We've all heard the admonition to those who live in glass houses about throwing stones, but have you heard about this unusual glass bottle house in Kaleva, Michigan?
Finnish immigrants established Kaleva in 1900. There were a few homes, a depot, a post office, a store, some lumber camps, and a boarding house for men working on railroads in the area prior to the arrival of the Finns.
The Finnish folks set about clearing the land, including the stumps that littered the settlement's main street, and laying out a town with street names like Wuoksi, Kauko, and Louhi honoring their Finnish heritage.
The name Kaleva came from a 19th century epic poem called the Kalevala, a work including Finnish folklore, oral traditions, and mythology. The poem, considered Finland's national epic, helped develop Finnish national identity.
Finnish native John Makinen Sr. moved to northwestern Michigan in 1903, establishing the Northwestern Bottling Works Company in Kaleva.
Today, Manistee County where Kaleva is located, is home to many active snowmobile clubs with its 125 miles of registered, marked, and groomed trails, so you can imagine that Makinen wanted a comfortable, cozy home for his family.
The inventive and thrifty Finn also had plenty of empty bottles on hand, and found that bottle wall construction and its thick walls provided plenty of insulation. Bottle houses stay warmer in winter and cooler in summer. They are also solid and fire resistant.
Makinen used over 60,000 bottles, many of them from his own plant, to build a new family home in 1941. Workers laid bottles on their sides with the bottoms facing out toward the exterior and placed different colored bottles to form decorative patterns.
I loved reading the different labels on the bottle bottoms as took these photographs.
Makinen died in 1942 just before his family planned to move into the house, but his bottle house lives on today as a museum. The Kaleva Historical Society purchased the house in 1980, remodeling it and opening it as the Kaleva Historical Museum.
The Kaleva Bottle House is on the National Historic Register and the Michigan Register of Historical Places.
The museum opens during weekends from Memorial Day through Labor Day and on Sundays through October, showcasing 19th and 20th century artifacts that include things related to lumbering, farming, railroads, schools, and area history.
The museum also has a special room dedicated to a collection of fishing tackle from Makinen's son William, who established Makinen Tackle in his garage. William starting making fishing lures as a 10-year-old, turning his childhood hobby into a business in 1945. By 1946, he had 50 employees and opened a factory in town that operated until later in the 1950s.
The museum was not open when we visited, so we didn't have a chance to tour the inside of the house or the museum.
One interesting thing I did find in my reading about the museum was the fact that folks there suggest Makinen's company as a possible source of the term "pop" for carbonated drinks. Early bottling plants like Makinen's used corks to seal bottles, and the pressure of carbonation sometimes caused corks to fly out of the bottles and make a loud "pop" noise.
And, yes, I'm in the "pop" camp, rather than the "soda" or "cola" camp!
Kaleva is just a few miles off of US-31 near Manistee, eight miles from Crystal Mountain Resort in Thompsonville, and 10 miles from Lake Michigan.
See my story Metal marching band at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan for another fun construction created from discarded materials. I love this outdoor sculpture created from scrap metal by Stuart Padnos, a senior executive for a scrap metal and recycling firm by vocation and self-taught artist by avocation.
Check out The Kalevala: Or Poems of the Kaleva District translated by Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr. and compiled by Elias Lonnrot. This well-reviewed edition of the epic includes 50 poems of The Kalevala, as well as a number of helpful appendices.
Bottle Houses: The Creative World of Grandma Prisbry by Melissa Eskridge Slaymaker, illustrations by Julie Paschkis, looks like a fun children's book about a real-life grandma who created a "bottle village" in California.
© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved
I love the "happy" and "home." Too bad he never had a chance to live there.
Posted by: Arrows Sent Forth | October 26, 2010 at 08:31 AM
Nicole-Knowing the story made the "happy" and "home" a little sad, but the happy part of the story is that the house is still around for folks to enjoy :)
Posted by: Dominique King | October 26, 2010 at 02:46 PM