AEMI

76 AEMI JOURNAL 2015
keeps appearing in academic as well as
popular accounts, is quite astonishing as
in Finland women up to 1863 had no
given legal rights at all, and thus couldn’t
demand any such things. The fact that at
Sitka the church room in question was
between August of 1840 and August
of 1843 temporarily installed into the
Green Room within the walls of Sitka’s
governor’s mansion (Enckell1996:24),
that is, up to the time the actual church
building was completed, seem to have
been interpreted by some to underscore
such a twisted and unrealistic notion.
But even more foolish is the notion
that the Russian American Company
would, just to please a governor’s intended
wife’s religious devotion, proceed
to spend considerable sums, building a
church-building for just her, accommodating
150 to 200 people, as well as pay
the salary for a hired clergyman, all representing
a religion other than their own
dominant Russian Orthodox one.
No way! Such a choice was purely
economical, as the workforce the Russian
American Company so ardently
kept seeking throughout its operating
years, and did recruit, were Lutherans
from Finland as well as from the Baltic
Provinces of Estland, Lifland and Kurland
(Grinëv 2009), at that particular
time-period subjugated under Imperial
Russian rule (Enckell 1996:1-3).
By the fall of 1840 the logs for the
building had already been brought
down from the mountains, but, and as
there’s always cropping up a ‘but’: the
Orthodox Bishop, at the time at St. Petersburg,
wished to take up this matter
with the Czar. Finding His Majesty’s
ear closed to this matter, the bishop,
who arrived to Sitka in the fall of 1841,
fought what he considered to be such an
unacceptable intrusion within his territory.
Still, by Easter of 1843 the exterior
of the church-building stood ready
for interior adornment and the grand
installment took place August 24 that
year (Enckell 1996:25). By then Sitka
could boast of an established Evangelical
Lutheran parish with a fluctuating
membership of 100-175 members
a year, pointing to the fact that Sitka’s
Russian Era Evangelical Lutheran parish
was quite comparable in size to that of
Irkutsk’s Lutheran parish with its 150
parishioners both military and civilians
(Lenker 1898:648. Wrede1918:81). The
unfortunate thing is that Irkutsk’s Evangelical
Lutheran parish archives and records
went in 1879 up in smoke when
the grand fire on July 7 swept though
the city (Lansdell 1882:163-170. Lenker1898:648).
Although the same is not
true for Sitka’s Russian Era Evangelical
Lutheran Church, the where-about
of this parish membership records still
elude us. Only the original birth and
baptism records were located in 1995
(Enckell 1996:51-59).
As to Margaretha Hedwig Johanna
Sundwall’s often referred to religiosity
I don’t think it was any more feverish
or ardent than what was generally expressed
or socially expected at the time,
and certainly not more Devout Lutheran
than Madame von Wrangell was reported
to be (O’Grady 2001:31) or even
that of Madame Furuhjelm’s devotion,
she so freely drenched those letters with,
she mailed to her mother (Christensen
2005). When life at the time was so full
of harrowing events and there were no
tools yet by which to prevent or mend
most of them, the choices were to go