St. Urho King and Queen crowned Monday at Helsinki Bar in Butte

A tradition launched by Finnish Americans in Minnesota in the mid-1950s to honor a fictional saint continued Monday night in Butte with high-spirited fanfare.

The packed crowd’s anticipatory buzz at the Helsinki Bar reached decibel levels high enough to likely scare waterfowl away from the nearby Berkeley Pit.

Cheers erupted around 6 p.m. when Lorrie Tracy and Bill Willis were crowned St. Urho Queen and King for 2026. The trappings of royalty included horned helmets, capes and papier mache grasshoppers on sticks.

St. Urho’s creators credited him with driving out frogs or grasshoppers from Finland. For Helsinki Bar patrons, the consensus has been grasshoppers.

Both Tracy and Willis boast Finnish family ties. The two are cousins.

“I used to take saunas here with my grandmother,” Tracy said, gesturing toward the Helsinki Bar.

Willis is part of the Waananen family.

The honorees in 2025 were Fiina Heinze, whose first name has Finnish ties, and George Copyak. His links to Finnish heritage were more opaque. Both attended Monday’s crowning.

In melting pot Butte, Finn Town was once a lively community, according to the Montana National Historic Register: "Twelve saloons, six grocery stores, 18 boarding houses, a community hall, and three saunas served 'Finn Town,' a bustling ethnic enclave in the 1920s. Finns were relative latecomers to Butte, arriving in numbers around 1910.”

Then came the Berkeley Pit, an open pit mine that also consumed the Italian community of Meaderville.

"In the 1950s, the Anaconda Company purchased much of the Eastside — including Finn Town — to feed the Berkeley Pit’s rapacious appetite and to create a buffer zone around its open-pit mining operation. Today, the Helsinki stands alone, a potent reminder of the once vibrant Finnish neighborhood."