'Laukaa church village'), historically known as Pellosniemi, is an urban area (a taajama) and the administrative center of the municipality of Laukaa, Finland.
[2] Formerly a rural village formed on lands of the Pellosniemi vicarage, the modern urban area largely developed during the late 20th century.
[2] Laukaan kirkonkylä is located by a terminal moraine formation (Sisä-Suomen reunamuodostuma), which is visible as a ridge beginning from the southwest around the hills Aikalanmäki and Kataanmäki, extending to the northeast towards the Kylmäniemi cape.
[12] An example is the Hevosenpää site, a well-preserved early Metal Age settlement in the northern part of the village, on a former island of the Saraavesi now surrounded by wetland.
[15] In the 15th century, the lands around Saraavesi were hunting grounds privately held by land-owning farmers from the villages of Kurhila and Viitaila in Asikkala, Matkantaka in Hauho as well as Hauhiala and Kaitala in Lammi.
During the 1450s, most of these were bought by Olof Nilsson Tavast (Olavi Niilonpoika), a nobleman who held the Porkkala manor in Lammi and acted as a judge in the Hollola hundred (kihlakunta).
The Pellosniemi cape had not been acquired by the nobility and was mentioned as belonging to Heikki Mölö (Mölönen) from Matkantaka.
[16] The settling of the hunting grounds in modern Central Finland began around the 1540s during the reign of King Gustav Vasa, who declared uninhabited lands property of the crown in 1542, encouraging settlers to move away from older, crowded settlements.
[19] Pellosniemi (officially a village, despite being a single farm) was held by the Ikonen family until 1608, when it was acquired by pastor Thomas Andreae.
The new parish was named Laukaa, as its first church was located by the Laukaankoski rapids, modern Tarvaalankoski in the village of Tarvaala.
[22] The vicarage was the only independent estate in Pellosniemi for long, though various tenure farms (torppa) under it began to be established in the 18th century.
Other early tenure farms included Mikkola (first mentioned c. 1726–1731), Jokiniemi and Klemettilä (1753), of which the latter was divided into Ala-Klemettilä and Ylä-Klemettilä in 1763.
[26] Both the settlement of evacuees and the transition to a post-industrial society caused Pellosniemi to start developing into an urban area; there were 2,500 inhabitants in the mid-1960s, which had increased to almost 4,500 by the late 1980s.