Forssa Museum

Forssa museum is located in the historic Spinning Mill Area which has been renovated into a vibrant cultural centre.

Our permanent exhibition the City of Colourful Cloth tells how Forssa evolved from a group of farming villages of the middle of the 19th century into a modern industrial city. It tells how Axel Wahren founded Forssa and how “cotton angels” came to work in the factory. It tells about the time when the river through the city got blue, green or red, depending on the dyeing plant. It also tells about later days when rotating machines produced kilometres of colourful cloth, and when houses were made of concrete.

The City of Forssa was established around textile industry. Swedish born Axel Wilhelm Wahren (1814-1885) founded a cotton spinning mill by the side of Kuhalankoski rapids in 1849. The mill was soon followed by a weaving mill, yarn dye works and Finlands first industrial fabric printing plant. In 1934 the Forssa Company founded by Wahren was merged with the Finlayson textile group from Tampere. From this merge a company named Finlayson-Forssa was born. Textile production in Forssa ended in 2009. The heritage of the textile factory is now stored in Forssa museum’s textile archive, which contains fabric samples, sketches and artifacts originating from between the 1800’s and 2000’s.