The brief history of the Riihimäki region

History can often be quite boring. So let's list all the funniest and most interesting facts right at the top, which you can use to entertain others after a successful trip to the Riihimäki region.

No one knows where the riihi (traditional grain drying and threshing cabin) that gave Riihimäki its name was located.
Even the exact hill (mäki) isn't known.

Because Riihimäki is a crossroads, newborns or small children were often abandoned there in the “good old days.” Since the children could not speak, they were often given a surname based on the place where they were found – Riihimäki.

The name Hausjärvi has the same ring as Riihimäki. The location of the actual Hausjärvi Lake is known to be somewhere in the direction of the parish village, but it was drained and dried in the 1960s. There had been attempts to dry the lake since the 1800th century.

Finland's richest man was shot dead in Hausjärvi during the civil war by Russian sailors. Risto Ryti, who later became president, was also involved in the scuffle.

It's not worth making jokes about being "lopen uupunut" ("totally exhausted") to Loppi residents anymore. The joke doesn't even get a rise out of people anymore – it's so worn out.

Potato production (Loppi potatoes are good, by the way) is also a sensitive matter but also a source of pride.

Now that we've gotten these fun details out of the way, we can move on to a more objective overall picture of the past of these three regions.

To people in the 2020s, Riihimäki, the so-called daughter of the railway, is probably more familiar than the neighboring municipalities of Loppi and Hausjärvi.

The histories of Hausjärvi, Loppi, and Riihimäki are so closely intertwined that it can easily be said that Riihimäki in particular would not exist without these two old parishes.

Let's go back in time. Let's imagine that we are standing at the Riihimäki railway station a couple hundred years ago. Oops! My socks got wet right away. We are standing in a swamp – to be more precise, in the Uhkola swamp. There is forest nearby and in the distance there are some kind of buildings. Maybe crofts.

So there is almost nothing in Riihimäki and we have to wait for decades for that something that will form the city. In fact, we are not in Riihimäki, but on the lands of the Kara Manor. In other words, we are not even in the old parish of Riihimäki yet. Even Hausjärvi was only founded in 1868, six years after the aforementioned railway station was opened.

There have been plenty of manors in the area, as well as everything else related to agriculture, livestock farming, hunting, forestry work and other things related to surval and livelihoods in Finnish rural countryside.

In fact, the famous Riihimäki lasi glass factory and the nowadays less famous sawmill originated in Loppi, when the 1800th century Finnish “startup” man, H. G. Paloheimo, received a considerable amount of land through marriage, which he was able to expand and with the favorable assistance of the economic circles of the time, he was able to start a local industry. The most persistent roots of Riihimäki’s industrial history therefore originate in Loppi!

The lands of Loppi also fed Riihimäki, as well as the parish village of Hausjärvi, with whom the people of Riihimäki argued until 1922: sometimes about establishing their own church, sometimes about the details of municipal administration. And then, the new era of Riihimäki township began.

The geographically large municipalities of Loppi and Hausjärvi, both with a population of around 8000, still frame the small city of Riihimäki, with a population of just under thirty thousand. In addition to this brief historical overview, all municipalities contain interesting layers of the past, from manors to industrial history and from ice age landscapes to monuments – exploring all of these is highly recommended!

Juho Haavisto, M.A.
The author is a cultural historian from Riihimäki.