Please help decypher a typo! (the name of a Canadian town)

Kirkland Lake, ON?

There is also Kirkland on the Montreal island, QC.

-cb

If the writer of 'Kirk Clod' never saw it written, just wrote what he thought someone said? My mother,who started out speaking Polish and learned English as an adult, never really understood 'L' in the middle of a word, 'railway' was 'raiway'. If the person saying 'Kirkland' had a similar difficulty with 'N', and the writer didn't correct for it, well, there you are. The two-words-for-one might represent the original speaker repeating the word v-e-r-y-s-l-o-w-l-y.

Interesting.

Clod = clod of earth (divot)
Earth = land

Round about way of doing it, but it works.

Even as late as the 1960's, people from rural Ontario had some very strange accents. The area had been settled for a long time and people didn't travel much. The old people in Walkerton and Beleville sounded almost like people from Yorkshire in England.

I can easily see how Kirk Land could sound like Kirk Clod in some of those dialects.

Yep, and they were older people dictating their memoirs in the '20's they were likely native Finnish speakers, learned English as a second language, and, if they lived among a group of other Finnish speakers, may not have used English all that much. In an outlying area they would have kept their accents, as Mike Martyn says.