# The Bohemian Prairie **From Czech Villages to Iowa Farms** Bartosh • Riha • Stará • Krejčová The people of this chapter came from a small cluster of villages in the Písek region of southern Bohemia — Údraž, Neznašov, Albrechtice nad Vltavou, Újezd, Bohanice, and the little quarter of Mala Strana — where for three generations the Bartoš, Stará, and related families were born, married, and buried. From that settled, church-centered countryside on the banks of the Vltava, they joined the great mid-century migration to America, carrying their Czech language and Catholic faith to the farming communities of Iowa and, in time, to the prairies of North Dakota. Their story is one of cottagers and hired hands who crossed an ocean and a continent to become, at last, owners of the land beneath their feet. ## The Bohemian Homeland The villages this family called home lay in the districts of Vltavotýn and the region of Budějovice, close by the old market town of Písek, whose name recalls the gold-bearing sand once panned from the riverbed. It was a gentle, ancient country of low hills, dark stands of spruce and pine, and medieval fishponds still worked in the nineteenth century, threaded by the Vltava on its way north toward Prague. The land was good enough for rye, barley, oats, potatoes, and flax, and for the pasturing of cattle and geese, but never so rich that a peasant household could grow careless. The villages themselves were tiny — a knot of houses gathered around a green, a chapel, and the surrounding strips of field — and homes were identified not by street but by house number. A person's parish record would faithfully note that a father was a cottager "in Albrechtice house number 31," or a farmer "from Albrechtice house 12." A house number was an inheritance, an identity, and a measure of standing all at once. That standing was finely graded, and the gradations governed everything. At the top stood the _sedlák_, the full farmer with substantial land; below him the _chalupník_, the cottager with a modest plot; then the _domkář_, whose little house and garden left him dependent on day labor; and at the bottom the _podruh_, the landless hind who lodged in another man's house and worked for wages and shelter, and the _pacholek_, the unmarried farm servant hired by the year. Within a single family one might find every rung of this ladder, and marriages often joined a farm servant to a cottager's daughter — two households rich in labor but poor in acres. Land could not be divided endlessly among children without impoverishing them all, and it was this quiet pressure, more than any single hardship, that would eventually set so many Bohemians in motion. The community was overwhelmingly Czech-speaking and Roman Catholic, its life anchored to the parish church, though the wider administration of the Habsburg realm was conducted in German. The priest recorded every birth, marriage, and death, and the midwife, or _baba_, was named in the baptismal register alongside the godparents. Parishes served scattered villages, so that the affairs of one settlement might be recorded across a boundary in a neighboring parish — as happened again and again in this thickly parceled countryside where villages, districts, and church jurisdictions did not always line up neatly. The decades this family belonged to spanned one of the great turning points in Central European life. The oldest of them were born in the years when the reforms of Emperor Joseph II were still recent memory — serfdom in its harshest form abolished in 1781, though the burden of _robota_, the compulsory labor owed to the lord, still lay across village life. The Napoleonic Wars reached even these quiet villages through conscription, requisitions, and the ruinous state bankruptcy of 1811, when the Austrian currency collapsed. The revolution of 1848 finally swept away the last feudal obligations, transforming a _domkář_ or _podruh_ from a lord's subject into a free man who owned his own labor; the children and grandchildren who married in the 1850s and 1860s were the first of their line to grow up in that freer, though still hard, world. By the 1860s, restlessness had found a direction, and word of cheap and abundant land in America reached even the smallest villages along the Vltava. ## The First Generation: František Bartoš and the Stará Family The earliest known member of the family was **František Bartoš**, born in 1791 in Albrechtice nad Vltavou, where he lived as a _chalupník_ — a small peasant cottager — in house number 31. His wife was **Veronika**, born about 1803, daughter of **Vít Bartuška**, a _sedlák_ of Albrechtice house number 12. Theirs was a match that reached across the ranks of the village, joining a cottager to a farmer's daughter. Their son **Jakub** was born there on 23 July 1834, into a settled, patient, half-feudal world