“The Road to Winona” Preserves a Vanishing Chapter of Finnish-American History

New historical novel documents the immigrant experience in Michigan’s Copper Country, from company-town exploitation to the Finnish concept of sisu.

[CITY, STATE] — As the towns once built by Finnish immigrant labor continue to fade across Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a new novel is working to make sure their history does not disappear with them. The Road to Winona, by Dr. Shirley J. Williams, is a work of historical fiction rooted in the real experience of Finnish immigrants who settled the region’s mining and logging communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The novel follows a family’s passage from Finland, then under Russian imperial rule, through the docks of Liverpool, steerage crossings of the North Atlantic, and inspection at Ellis Island, before settling in Michigan’s Copper Country. Along the way, Williams documents conditions rarely covered in popular fiction: debt-bondage logging camps where wages vanished into company fees, unsafe sawmills and mines, and the discrimination Finnish immigrants and their descendants faced, including being mistaken for Axis sympathizers during World War II despite Finland’s resistance to Soviet invasion.

Central to the novel is the Finnish concept of sisu, a word with no exact English equivalent, often translated as grit or quiet perseverance in the face of hardship. Williams traces sisu across generations of one family: in immigrants surviving famine and forced labor, in a mother rebuilding a household after her husband is crippled in a mining accident, and in a community an ocean away raising relief funds for Finland during the Winter War.

“Finnish immigrants built entire communities in places most people will never visit,” said Williams. “I wanted this book to put names and faces to that work, not just acknowledge that it happened.”

Williams’s research draws on her own family’s roots in Winona, Michigan, a former copper mining town near Houghton, as well as broader historical material on Finnish emigration, the Homestead Act, and the logging and mining industries of the Upper Peninsula. The novel includes detailed depictions of Finnish cultural traditions, including sauna customs, traditional foods, and the language itself, much of which Williams’s own family carried with them for generations after settling in America.

The Road to Winona is available now on Amazon.