Czech Village & New Bohemia: History in the Heartland

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Introduction

BRIDGES

Abridge—as does a road—leads somewhere. But a bridge accomplishes much more than a simple road, for it crosses an obstacle—a river, a gulch, railroad tracks, even an ocean.

Sure, you don’t see a bridge across the Atlantic Ocean. But if you use your imagination, it’s there. From the area known as Bohemia in Eastern Europe to a flat and prosperous land in the middle of America’s Heartland called Iowa, that bridge was built more than 150 years ago. It has taken adventurous Bohemian or Czech people somewhere—to a new land, to hard work and sacrifice, to family ties and fresh loves, to advanced educations and business opportunities, to realigned loyalties and relief from strife, to adventures unforeseen and to…yes, this symbolic bridge has taken these people to their dreams.

Today, in the Czech Republic’s capital of Prague, you can cross the Charles Bridge over the Vitava River. In Iowa’s second-largest city, Cedar Rapids, you can cross the Bridge of Lions over the Cedar River. Each bridge takes you past symbolic statues—in Prague they are of historically significant people, and in Cedar Rapids they are lions representing Czech independence. These bridges draw a parallel between old and new.

The Charles Bridge, constructed beginning in 1357, replaced the nearly two-century-old Judith Bridge that had been damaged beyond repair by a great flood.

The Bridge of Lions, erected in 1989, supplanted a weakened 1910 concrete structure that, itself, had replaced a rickety 1875 iron bridge. After just thirty-five years of service and seventy-nine years of service, these bridges across the Cedar River became early examples of the American tradition of replace rather than rebuild.

The Charles Bridge is magnificent. Its sixteen arched spans that stretch 1,700 feet across the Vitava are covered with cobblestones. It has three large bridge towers with the tower on the Old Town side often described as one of the more significant civil Gothic-style buildings in the world. Along the bridge’s rails stand replicas of thirty Baroque-style statues, the originals now preserved and exhibited at the National Museum in Prague.

The Bridge of Lions is functional. Its concrete bed spans seven arches across the Cedar. It provides not only two wide lanes for vehicular traffic but also walkways on either side for pedestrians and bicyclists. On the river’s west side stands a tall brick clock tower only twenty years old yet symbolic of the area’s Czech heritage. Along the concrete railings, semicircular extensions above the usually lazy river have concrete benches where you can rest, enjoy the scenery of a resurgent Cedar Rapids business district and come face to face with the small statue of a lion.

The Charles Bridge no longer allows anything but foot traffic, hence it becomes crowded with street venders, artists and walking tourists on a daily basis. In its early days, this bridge was significant not only because it connected the two areas of Prague but because it served as the major economic gateway from western Europe to Eastern Europe.

Likewise, the Bridge of Lions connects east and west, albeit on a significantly smaller scale. On the east side of the Cedar River, the New Bohemia area of Cedar Rapids was settled a decade before the American Civil War by Bohemians who left their country after the revolution of 1848. On the west side, Czech Village is a business district originally settled by immigrants of a multitude of nationalities until the burgeoning Czech population crossed the bridge and claimed the area as its own.

It is these neighborhoods of Cedar Rapids—the New Bohemia settlement from 150 years ago and the Czech Village district that came about in the early 1900s—that provide the focus for this brief historical perspective. It is an area that ebbed and flowed through most of the twentieth century until a handful of visionaries in the 1990s planted seeds for a vibrant future.

A well-traveled person would never mistake the quaint Czech Village/New Bo in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for the huge commerce and markets of Prague in the Czech Republic. But the connection is here and always will be—a bridge between two communities that today resonates as strong as ever with the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library appropriately located in the heart of the Czech Village/New Bo area. This neighborhood and its world-renowned museum serve as a testament to the accomplishments realized by arduous work, an appreciation for preserving deeply held Czech traditions and, yes, even more than a century and a half later, the challenging yet magical pursuit of human dreams.

The National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library, upper center, sits on higher ground away from the Cedar River five years after historic flooding in Cedar Rapids forced it to relocate. At left, the Bridge of Lions (Sixteenth Avenue) connects the New Bohemia area in the lower part of the picture to the Czech Village business district in the upper part. At right, the Twelfth Avenue Bridge has connected the areas since 1974. Photo courtesy of the Cedar Rapids Gazette.

