"This was not a decision we took lightly."
That's how Jennifer Boggs, chair of the Finnish American Folk Festival of Naselle, described a vote her board took in November 2024. The vote: sell the building the group had called home since a closing congregation handed over the keys in January 2019.
In late July, on the 24th through the 26th, the festival that building was supposed to support came back to Naselle for the first time in four years. It didn't return to Parpala Road, where the building sits. It returned to the football field, classrooms, and courtyard of Naselle School, a short drive away, in front of crowds that in strong years have topped 3,000 people, roughly five times the town's own population of around 629.
If you've lived in the valley long enough to remember the last full Finn Fest in 2022, the comeback itself isn't the surprise. The surprise is what the gap years proved. Naselle's biggest cultural event doesn't actually run on a dedicated building. It runs on the same handful of people who keep showing up, wherever there happens to be a room. The building on Parpala Road was just where they gathered while everyone waited for the real thing to come back.
A Church on Loan
The building at the center of this is the old Naselle Congregational Finnish Mission Church, built in 1928 by architect Mikko Talus and dedicated in a bilingual Finnish-English ceremony. By 1935 it had become the Naselle Community Congregational Church, and it stayed that way until 2018, when a shrinking membership with no pastor decided to close the doors for good. Rather than let the building sit empty, the congregation donated it to the Finnish American Folk Festival, along with a $30,000 gift to help cover maintenance. The handover became official in a service on January 13, 2019.
FAFF renamed it the Naselle Community Center and started renting it out for meetings, weddings, and funerals. But the real use turned out to be music. Over the years the building hosted Carl Wirkkala, a local folk and country singer, along with violinist Kim Angelis, pianist Jennifer Goodenberger, singer Richard Ellis, and folk guitarist Gene Quilhaugh. It even drew Ruusamari Teppo, a Finnish pianist and great granddaughter of composer Jean Sibelius, for a special appearance. None of this was the biennial festival itself. It was the town keeping its own culture running in between.
Why the Festival Went Quiet
The biennial festival dates back to 1982, and it had run every two years without much interruption until 2020, when COVID shut it down. The plan was to pick back up in 2022, and it did. What derailed the 2024 edition wasn't the pandemic. It was construction. Renovations to the STEM and music wing at Naselle School dragged on long enough that FAFF canceled the festival in both 2024 and 2025, waiting for the campus that hosts most of the event to be usable again.
That's four years of a town's signature weekend on hold, with the Community Center on Parpala Road absorbing the slack in the form of smaller concerts and gatherings. Then, in November 2024, with the school timeline finally settling and a 2026 date on the calendar, FAFF's members voted unanimously to put the building up for sale. Boggs framed it as a matter of focus rather than finances: the sale, she said, was "in the best interest of our organization to remain true to our mission and focus on our biennial festival." The building had done its job. Keeping it going wasn't the mission. The festival was.
Three Days on the School Campus
This year's theme was "Footprints from the Past," and it leaned hard into the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by spotlighting John Morton, a Pennsylvania delegate of Finnish heritage who was one of the document's 56 signers. Jay Smith III, a Pennsylvania lecturer honored by Finlandia Foundation National, gave a talk on Morton's life on the festival's opening day. The Honorary Consul of Finland, Kristiina Hiukka, took part in the July 25 morning ceremony and later gave a talk on why Finland keeps ranking first on the world happiness index.
Serena Travis, one of the festival's organizers, handled publicity and delivered welcome speeches alongside her mother, Marilyn Johnson. Student maypole dancers coached by Naselle teachers Hayleigh See and Sylvia Hoagland performed throughout the weekend, and Mike Swanson and Greg Nelson emceed the indoor presentations in the school's classrooms. On the music side, the Skamokawa Swamp Opera, a group that describes its own sound as "genre-bending acoustic music rooted in Wahkiakum County," played sets both nights, joined by Eeppi Ursin, Carl Wirkkala and the Whistlepunks, the Brownsmead Flats, and violinist Charlotte Loukola. The weekend closed with a family dance led by the Smilin' Scandinavians, after the raffle winners were announced.
The cultural programming ran just as deep. Author Karl Marlantes took questions about his writing on July 25. Bryan Penttila shared Naselle stories, Gary Anderson read poetry, and Russ Collier performed cowboy poetry. None of it needed the church building on Parpala Road. All of it needed the school, and the people who organize around it every two years whether or not there's a dedicated hall waiting for them in between.
The Rhythm Around the Festival
None of this happens in a vacuum, and the rest of the summer in Naselle keeps moving whether or not Finn Fest is on the calendar. The Naselle Sports Club books its youth baseball field solid from March through late June for baseball, softball, and t-ball, which means by the time festival weekend rolls around, the town's kids are already shifting out of one season and into another. Morning coffee still runs through Valley Cup Espresso, breakfast still happens at Rocket Diner or Hunters Inn, and none of that changes based on whether the biennial crowd is in town or two years out.
That's worth sitting with if you live here year-round. The festival gets the headlines every other July, but the actual texture of life in the valley, the diner booths, the ballfields, the coffee counter, runs on its own clock. Finn Fest borrows the school for a weekend. It doesn't own the town's rhythm, and neither did the building that used to house its overflow.
What Happens to 14 Parpala Road
The Community Center is still listed for sale as of this writing. According to the festival's own listing, the property sits on 1.29 acres with roughly 6,100 square feet across two levels, a paved lot for more than 20 vehicles, an updated septic system, and heating upgraded from an oil furnace to a heat pump. Smith Creek, a year-round tributary of the Naselle River, runs along the west edge of the property. It's about 20 minutes from Astoria and the Long Beach Peninsula, and roughly two hours from Portland International Airport.
FAFF's own description calls it a place where "the next chapter of this landmark is waiting to be written." For a town of about 629 people, a nearly century-old church with a dance floor, a kitchen, and a creek out back isn't a small thing to let go of. But the four years without a working festival already answered the question that might worry a longtime resident watching the for-sale sign go up: whether the culture leaves with the building. It doesn't. It just needed somewhere to sit for a while, and now it has moved back to where it started, out on State Route 4, at the school.
If you're curious about property along Parpala Road, the Naselle River corridor, or anywhere else in this stretch of the Washington coast, the team at PNW Real Estate Experts knows this valley well enough to walk you through what a place like this actually offers. Reach out for a free home valuation, or just to talk through what's happening in the neighborhood.
