Pietarsaari machine shop

Piispanmäki Pietarsaari

Piispanmäki (or Piispansaari) has been an area with busy industrial activity. In addition to a brewery, it had a bone mill until the mid-1800s.  As from the late 1800s, there was a machine shop north of the old graveyard. The footings of the machine shop were still visible in autumn 2018.

The machine shop was established by Birger Serlachius (1874–1934). Its lines of business first included shoeing, the manufacture and sale of vehicles, and the sale and repair of bicycles. The small smithy had been extended by building a foundry, a boiler forge, and a filing and turning shop. Soon it also specialised in brewery machines. Serlachius lived in the residential section of the adjacent brewery with his family and served as the property manager of the brewery. Due to the approaching prohibition of alcoholic beverages by law, the manufacture of brewery machines would not have been wise. Agricultural tools and simple machines, instead, were increasingly needed, so they became the principal products of the machine shop. In the early 1900s, the most important of these was the harrow. At its peak, the firm had about a hundred employees. In the early 1910s, at the latest, all the production of the machine shop was moved next to the railway in town. Through a diverse chain of events in the late 1930s, the machine shop became part of the Wärtsila group.

Stories

The demand for farming machines was so active in the early 1900s that Serlachius’ machine shop had obvious problems in delivering enough of them to customers in time. In autumn 1912, Birger Serlachius wrote in Kauppalehti: “The demand for our mowing machine has increased year after year so that, for example, last summer we could not deliver all the orders even though we had reserved 700 machines for the season in advance. In the first two years of manufacturing these machines, none of our largest machine retailers wanted to sell them, and we were forced to sell them either through rural tradesmen or directly to users. Only this year have we been lucky enough to engage many of the country’s largest machine shop retailers. They have already ordered smaller or larger amounts of machinery for next year. We have already sold more than a thousand machines at a fixed rate for next year.” (Kauppalehti 9 October 1912) Rather soon after moving to town, the machine shop faced financial problems and went bankrupt, but continued its operation later (Toivanen et al. 2002, 349–353).

Long ago, Piispanmäki was an island in the sea, called Piispansaari. After the sea “fled” in the 1800s, the town’s earliest industry was established there. In the 1700s, the town inlet with water traffic still ran east of Piispansaari. The name Piispansaari (‘bishop island’) possibly comes from the black-and-white seabird razorbill (Alca torda) or from the church services possibly arranged on the island. (Interview with city guides Ulla Nyström and Gun Snellman on 12 November 2018)

Photos

Remnants of the machine shop in summer 2018

The old graveyard with an iron cross manufactured in the machine shop

Pietarsaari machine shop, old drawing (Pietarsaaren kaupunginmuseo)

Map