Summer visitors on the islands of Kuorsalo and Tammio

• "We weren’t backwards in any way. People actually came there even before they went to the countryside. Even though we had a big family with many children and not much money, we were not poorly dressed. We had good clothes.”
• “Mother could sew too.”
• "Of course, there were some who had villas.”
• “Then there were those who walked around wearing straw hats and carried walking sticks, with white shirts on.”
• “They were, I’d say, not exactly rich, but better off than we were. And they dressed a bit differently.”
• “Probably city folk.”
• “I remember when [the neighbor girls] went off to play tennis — they had those little white dresses.
  The Sipari sisters: Sinikka Hirvonen, Sylva Mettinen and Hilkka Korhonen, Kuorsalo"

Already in the late 1800s, civil servant, gentry, and teacher families from Hamina and Kotka were looking for summer retreats by the sea. These could be found in places like Kuorsalo and Tammio. Fishing and pilot families in the archipelago offered their outbuildings as summer rentals, fixed up for guests and advertised through friends or newspaper ads. Many guests returned summer after summer.

At the turn of the century, reeds and shoreline were considered wasteland by islanders, where cows roamed freely. By the 1950s, this attitude had shifted. Now it was the holidaymakers who wanted to be near the water. Inland sauna huts no longer appealed to them, and instead, breezy seaside saunas began to appear along the coast.

Grand summer villas were rare in the southeastern archipelago around 1900. One exception was Villa Mäntylä in Kuorsalo, built by the teacher Helmi Enckell. More common was renting an existing house or converting an old fishing farm into a summer cottage. Bank manager Sundqvist bought the Römpötti house in Kuorsalo for this purpose, and forest officer Nordenswahn stayed with his family in Tammio. The presence of city dwellers brought a genteel atmosphere to the islands. They passed their leisure time in impractical hats and summer clothes. Many also came to the islands for the annual summer festivals.

In the late 1940s, major societal changes led many working-age islanders across Finland to move to the mainland in search of work or education. Old island farms became summer homes for their extended families. The owners, who were often summer residents themselves by then, continued to rent out spaces to earn some extra income. Summer visitors stayed in various buildings, sometimes lodging with widows. This small-scale rental tradition has continued into modern times.

The last permanent residents moved to the mainland for the winter in the early 1970s. But every summer, the islands would come back to life. Younger generations on holiday, along with former year-round residents, returned to the lands of their families. All available space, and sometimes more, was needed as children, grandchildren, and eventually great-grandchildren filled the saunas and rooms of the old fishing farms. New buildings, in the style of each decade, rose among the old yards, along empty shores, and on family forest land.