”

The event used to be held every opening day of firearm deer hunting season, when hunters would come in from the woods at nightfall for a hot meal in the town hall. But the annual Nov. 15 opening day falls on a different day of the week each year, and the cook couldn’t work weekdays because she has a day job preparing lunch at the American Legion Post in nearby Baraga. So the dinner was moved to the first weekend each year following the hunt. Any money it ever brought in always went toward repairs on the aging hall, a wood-frame building sitting on a wood foundation that suffers from frost heaving in the winter.

Beef stew has always been the main course, since few hunters could shoot and process a deer in time to serve venison here. It’s cooked in the hall’s kitchen using ingredients people bring from home, served alongside homemade breads and pastries they baked the night before. “This year they brought celery so I said, ‘OK, I’ll put it in,’ ” cook Dianne McMahon, 64, said stirring it into the mix of beef, potatoes, onions and rutabaga in the hot kitchen, driving the smell of the stew out into the neighborhood. “I just make it up, kind of play it by ear every year.”

“It smells good outside,” said smiling Barb Taisto, 82, who walked in with Finnish Nisu, a cardamom bread she made using flour and sugar she bought at the Mennonite bulk store in Chassell. “You’re not married to a Finlander unless you know how to make something like this.”

Up on stage was that Finlander, 83-year-old accordion player Eero Taisto, Barb's husband of six decades, who brought his accordion to provide the evening’s entertainment along with his pal, 87-year-old Glenn Adams, who brought his keyboard and his talents at singing old-time favorites and Finnish songs about things like saunas.

“Terve Tuloa” announced the banner above the arched stage in Finnish, a typo that mistakenly split one Finnish word into two when it was made decades ago, but which the town just kept in place anyway. “Welcome! To All Friends,” the banner clarified underneath.

The backdrop on stage was a landscape scene painted on canvas in 1938 by a striking logger with time on his hands, depicting a river flowing through green woods. A visitor from the Migration Institute of Finland once asked whether he could take it back to Finland to put in a museum, and that was only after his request to dismantle the whole hall and take it back with him to reassemble and display was politely declined. The fortitude of the Finns who founded settlements like this, he believed, deserved to be celebrated.

The town of Herman was founded in 1901 by a Finnish logger named Herman, who originally planned to stay just long enough in this remote woodland to cut down some trees and sell them. He wanted the town named after an acquaintance named Nels, who was financing the logging. Nels wanted it to be named after Herman, since Herman was the first one to settle there. The two men couldn’t agree, but without a name they couldn’t get mail delivered. So one day, when Herman was away, Nels went to the courthouse and had it named Herman behind its namesake’s back.

The town was never very big — at best a few hundred people — most of them Finns who came here to work in the woods and the mines. They had a post office, a store, a grist mill to make flour, a railroad depot, a pool hall, a small hotel and an elementary school.

And in the middle of it all, they built a town hall.

Herman Hall is a small building, built in 1931 to replace the previous town hall that burned down. It became the place to gather for everything. They’d show silent movies with ice cream as concessions, and hold basketball and volleyball games, which explains the narrow slabs of wood still nailed over the windows to protect them from within. The hall was the site of the town’s annual Christmas Program featuring local kids, and the stage for amateur theater productions.

“Here they’d have funerals, they’d have weddings, they’d have picnics,” said Martha Haanpaa, 69, who brought several jugs of milk. “It was always something.”

And of course, once a year, it was the site of the Hunter’s Stew, now the last event that remains, held in part just to raise some money to keep the building itself alive. Because the list of repairs keeps growing. Last year it was the water pump that broke. This year, it was the ramp leading inside, which a volunteer fixed at the last minute so the dinner could take place.

“It’s just important to preserve a sense of community,” said Nancy Mannikko, 75, who brought loaves of thick Finnish Reiska flatbread that she’d baked at home. “We’ve got people here whose great-grandparents used the hall.”

Twenty years ago, Mannikko compiled a history book on the town for its centennial, which now sat on a table by the front door, where just about everyone who leafed through it pointed out pictures of their parents and grandparents, some of them standing in this very hall, on these same creaky hardwood floors.

As the sun sank into the trees, the guests began arriving.

“I’ve been coming here for 40-something years,” said Mike Kanneck, 71, of Washington state, who brought his hunting buddies, all of whom travel from far away to hunt in Herman. “It’s a great gathering place. The hunters love it. They hunt all day and come here at night, and most everybody knows everybody else.”

It cost just $12 for all the stew they could eat, all the homemade Finnish bread they could butter, all the slices of pie they could dollop with whipped cream. They ate using real silverware and china, not plastic utensils. The soft music of the band on stage provided a quiet aural backdrop, an airy sound of gentle tunes with carousel melodies. Late in the evening, a 50/50 raffle was held. “Holy mackerel!” said the winner on speakerphone. “I’m pulled to the side of the road because I’m shocked.” He donated his $48 prize on the spot toward upkeep of the hall, bringing the town $48 closer to hosting the dinner next year.

“It’s really important to the people that grew up here and have a connection to Herman,” Andrews said. “But that number isn’t really large, and I wouldn’t call this an affluent community. We’re just kind of getting by and enjoying living in such a beautiful place. We do have a community though, and we are trying to hold it together and make things better for those who come after us.”

Outside the windows, the town’s abandoned old hotel sagged into a field of withered weeds, down the road from grassy plots where the farmers co-op store and the grist mill used to be. Just up the hill and past the tracks was the long-crumbling elementary school, whose cast-iron bell sat salvaged inside Herman Hall, across from the paint-chipped sign that was rescued from the post office before it was demolished, now propped up by the front door as a keepsake.

“This used to be our town,” said Haanpaa, who had her wedding in this room in 1974. “When I was little, I used to go to the store that was right there. And on the corner was a post office. I used to come to all this. And now there’s nothing.”

Except for this hall.

Pirkola sat at a table by the front door, collecting the $12 admission from the hunters and visitors arriving for dinner. On the table was a jar for donations for the hall’s upkeep. Another jar asked for tips for the musicians. “Donation for the band so they can buy gas to go home,” its label read. Both jars had several bills dropped inside.

She worked all year to make this event happen, hosting yard sales inside the hall featuring items people gave for the cause, soliciting donations here and there to keep pace with the never-ending list of repairs, stoking enthusiasm for the town’s last surviving tradition. It’s hard work without any guarantees.

“It gets stressful when you don’t know what’s going to happen with the hall,” Pirkola said. “It needs a lot of work right now. We’re working with a couple boards underneath holding this hall up; the boards have rotted so much they’re not touching the ground. But I had someone come in and kind of rig it so we could have this dinner. And It’s frustrating when it comes to trying to get donations. They don’t come as much as they used to."

The room was full now as people trickled in from the outside cold. They sat wherever a seat opened up, and so friends and strangers mingled as they ate their meals together, while the two older gentlemen played their songs, as a few children danced by the stage with their mom, and everyone else lingered just to make the night last a little bit longer.

“So why do I do it? My fulfillment in it is all of this — It’s the kids, the people, the families that come together,” Pirkola said. “We get to meet a lot of new people and see a lot of old people. And that’s what I like. And that’s why I do it. I enjoy just seeing everybody come together.”

John Carlisle writes about Michigan. His stories can be found at freep.com/carlisle. Contact him: jcarlisle@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @_johncarlisle, Facebook at johncarlisle.freep or on Instagram at johncarlislefreep.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Against all odds, U.P. town keeps annual hunters feast going