Paul Korpela and his father, John Korpela, at Kalevala Farm, circa 1950s. They are standing approximately where the Walmart parking lot in West Lebanon, N.H., is now and the field in the background is where the box store would be built. (Family photograph) Family photograph

The Korpela family in 1963 at the home of Jean Korpela's mother in Penacook, N.H. From left are Paul Korpela, Ellen Korpela Peck (standing behind), Sandy Korpela Radis (front), son Jon Korpela and Jean Korpela. (Family photograph) Family photographs

Paul Korpela at the Cedars, his retirement home in Portland, Maine, in 2021. (Family photograph)

WEST LEBANON — In the spring of 1972, Peter Johnson drove over to the Korpela dairy farm in West Lebanon. Johnson, a former teacher at Lebanon High School turned general contractor, had an idea he wanted to talk about with Paul Korpela, whose farm spread across 360 acres on both the east and west sides of Route 12A and whose farmhouse and barn sat on land that is now occupied by Walmart.

Johnson found Korpela, 46 at the time, in his workshop across the narrow two-lane Route 12A — then more commonly called Plainfield Road — that cut lazily between cornfields near where Koto Japanese Steakhouse is today, fixing a broken disc harrow.

Interstate 89 linking Concord and Burlington had opened only a few years earlier but already it was plain what the new highway would mean for the rich plain of farmland that fanned south from Exit 20 in the Connecticut River floodplain.

“Having myself been brought up on a dairy farm, I knew what to do and started helping Paul and holding things a little bit for him while he worked on the harrow,” Johnson recalled recently. “After he finished repairing it he asked what he could do for me” — Johnson was no stranger to Korpela because he had taught his kids in high school — and Johnson explained he had his eye on the field where Ziggy’s Pizza and Staples are now located to open a building supply business catering to the expected home building boom he foresaw coming in the Upper Valley.

Korpela knew well where things were heading for struggling small farmers like himself, family and friends recall. He and his father, John Korpela, a dairy farmer in Enfield, bought the West Lebanon farm in the late 1940s but they had recently leased some of their farmland on the west wide of Route 12A to a developer to put in a department store on parcel that would later become Upper Valley Plaza.

After talking for a few minutes, Korpela agreed to lease Johnson the land and they formalized the deal — by shaking hands.

That single handshake sealed a business partnership that would reshape the region by shifting the heart of the Upper Valley’s economy from Claremont, where it had been centered since the 19th century, 25 miles up river to West Lebanon at the nexus of two interstates and burgeoning growth.

“That’s how it all started,” Johnson said of what was to become the thick corridor of shopping plazas along Route 12A now dominated by big box stores Walmart, Home Depot, Staples, Kohl’s, Price Chopper, BJ’s Wholesale Club and a string of fast-food chain restaurants.

Paul Korpela, who was born in his parent’s farmhouse in Enfield in 1926, died at his retirement home in Portland, Maine, on Nov. 29, exactly 10 years to the day that his wife of 63 years, Jean Van de Bogart Korpela, passed away at the same home. He was 95.

Paul and Jean had met in the late 1940s when he attended a Young Farmer’s Club square dance in Lebanon at which Jean, a social worker and extension agent for Grafton County, was the caller. After a “whirlwind” romance, they were married in the front room of the farmhouse.

“They were best friends. They were lovers. They were a team,” said Paul and Jean’s daughter, Ellen Peck, speaking of how her mother and father ran Kalevala Farm as the Korpela family farm along Route 12A was named.

Paul was gregarious and mechanically inclined and Jean, with a masters degree from an Ivy League university and reading knowledge of French and German, were partners in running the 100-head purebred Ayrshire dairy farm, their daughter said, that was to become Ground Zero in developing the West Lebanon shopping corridor. “It was a family farm and that meant everyone was involved in order to survive,” Peck said.

Land — and the value of land — was a deeply rooted conviction in the Korpela family.

Paul’s father, John Korpela, had emigrated from Finland in the early 20th century and gone to work in the woolen mills in New Hampshire, joining other Finns who had settled near Lake Mascoma and eventually purchased a dairy farm on Stony Brook Road in Enfield.

Paul, 10 years younger than his next oldest sibling, learned dairy farming alongside his father growing up and was working as a herdsmen on the farm of New Hampshire Gov. Dr. Robert O. Blood in East Concord when his father called him one day to say he had an opportunity to buy the Ross Wood family farm in West Lebanon, with its rich soils along the bank of the Connecticut River.

“Buy it,” Ellen Peck said her father unhesitatingly urged his grandfather.

As descendants of Finnish “peasants,” Peck said, land was viewed as the key to secure future.

“You buy land and hold on to it. You lease land. You don’t sell it. You can’t build more land but you can build on it,” Peck remembered her father frequently saying.

