Life for immigrant farmers in northeastern Minnesota was harsh, and Finnish settlers in places such as Embarrass relied on a centuries-old tradition of subsistence farming to survive the region’s thin rocky soil, short growing season, and severe climate. Men, women, and children all shared in clearing land and building homesteads, while farms produced potatoes as the major cash crop along with hay, rye, oats, and wheat. Finnish immigrant farmers began settling parts of St. Louis County in the late 1800's, obtaining land through private purchase and under the Federal Homestead Act of 1862, and many moved to rural homesteads to escape poor wages and unhealthy conditions in the mines of the Vermilion and Mesabi Iron Ranges, while others sought landownership for ethnic, political, or religious reasons. At age 26, Gregorius Hanka married Mary Stierna, and together they bought an 80 acre parcel from the Duluth and Iron Range Railroad. While staying with neighbors, they built a one-room log house from logs short enough for one man to lift and tight enough to withstand winter winds, and by 1915 the homestead also had a sauna, hay barn, and cattle barn. The Hanka homestead eventually included ten buildings, four of them log structures, arranged in a U-shaped courtyard like farmsteads in western Finland, with open hay fields around the farm and a log hay barn about 500 feet southeast of the house. Its many separate buildings reflected Finnish practice in giving each structure a special function, and the distant hay barn also reduced the danger of fire spreading to the rest of the farm. The buildings preserved traditional Finnish immigrant construction methods from the turn of the century, including chinkless log walls and double-notched corners, using materials such as tamarack, pine, and poplar from nearby woods.