Lippu Cottage
Lippu cottage is one of the oldest buildings in the area. The origins of this cottage have not been definitively determined. According to local tradition, the cottage is said to be a Russian border guard’s croft from the 18th century: From 1743–1812, the border between Swedish Finland and Russia followed the Kymi River which forms the Verla rapids. On the other hand, this cottage might very well have been one of the military crofts in Valkeala. It seems that this cottage was moved to Verla at the beginning of the 1870s.
The building is a single-room log cottage measuring about 12 m2. A woodshed was added at a later date to the other end of the building. The log walls have been covered with planks. The building used to have traditional "soil bench" foundations with an empty space in the middle, where people would keep chickens in the winter and store food in the summer. Electrical lighting came to these workers’ houses in 1923.
The building is named after its first resident of Verla, mill worker Antti Anders Lippu (1838-1911). Antti and his wife Magdaleena lived in the cottage and raised their six daughters there. Antti and Magdaleena lived in the cottage until the end of their lives. In 1913, the mill bought the cottage as a residence for the workers. After the Lippu family, the cottage has been inhabited by Herman Kinnari, the oldest employee of the mill. He was 86 years old when he ended his job as a night watchman in the 1930s. The croft served as a dwelling for the mill workers until the mid-1950s. One of the last residents in the cottage was the Ukkonen family. Father Salomon worked as a stable man at the mill and as he grew older, he became a night watchman.
There is a worker-housing exhibition during the summer time in the Lippu Cottage, telling about how the mill workers lived in Verla.