Running the dairy farm required each cow being milked twice daily, first in the morning from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., and in the evening from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Korpela — who did much of the work himself along with high school kids he could hire to help — would fill a 500-gallon tank with the milk, which would then be picked up by Honey Gardens Dairy in Lebanon, which processed and bottled it under the Honey Gardens label.

A small dairy farm was never a big money maker “but we ate well,” said Jon Korpela, Paul’s son and now a retired banker who divides his time between New Hampshire and Florida. Jean cultivated three large garden plots in which she grew a cornucopia of green and root vegetables that would be stored in wooden bins in the dirt cellar of the farmhouse. There were always a couple of cows which were culled from the heard and slaughtered to provide a year-round supply of beef (daughter Ellen said meals were cooked using the liver, heart and tongue).

On Friday nights Jean and Paul would invite relatives and friends over dinner, games of pinochle and a Finnish steam bath Paul had built and attached to the house (the ladies went first in one group and then the men together in a second group).

His Finnish heritage was important to Paul, family members said, whether it was playing Finnish folk songs on the accordion or staying in touch — and later visiting — relatives in Finland, including bringing relatives’ teenage sons to New Hampshire for the summer to work on the farm.

“Dad didn’t speak English until he was six-years old and went to school,” daughter Ellen said.

“Family was a big deal for him,” said daughter Sandi Korpela Radis. “We grew up very ethnic, doing Finish dances, Friday nights with all the Finish relatives and the steam bath.”

Paul loved to laugh and beamed naturally in photos. One year for Jean’s birthday he gave her a chain saw as a birthday present (she got him back when the big box with his name on it under the Christmas tree was a complete set of dishes).

With 12-plus hour workdays and no vacations, farm labor was exhausting — and dangerous.

“He was getting banged up pretty bad,” said Jon Korpela, Paul’s son. “One time he got dragged by a heifer over rocks and that laid him for a time.”

In the early 1970s fertilizer prices began escalating, sharply pushing up the cost of feed grain to historic highs. A herd of 100 cows, of which only 60 were milking, were far too few in era of mega-dairies in which the industry was heading.

“It became very obvious to my father that not only were we not going to make much money in dairy farm, we weren’t going to make any money. We were going to lose money,” said Jon Korpela, now a retired banker who divides his time between New Hampshire and Florida.

Paul and his father, John, had already sold a 22-acre parcel of land on the east side of Route 12A near Exit 20 to Dartmouth College grad and Massachusetts developer Daniel Rothenberg in the mid-1960s. Rothenberg brought in the now-defunct discount chain Rich’s, which became the anchor tenant in what today is Upper Valley Plaza.

Korpela accepted Johnson’s idea to go into business together in 1972 and leased him the land to build Johnson’s Home Center and a year later, in 1973, sold his herd of purebred Ayrshire dairy cows to a Canadian farmer.

The next project they worked on together was bringing in Wendy’s and then after that, Walmart, said Johnson. Gradually, other box stores and retailers — Price Chopper, Home Depot, Golf & Ski Warehouse, BJ’s Wholesale Club, Friendly’s (now gone and occupied by BJ’s gas pumps) and Staples followed.

And if Korpela did not get the terms he was expecting in leasing a property, he wasn’t afraid to let the big corporations know that he wasn’t feeling any pressure to cut a deal, according to his son, Jon.

“He’d say, “well, it grows great corn” about a tract of land and then get up to leave the room, Jon Korpela said — which usually drew the other party back to the bargaining table.

Korpela placed so much value on land that he would swap it rather than sell it, his son and daughters said.

For example, when Lebanon Crushed Stone had an exhausted gravel pit at the site where the Fore-U Golf Center and driving range is now, he traded property he and his father owned on the other side of Route 12A across from the town’s landfill.

“Money’s not going to do us any good,” Jon Korpela said his father and grandfather said in turning down a cash offer. “We want land.”

(Today, the Korpela Family Trust, in which the former Korpela farmland along Route 12A is held, is assessed at $71 million, according to City of Lebanon property records).

After Paul sold the herd and he and Jean has some income rolling in, they moved out of the farmhouse and built a home in North Grantham. For several years an aunt continued to live on the property but when it came time to develop the parcel for the Walmart and Price Chopper shopping plaza, the Lebanon Fire Department razed the house and barn in a fire training exercise.

Although Paul Korpela was not given to sentimentality and saw the development of the family’s land into a retail corridor as inevitable and a smart business decision, friends got together to occupy Paul on that fateful day with activities just in case he might get upset.

“They said to him ‘let’s go golfing’ or ‘come out with us for coffee,’ so he wouldn’t see it burn,” daughter Sandi said.

Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.

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