1

INTO THE 1870S

IMMIGRATION AND THE AMERICAN DREAM

In 1870, just twenty-four years after Iowa became a state, its fledgling government spent $30,000 to convince restless Europeans that the Beautiful Land between two rivers could make their dreams come true. The 106-page brochure published in a multitude of languages, however, said nothing about the arduous journey required to reach what today has been dubbed the Heartland of America.

Frank Peremsky, who came to Cedar Rapids in 1856 by himself before his twentieth birthday, would have told of an ocean voyage long and lonely.

Thomas Korab, seven when his family dragged him across the continent in 1854, told tales of hunting wild rabbits for food and leading ox-driven carts through dangerous rivers and streams.

And Frank Svec, a twenty-something-year-old veteran of war in Bohemia when he arrived in the mid-1860s with his bride, Rose Kventensky Svec, and their two very young sons, Frank Jr. and Joseph, undoubtedly learned that cutting down trees to fuel steam-driven locomotives was as difficult as working the metal mines in his homeland.

For early Bohemian immigrants to Cedar Rapids and the surrounding area, life wasn’t a leisurely and wealthy fantasy. But it held promise.

In 1846, when Iowa became the nation’s twenty-ninth state, it had few roads and fewer bridges. The first pioneers of 1837 followed rivers and streams, if they didn’t actually float handmade rafts on the waters, to their new homes. Those who came later, like Korab and his family, crossed flowing rivers at their own peril, for often, if someone built a rudimentary bridge, high water soon washed it away. Often these pioneers waited days for a river level to subside so they could ford it. A short journey today required an eternity then.

The trip took twelve weeks, recalled Thomas Korab who published a diary in 1925 about his family’s immigration from Moravia to farmland southeast of Cedar Rapids.

It was a stormy voyage and it made an impression, not only on me, but upon my parents.

When we finally arrived in New York my father saluted the boat in tribute to it for bringing us safely here. We arrived at the Lorences, who lived in Racine, Wisconsin…in November, 1854. They were harvesting corn. We could go no further because it was too late in the year. We lived in a log cabin; three families lived there. My father cut wood in the forest.

As soon as spring arrived, my uncle came, by foot, to act as our guide from Wisconsin to Iowa. We bought a wagon and oxen and departed. The trip took two weeks. With us, in two other wagons, also came the Dostals and Lorences. It was the latter part of April, there was no grass, roads were bad, and it was very frosty. While the others went on, I was sent to one farm to buy something to eat and I got a loaf of bread fresh from the oven…My uncle had a gun and whenever he saw a rabbit, he shot it. After a while, we finally came to the Lorences and Zvaceks, east of Ely.

Thus, Thomas Korab’s family became early Bohemian settlers south of Cedar Rapids, where he would marry, have two children and farm eighty acres. On their journey across the Mississippi River they didn’t even find a bridge—the first one at Dubuque was constructed in 1868.

BRIDGES AND CULVERTS

Today, Iowa has more bridges and culverts per square mile than any state in the nation. The reason is twofold. First, the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers that form the state’s east and west boundaries are fed by hundreds of tributaries. And second, because Iowa’s topography is basically flat, surveyors platted the 310- by 200-mile state with a grid system of mostly straight roads every mile, east–west and north–south. Where road met water, in went a culvert or up went a bridge so that, in most cases, traveling from Point A to Point B was a straight line.

For immigrants from Bohemia, a bridge was the least of their worries. In March 1848, revolutionary action against the Habsburg Austrian Empire, of which Bohemia belonged, once again resulted in fighting on the home soil. A long history of wars and revolutions prompted many natives—who correctly predicted future fighting and bloodshed—to leave their homeland in search of peace and tranquility, land ownership and equality, opportunity and prosperity.

One man, Joseph Sosel, was packed into a wooden barrel in 1848 and smuggled out of Austria because the government had put a price on his revolutionary-minded head. A scholarly attorney, Sosel had unsuccessfully led Bohemian students in an uprising for political rights and more freedom. As the first Czech attorney to settle in the United States, according to multiple sources, Sosel eventually came to Cedar Rapids by way of Wisconsin as did so many Czech immigrants in the 1850s. They often rode in stagecoaches that followed the Military Road, a furrow dug into the wild prairie in 1839 that turned into a muddy mess every spring. Enhanced by a few bridges in the 1840s, this crooked trail meandered from Dubuque to Iowa City, the territorial capital and soon-to-be seat of state government, from 1840 to 1857. By the 1850s, the swiftest stages could complete the seventy-five-mile route in three days.

