Keminmaa (until 1979 Kemi rural municipality, Swedish Kemi
landskommun) is a Finnish municipality located in the southwestern
part of Lapland. The municipality has a population of 8,062 and
covers an area of 647.24 km², of which 20.88 km² are water bodies.
The population density is 12.87 inhabitants / km².
At the
beginning of 2015, the City of Kemi and the municipalities of
Keminmaa and Simon planned to merge into a new city of Kemi. The
Kemi and Simon municipal councils approved the merger proposal, but
the Keminmaa council rejected it.
The settlement on the Kemijoki river is very old.
Permanent settlement was established as early as the beginning of
the 11th century, when people moved from Satakunta, Häme and Karelia
to the wilderness of the north. In the 13th century, Swedish and
German merchants arrived in the area, and the salt obtained from
them was a crucial condition for the revival of the salmon trade.
The first written record of the Kemi parish dates from 1329, when it
is mentioned in a letter from King Maunu Eerikinpoja. In the same
century, there is a controversy over the delimitation of the border
between the dioceses of Uppsala and Turku in Northern Ostrobothnia.
The border of the dioceses eventually formed between Tornio and
Kemi, so that the Kemi region remained in the diocese of Turku and
thus in Finland, while Tornio was under the control of the bishop of
Uppsala. The Kemi parish was a large area that stretched from
northern Lapland to Haukiputaa.
According to tradition, the
first church of the parish, dating from the Catholic period, is
located in Valmarinniemi. The church was looted by the Russians in
1473 and burned down in 1517. The new church, the current old church
in Keminmaa (St. Michael's Church), was built between 1519 and 1521.
There lies the famous mummified body of Pastor Nikolaus Rungius, who
died in 1629. The church is the northernmost medieval stone church
in Finland.
In the Middle Ages, secular rule was also formed.
Keminmaa's predecessor, Kemi Parish, was one of the oldest parishes
in Northern Finland and extended to the whole of Peräpohjola, ie the
present Simon, Kemi, Tervola and Rovaniemi all the way to Kemijärvi.
Livestock farming began to develop from the 17th century.
Rovaniemi seceded from the Grand Master of Kemi in 1785 and Simo and
Tervola in 1866. The uplift lowered the mouth of the Kemijoki River
so that merchants could no longer reach the rivers with their ships,
so in 1869 the city of Kemi was established as a new trading place
by the sea. The new church in Keminmaa was built with the funding of
Emperor Alexander I in 1823–1827 and was designed by Carl Ludvig
Engel. From the 1860s onwards, numerous steam sawmills were
established in Kemijoki, which revolutionized life in the area. The
most significant were the Karihaara sawmill, which started
operations in 1874, and the Veitsiluoto sawmill, founded by the
state in 1921. The birth of industry increased the population of the
area, and thus a large part of the former Kemi countryside was
annexed to the city of Kemi from the beginning of 1931. At the same
time, the Kemi countryside lost almost 15,000 inhabitants and only
3,500 remained.
During the Second World War, on the site of
the present nursing home in Keminmaa, on the edge of Lake
Kallinjärvi, there was a German bakery, where all the breads of
German troops in northern Finland were baked. There was a German
officers' club in Pölho's school.
After the wars came the
time of reconstruction. Pohjolan Voima Oy built the Isohaara power
plant in Keminmaa in 1945–1948, as a result of which the salmon of
the Kemijoki River became history and many meadows and fields were
submerged. At the end of the 1950s, extensive zoning work and the
development of municipal technology began, which resulted in the
construction of more than 1,600 detached houses and about 1,200
apartment and terraced houses between 1970 and 2005. In 1966,
Kuivamaito Oy's factory was completed in the then Kemi countryside.
The Elijärvi mine was opened in 1968 and the Taivalkoski power plant
in 1975. At the beginning of 1979, the name of the municipality was
changed from Kemi to Keminmaa.