Abram, Haukk, Hamppla, and Wähä-Haukk

History

According to the 1756 land map, Abram Haukka was owned by Frimodig. In 1800, Abram Haukka (141) was owned by Kaisa Frimodig, the patron’s widow, while Hamppla (142) was owned by the merchant Fredrik Höeckert. The house was also occupied by the former bourgeois Zacharias Broberg. Wähä-Haukk (143) was owned by the fisherman Gustav Nurmelin. He also owned a 22 kapanalas (old measurement, one kapanala was 154 m2) sowing, a food shed, a barn and a quarter of a boathouse.

Fire insurance

When the fire insurance was taken in 1850, there were eight buildings on the plot owned by the merchant Adolf Wilhelm Grandström. The main building was on Kauppakatu, the end on the edge of Raastuvantori. The building was made partly of new and partly of old logs. The year of construction was 1847, partly 1849. The building was unlined and had a boarded roof. There were 16 windows with six-paned frames. Three of them had wooden shutters. There were 16 attic windows and they were double-paned. There were four chimneys. The building had eleven rooms: an entrance hall, a hall, a shop and seven chambers and a kitchen. In the entrance hall there was a closet from which the attic stairs led. To the shop there were stairs made of logs and planks. In front of the entrance on the courtyard side was a plank porch. Nine of the exterior doors were full French single-piece and five were double. The outer doors were double doors as was the shop door. The rooms had skirting and cornices. Two rooms had French wallpaper. They were backed with paper glued to the wall. Two rooms had paper wallpaper. In the hall there was a large white glazed square oven, one round white glazed oven, two yellow glazed square ovens, three round brown glazed ovens and one brick tiled oven. The kitchen stove had an iron stove and a roasting oven. The shop was decorated with two oil-painted counters with 14 drawers. Oil painted shelving units with ten drawers and a cupboard with glass doors.

The building facing Koulukatu was built of new logs in 1790. It was an unplanked and red-ochrid painted storehouse with a floor. The roof was made of boards. There was a two-part cellar under the building. The building had a window with an iron grille. Next to the storehouse, on the northern edge of the plot, was a small plank shed building dating from 1849. The building was painted red.

On the northern border there was also a residential building of logs, built in 1790 of new logs. The building was unplanked and painted in red ochrid. It had a entrance hall, a hall, two chambers with two tiled stoves and a sleeping room. The two windows in the building were four-paned, and there was one similar window with iron shutters. There were three intermediate doors, and they were half French. The outer door was a double board door, as were the doors to the storehouses. There were two chimneys. The shed and privy building, an extension of the residence, was built in 1847 and was painted red.

The baker’s building along the Kauppakatu was built in 1819 from new logs. It was painted red and had an entrance hall and a chamber with an unglazed tiled stove and a baking room with a stove and baking oven and a vaulted sauna oven. The building had three four-paned windows.

The stable at the corner of Kauppakatu and Pappilankatu was a building built in 1790, unplanked and painted red. It was in good condition. It had room for three horses. The barn on Pappilankatu was also built in 1790 and was unplanked and painted red. The building contained a four-cow barn and a feed store. The barn had a window.

In addition, the gate on the market side, which was made of planks and lined with boards, and the fence on the property were insured. The second gate was on the side of Pappilankatu, between the stable and the barn.

In 1855, repairs to buildings were reported to the fire insurance company. The main building was lined in 1851, and painted with oil paint in 1852. Three of the rooms had French wallpaper on a paper backing. One building had paper wallpaper, two rooms had paper ceilings. The shop’s staircase was fitted with an iron railing. There were also wooden gutters and five tin downpipes…

Three more buildings were also insured. They were located on plot 241. The building on the Priest’s Street was a residential building, which was old and in good condition. It consisted of a hall, two chambers and a kitchen with three tiled stoves and a kitchen stove. There was a cellar under the building. There were seven hexagonal windows and a half-window. There were two full transom doors, one half transom door and an external door, which was a boarded double door. The tiled stoves were brown glazed and flat. The rooms had wallpaper. The second building was a new storehouse building built the previous year, equipped for salt storage. It was located on the southern boundary of the property. The third building was on the eastern boundary of the plot and contained a sauna and a bakery. It was built in 1839. The rooms consisted of a hall, a room with a vaulted sauna oven, a stove and a baking oven with two chimneys. The building had one six-paned window. The building also had a food shed.

