The Farm’s Finnish sauna’s materials come from the Olympic Peninsula. Our area’s Finnish sauna sat 1 mile to the east and was public, run by a logging widow with 5 young children who charged a US nickel for each use. It was a “smoke sauna” built without a chimney. Wood was burned in a large center pit and allowed to die; then the smoke was ventilated out the two end-doors.
The residual heat lasted the duration of the sauna. When the heat began to feel uncomfortable it was customary to jump in the dammed-up pond on Victoria Creek. Strange you think? For centuries most Europeans did not bathe; by the Reformation for the rest of Europe, bathing was something ordinary people did rarely (annually) or not at all, but not in Finland where even today, saunas outnumber people. Native Americans were also using sweat lodges. Whose ancestors were truly “strange” we wonder.
https://www.saunaplace.com/sauna-history/
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/god-sauna
http://www.plc215.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Finnish-Loggers.pdf
https://saunadigest.com/finnish-sauna-7fc897d313a0
https://www.plc215.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Finnish-Loggers.pdf
https://unric.org/en/finnish-sauna-added-to-the-unesco-cultural-heritage-list/
https://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/30904_Chapter10.pdf
Saunas were a substitute for:
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