The school began as something quite different. Finnish immigrants arriving in the United States between 1899 and 1907 were remarkably literate -- 98 percent could read and write. Education was deeply valued, and the desire for higher learning in their own language crossed generational and ideological lines. A Finnish Lutheran high school was established to teach the Finnish language and Lutheran religion. It moved to Smithville, a rural area just southwest of Duluth, shortly after its founding. But secular Finnish socialists, frustrated by the lack of advanced non-religious education in their language, saw an opportunity. Board member Alex Halonen led the Finnish Socialist Federation in buying stock, and by the fall of 1907, majority control of what had been the Finnish People's College was firmly in socialist hands. The hymns gave way to lectures on political economy.

The transformation accelerated between 1914 and 1915, when a factional battle split the Finnish Socialist Federation. School administrators and faculty aligned with the syndicalist left wing of the Finnish labor movement, and the college came into the orbit of the Industrial Workers of the World -- the IWW, whose members were known as Wobblies. This was no abstract affiliation. Finnish immigrants constituted nearly 40 percent of mining employees in northern Minnesota in this period, and many worked in the mining and timber industries or on the docks of Duluth, a major port on the southernmost tip of Lake Superior. The IWW was actively organizing these workers, fighting for better wages and safer conditions in an era when mine collapses and logging accidents were routine. Work People's College became the movement's educational engine, training organizers who could speak to workers in their own language about their own lives.

Work People's College was not unique in concept -- other radical labor colleges existed across the country, including Brookwood Labor College in Katonah, New York, and Commonwealth College in Mena, Arkansas. But its Finnish character set it apart. Instruction was conducted in Finnish, the student body was overwhelmingly Finnish immigrant, and the curriculum reflected the particular concerns of Scandinavian working-class culture: cooperative economics, labor journalism, and the folk high school tradition that valued education as a communal rather than individual achievement. The college operated continuously for over three decades, surviving World War I, the Red Scare, the Great Depression, and the internal disputes that periodically fractured the American left. It finally ceased operation in 1941, as the generation of Finnish immigrants who had sustained it aged and their American-born children moved into English-language institutions.

The physical school is gone, but its legacy persists in unexpected ways. In 2012, the Twin Cities branch of the Industrial Workers of the World relaunched Work People's College on a limited basis as a summer training camp for activists and organizers -- proof that the name still carries weight more than a century after Alex Halonen and his comrades bought out the Lutherans. The Immigration History Research Center Archives at the University of Minnesota holds the college's papers, preserving class rosters, correspondence, and curriculum documents that record one of the most unusual educational experiments in American history. In the forests of Smithville, where the building once stood with its two flags flying, Finnish socialists tried to answer a question that remains open: what would education look like if it were designed not to credential individuals but to empower an entire class of working people?