The insurance was renewed in 1865, the property was still owned by the merchant Grandström. Plot 241 was now fully connected to the old plot. The three buildings on the plot had been replaced by one large outbuilding. It had been built in 1863 and 1864, with a tiled roof, and contained a mezzanine storage room, two smaller storerooms, a stable and a barn with a hayloft, a latrine and a dung hold, a carriage shed, and a wooden shed. The main building and the market-side storehouse building had tiled roofs, as did the other two residential buildings on the site. The roof of the bakery was still made of tiles, as were the old stable and the barn, which were now treated as a single building, with a pass between them.

In 1870, the insurance was renewed again. The house was still in the same ownership. Now Granström was mentioned as a magistrate. A new residential building had now been built on the corner of Kauppakatu and Pappilankatu, on the site of the former stable and barn building. The main building had been extended so that there was a residential building all along the block in Kauppakatu. The building had been completed in the autumn of the previous year and had not yet been planked or painted. The roof was of brick. Interior work was still in progress, as the building was said to have eight future residential rooms. Apart from a entrance hall, a heated entrance, and a closet, there were a parlour, a dining room, a kitchen, and five chambers. On the Koulukatu side of the building, the plank shed between the warehouse at the gate and the next residential building had been converted into a salt storage.

In 1875, changes were again made to the insurance policy. Now the interior of the new dwelling, floors, ceilings, six double doors and 10 other solid French doors, four white, four pale yellow and one brown glazed tiled stoves, a tiled kitchen stove with an iron stove, a frying oven and a tin hood were also covered. The walls of the drawing room and the large chamber were covered with paper with French wallpaper pasted on, paper wallpaper painted in three rooms and skirting boards were also mentioned. The building was also fitted with a boarded porch with windows and double doors.

Modification drafts

The modification draft for the building facing the school street on the plot dates from 1887 and is by John Fred. John Lindegren. The building consisted of two parts, two storages at the gate and a residential building a little further away. The dwelling house had a double dormer floor and at one end an additional end chamber. The residential building was narrower in frame than the storage building and also lower in height. Now the two buildings were to be combined and brought under one roof. The residential part also needed to be raised. In addition, the building was to be planked and the windows were to be made larger. The plan called for the residential part to be triple-planked, the storage part to be horizontal-planked and both to have six-paned windows with a pattern ending in a lily motif. The boarded salt-storage section between the buildings was vertically boarded. The building was still covered with a roof tile, according to the description.

A modification drawing of the residential building on Kauppakatu dates from 1890. The third window on the east side of the long façade was converted into a commercial door and a stone staircase was built in front of it. There had been a total of 14 windows. The building was horizontal-panelled and the six-paned windows had classical framing. The building had a stacked tile roof. The alteration plan was drawn up by John Fredr. Lindegren. In 1891, a small porch-like addition was made to the end of the building facing Pappilankatu, with an entrance from the street. On the side facing Pappilankatu there was a high horizontal wrought iron fence and an overhead gate. The plan was drawn up by J. O. W. Johanson.

An alteration drawing of the building on the side of Kauppakatu dates from 1899. The change concerned the eastern end of the building, where a commercial building was to be built on the corner of the square and Kauppakatu. There had already been a shop entrance facing the square, but the shop door was now moved to the corner of the building. For the commercial premises, the corner chamber and the adjacent room, which had previously been a shop, were combined into one room. In addition, the kitchen and three chambers were combined into a single room along the shopping street, and the hallway and one chamber were further combined into a separate room. Doors were made between all three new commercial rooms. There were two entrances from the courtyard. The old glass porch was demolished to make way for them. The new façades, apparently designed mainly by Arvi Forsman, were in the National Romantic style in the details of the window panelling. Perhaps some ideas had been taken from the new buildings of the seminary. The display windows were large, but made up of smaller sections. The upper parts of the windows were small square. The roof of the building was still brick. Jonh Fredr also played a part in the design of the details of the corner entrance. Lindegren. His drawing was dated a couple of weeks after Forsman’s drawing.

The transformation of the façade started at the corner of the square, and gradually progressed to other parts of the long building. In 1906 it was the turn of the end of Pappilankatu. The design, faithful to the original idea, was by Leonard Ahti. An entrance was also opened on the side of Pappilankatu. In 1891, the planned entrance was proposed to be removed. At the same time, other changes were made to the premises. The large rooms were divided into smaller ones and a second kitchen was added. A couple more porches were also added. In 1924, the façade along Kuninkaankatu was further altered. Two more entrances to the shop were added. On both sides of the new doors, display windows were added. The six residential windows that remained on the façade were given the same type of framing as the other windows. The windows were now drawn as cross-pane, whereas the end windows in the Ahti’s plan were T-pane. The façade alteration was also to include a narrow vertical section of the lower part of the horizontal-framed façade on Kuninkaankatu, as already indicated in Lindegren’s plan. In 1930 it was planned to create a new entrance to the shop on Kuninkaankatu. It was placed in the central part of the already existing shop window. In 1937 one more shop window was added.

