Simo

Simo lies at the mouth of the Simojoki on the northern shore of the Gulf of Bothnia. Farming, livestock and fishing sustained its coastal villages, and salmon from the river was valuable enough to appear in a fourteenth-century record: a household was required to pay a barrel of it to Turku Cathedral after an offence reported to Bishop Hemming in 1345. Simonkylä had eleven farms in the 1540s, but its houses were burned during a Russian raid in 1581. Tax relief helped the village recover. A coastal road later carried the postal route between Sweden and Finland through the settlement; by the early 1750s it could be travelled by wheeled vehicle.