When Bohemians arrived in Iowa’s wide-open territory, they came upon white settlements freshly founded by the adventurous, the industrious and, sometimes, the dishonest. One of the latter, it seems, was Osgood Shepherd, who, in 1838, became Cedar Rapids’ first permanent settler of European descent. By one account, he jumped William Stone’s claim and commandeered Stone’s log cabin on the east bank of the Cedar River in what today is the heart of the city—First Street and First Avenue Southeast.

Shepherd, described in the 1878 history of Linn County as a large man, shrewd and cunning, and of more than average intelligence, opened his home as a tavern. With red hair, a rugged constitution and eyes piercing as that of a snake, he reportedly surrounded himself with outlaws. The story has long been told of Shepherd’s penchant for stealing horses and hiding them among thickets of trees on an island in the Cedar River, an island that decades later would, ironically, become home to the city’s government as well as the courts of Linn County and its jail.

By 1850, the population of Cedar Rapids had yet to reach four hundred. Most of the early inhabitants, originally from Great Britain, Norway, Sweden, Germany and France, had trekked west from the likes of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois or had sailed up the Mississippi River from New Orleans. Some were genuinely happy with what they found in Iowa while others simply gave up the strenuous search for nirvana when they found the new wide-open prairies satisfactory.

GOLD RUSH INFLUENCE

Cedar Rapids experienced a nice growth spurt when the westward movement gained momentum after James W. Marshall struck gold in 1848 at Sutter’s Mill in California. Since news traveled slowly in those days, it wasn’t until 1849 that Bohemians learned of the fortunes in California. Combined with the spoils of war and poor economic times, this prompted twenty-five thousand adventurous Bohemians to leave behind what little they had, including family members, in search of roads paved with gold.

Of course, by the time new European immigrants reached American shores, thousands of gold diggers on the continent had picked the mines nearly clean. While an estimated 300,000 fortune seekers reached their destination in the years to follow, thousands more realized that the weeks-long journey over huge mountains and across hundreds of unbridged waterways wouldn’t be worth the effort. These people, too, abandoned their golden fantasies to follow more realistic avenues toward success.

By 1856, the population of Cedar Rapids had quadrupled to 1,600, of which 400 were Bohemians. Most of these immigrants arrived in southern Linn County and northern Johnson County as they veered off the Military Road. Soon, some of them began the short migration to Cedar Rapids, where they settled along the east side of the Cedar River, downstream several blocks from the site of Osgood Shepherd’s log house. Shepherd, it seems, moved to Wisconsin in 1841 and was killed there in a railroad accident. But it was this year, 1856, that Cedar Rapids revised its seven-year-old charter and officially became a city in many historians’ eyes. And it was here, along today’s Seventh Avenue, that the first bridge in Cedar Rapids to cross the Cedar River was constructed in 1857.

Prior to 1857, travelers and merchants who wished to cross the river did so in the winter when it was frozen, waited for the river level to subside in the spring and the fall or took a ferry, explained Luther A. Brewer and Barthinius L. Wick in their 1911 book History of Linn County Iowa: From Its Earliest Settlement to the Present Time. They explained that use of the river had been popular since 1839, when keel boats plied their trade, and that it reached a new level when the first steamboat, The Maid of Iowa, brought a few settlers to Cedar Rapids in June 1846. Steamboats in a variety of shapes and sizes, including The Uncle Tobey with a two-hundred-ton cargo in 1853, traveled the Cedar River through the 1850s.

An artist’s copy of an 1859 map of Cedar Rapids shows the street names originally given when the city was platted. At right, Crocker Street on the east side of the river would become Fourteenth Avenue Southeast in the New Bohemia district. It was later connected by a bridge over the Cedar River to May Street (today’s Sixteenth Avenue Southwest) that runs through the Rural Square that would become part of Czech Village. Courtesy of the Cedar Rapids Gazette.

David W. King, one of the area’s most industrious entrepreneurs and founder of a village named Kingston on the west bank of the Cedar