In 1923, shop windows and two shop doors were added to the building facing Koulukatu. In 1928, a garage for several cars was built in the middle of the courtyard, on the northern boundary, in the form of a bakery and sauna building, with a concrete interior. A couple of separate rooms were also left in the building. The property is owned by the Western Finland Wholesalers. In 1937, a gasoline dispenser was added to the yard.

In 1949, the premises of the commercial buildings on the corner of Kauppakatu and Koulukatu were combined. At the same time, office space was built on the courtyard side. The shop’s display windows were enlarged to one-piece. In 1954, the premises of the second shop were combined, the ceiling was lowered and the heating system was changed to a suspended ceiling system. The windows were made large. At the same time, however, one of the shop entrances was closed and its display windows were replaced by residential windows. The space became the shop’s office space. In 1956, the building facing Koulukatu was converted to stove-pot heating.

The buildings on the plot owned by Riisla Oy were altered in 1961. The main reason was to change the heating system from wood and oil fires to central water heating, but at the same time minor internal changes were made. Apart from the furnaces, some partitions were removed, and on the other hand, some of the previous openings were plugged. The eastern end of the building on the shopping street had at one stage been extended to the courtyard by an extension of office rooms. The west end had also been extended to the courtyard. There were three separate commercial units and the western end of the building was used as a wholesaler’s salesroom with office and other small rooms, but no display windows as in the shops. The whole of the building along Koulukatu was used as a wholesaler’s salesroom. The different rooms were connected, but the partitions remained. The old storage room had become a single commercial room with a roof entrance. A storage building in the middle of the site was converted into a boiler room and garage. At the end of the building was a room and kitchen apartment. The storage building on the Pappilankatu side of the site was partly used as a hot and partly as a cold store. There were three toilets for the whole large commercial building, one in the entrance hall of the wholesaler’s sales room and two others, like the old toilets, next to each other and behind the same front door in the outbuilding, which also housed the boiler room. Even the apartment in the building did not have its own toilet, but there was a water point in the kitchen.

The site was altered in 1963. The whole building along the Kauppakatu had been in commercial use before, but the premises had been divided into several shops, offices and storerooms, but the original semi-detached part of the building and the extension to it could still be seen. The partition walls were now removed so that most of the space in the western part of the building became a single, unified shop. A further office and a storage room were left on the courtyard side. Most of the joiner-style details were removed from the facades, while the old T-shaped windows were replaced by large display windows and the shop entrances were renovated. Changes were also made to the building on Koulukatu. Shop windows were added and enlarged. The building was left with a single, two-storey shop and three storage rooms. In 1966, changes were made to the central shop area of the building on Kauppakatu. The shop and office space was rearranged to create more space in the shop room. In the same year, changes were also made to the large warehouse building on Pappilankatu. In addition to the warehouse, a small office was added to the building. In 1981, the last partition walls of the commercial building were demolished.

In 1977, the façade underwent renovative changes. The designer is Jukka Koivula.

Current situation

Building on the side of Kauppakatu
Residential building composed of three buildings, now a commercial building, central part built in 1819, eastern part in 1847 and 1849 and western part in 1819, western part courtyard wing in 1869, uniform ribbed horizontal planking, hipped cover, tiled roof, features of the window panelling according to Arvi Forsman’s 1899 plan, large display windows from 1963. Adaptive and restorative alterations in the 1990s (Jukka Koivula).

Building on Koulukatu
An elongated residential building, currently used as a commercial and storage building. Neo-renaissance cladding on the street facade, ribbed horizontal boarding on the courtyard facade, saddle roof. Composed of two buildings, the southern part built in 1790, the northern part afterwards and joined around 1870.

Outbuilding on Pappilankatu
A large short-cornered storage, built in 1863 and 1864 and enlarged later, with a roof lining.

Outbuilding in the yard
Exterior building of cement brick, partly of vertical board

Gates
On the Koulukatu side a new large driveway gate, on the Pappilankatu side a gate with concrete pillars and gate leaves partly preserving the spirit of the early 20th century.