The story of Farmhouse Sipilä

The Sipilä Farm has always been located deep in the countryside, surrounded by lakes, ponds and forests. The Sipilä house is probably one of two farms by Lake Venetekemä whose known history stretches at least as far back as the year 1801. In that year two farmers bought the farm from the crown of Sweden. The buyers were Farmer Pöntinen, a member of one of the first families in the village, and Farmer Manninen.

The year 1880 is written on the granary wall at the current Farmhouse Sipilä, and the stone part of the barn may be even older than that. It wasn’t until 1923, at the time of Aapeli Ylönen, that the main road was built to replace a cart track, although the railway had been running to the village since 1918. In 1928, an announcement in Pieksämäen Sanomat newspaper declared that ”The heirs of Aapeli Ylönen have sold their farm to Farmer Albin Häkkinen from the Niskamäki village in Pieksämäki. The purchase price 380 000 marks”. This takes us to the era of the present owners, the Hänninen-Piispa family, or the era of Eino and Aino.

One of the sons, Eino Häkkinen, married Aino from the Iivo Farm located in the north shore of Lake Venetekemä. The two other sons, Ano and Otto Häkkinen, disappeared during the attack on the Karelian Isthmus in 1944. It wasn’t until years later in the 1950s that a deed of estate inventory could be drawn up, which made Eino Häkkinen the owner of the new Sipilä Farm. The Häkkinen family era at Sipilä was based almost entirely on self-sufficiency and running small businesses.

The farm was busy with keeping breeding bulls, selling raw milk, lending out the telephone machine, dairy farming, flour milling, tending the vegetable patch and garden, and forestry. There was a chicken coop behind the stables in summer, and a pig house stood at the site of the garage. An old mare called Liinu was kept for a long time on the farm. She was docile, and the farmer took her swimming in the evenings after the day’s work. One foal arrived to the farm before Liinu was put down. In addition to milk cows, chickens, and a few horses, there were sheep on the farm. Their wool was taken to a factory, but it was spun into yarn at the farm – guests also took part in spinning the wheel every time they visited the farm. A lot of fish was preserved using salt, but the springtime diet was largely vegetarian as the supplies were running low.

Berries from the garden and also wild blueberries were preserved. Sometimes there was milk pudding for dessert. During the war, the farm welcomed Karelian evacuees, who were used to having boletus mushrooms in their diet. The farm family found this strange, as boletus mushrooms were regarded as ”cow food” in Savo. If fish was needed, the time for fishing was early in the morning. Then the farmer’s daughter Eira was woken up, to go along to be the rower. They rowed to the south end of the lake to lay the nets into the water. The catch comprised vendace, roach, perch, and also pike that was salted, boiled or fried. Crayfishing was important until the 1960s, when the crayfish pest destroyed the populations.

Farmer’s wife Aino liked to grow house plants. The tiled stove in the big drawing room was heated only a little, in order to keep the temperature suitable for the plants. Geraniums, cape primroses, and other plants such as gloxinia, begonia, Chinese hibiscus, oleander and porcelain flower grew there, covering an entire wall. Sauna was the favourite spot of Farmer Eino. From the window of the beach sauna, you can still see a huge pile of stones that were once picked from the fields by the combined effort of people and horses.

Here, you can still feel the history and atmosphere of the Sipilä Farm. Flowers greet the newcomer, the saunas are heated, and life goes on with respect for the values and work of the previous generations.

The Sipilä Farm has become familiar to Finnish people through TV. It has been the location of The Farm Finland during 2019–2021.