Count Per Brahe, Queen Kristina of Sweden’s governor general, gave a charter to the town of Salo in 1649 with the intention of building a town near the old harbour site of Satamakangas. Unfortunately, the harbour area had become so shallow that the location of the future town had to be changed. A new and better place was found further north, at the current bay of Raahe. After acquiring possession of the parish of Salo in 1652, Per Brahe renamed the town. It became Brahestad in Swedish, or Raahe in Finnish.

On the night of October 6, 1810 the expanding town of Raahe was faced with a disaster, a fire broke out. Three quarters of the town was destroyed, about 60 houses, including the town hall and its records. The church, the schoolhouse, a few houses in Rantakatu and some dwellings on the north side of the church hill were saved. The commission’s surveyor Gustaf Odenwall was assigned to draw up a new town plan and a plotting-out plan for rebuilding the town.

The burghers and the town administration agreed upon certain principals for the rebuilding of the town and a new plan, some of these were:

• a new, larger market square at the corner of Isokatu and Kirkkokatu
• the streets would maintain their previous width, widening the streets for the purposes of fire safety was given no support
• a space of three cubits or about 1,5 – 2 meters would be left unbuilt on the boundaries of the plots for fire safety purposes
• because of the enlargement of the plots the town needed to be extended
• two-storey wooden houses could not be built anymore, the stone base could not be too high, the buildings and their stone bases facing the street were to be of a uniform height