standing on the near edge of the great upheavals of 1848. The family Jakub would marry into was rooted a little to the south, in the villages of Újezd and Údraž. **Matěj Stará**, born about 1784, lived as a _domkář_ — a cottager with barely more than a house and garden — in Újezd house number 29. His wife **Marie** was a daughter of **Josef Vávřina**, a _podruh_ of Bohanice. Their daughter, **Anna Kateřina Stará**, was born in 1828, into the long, watchful calm of the Metternich era, when the storms of war had passed but the deeper transformations were still to come. ## Jakub Bartoš and Anna Kateřina Stará As a young man, Jakub Bartoš worked as a _pacholek_ — a farm hand or horse groom — in Nezdašov, while living as a _podruh_ in the village of Újezd. On 20 February 1860, at the age of twenty-six, he married Anna Kateřina Stará, then thirty-two. Though Anna's home village of Údraž lay within the parish of Albrechtice nad Vltavou, the marriage was recorded a short distance south in the parish of Neznašov — one more instance of the way faith, kinship, and walking distances laced these villages together. Both were Catholic and single. By the time their children arrived, Jakub had risen to _domkář_ in Nezdašov, occupying house number 3. Their daughter Mary Bartoš was born on 4 May 1860 in Nezdašov, and their son **Frank Louis Bartosh** on 2 August 1864, both baptized in the parish of Neznašov. Frank was only seven months old when the family joined the outward flow of Czech emigrants in the winter and spring of 1864 and 1865, carried through New York and onward to Iowa. A third child, John, would be born in Iowa in May 1870, the first of the family's children on American soil. Jakub lived out his later years in Winneshiek County, Iowa, in the townships of Jackson and the village of Calmar, where he died on 19 November 1901. ## Mathias Bartosh, Pioneer of Center Township Of the same Bohemian stock, brother of Jakub, was Mathias (Matěj) Bartosh, born 31 January 1832 in Bohemia. As a young man in 1856 he served as a soldier in the war with Italy, one of the campaigns that drew the emperor's peasant sons far from their native villages. In 1858 he married Anna Stejskal, born in 1829, and in 1865 — the same years the family of Jakub Bartoš crossed — he brought his own family to America, first settling in Winneshiek County, Iowa. In 1874 Mathias moved west to Pocahontas County, taking up land in the northwest quarter of section 29 in Center Township, a claim he was the first to occupy and improve. Through steady labor he expanded the farm to 320 acres, holding it until 1895, when he retired to the town of Pocahontas. There he was remembered as one of the founders and a generous supporter of the Catholic church, and there he died on 24 March 1907. Mathias and Anna raised seven surviving children, whose marriages wove the family deep into the Bohemian settlements of Center Township. ## The Riha Family Into this transplanted community married another Bohemian family, the Rihas. **Albert Vojtech Riha** was born in Bohemia around 1833 and, like so many of his generation, crossed the Atlantic to Iowa, settling in the community of Utica in Chickasaw County, where he died on 24 August 1888. His wife was **Eva Evaline Krejčová**, and several of their children were born in Spillville, in Winneshiek County — a village so thoroughly Bohemian that its shops, churches, and daily speech remained Czech for generations. The children of Albert Riha reflected the restless movement of Czech immigrant families across the Midwest. **Mary Eva Riha**, born in Bohemia on 24 January 1868, immigrated while still young; she married **Frank Bartosh** in Iowa and eventually followed him to North Dakota, dying at Lisbon on 1 April 1943. James Reha, born in Iowa in August 1864, moved steadily northwest through Murray County, Minnesota, before settling at Lisbon, the same North Dakota town where his sister lived; he died there on 4 December 1943, only months after her. Elizabeth "Lizzie" Reha, born 14 November 1870 in Spillville, remained closest to home, marrying Joseph Sinek and living out her long life in Pocahontas and Chickasaw counties in Iowa, where she died on 26 August 1961 at the age of ninety. Anna Reha, born 14 May 1873 in Spillville, married James Joseph Vodraska and ranged the farthest — through Dickinson County, Iowa, Houston County, Minnesota, and back to Pocahontas County before her final move to Michigan, where she died at Lakeville, Oakland County, on 4 March 1928. ## The Iowa Years For more than half a century, from the close of the Civil War into the years between the World Wars, the Bartoš and Riha families lived out their American lives in the northeastern and north-central counties of Iowa. What drew them was Iowa's reputation across the Bohemian lands as a place where a landless cottager could become a landowner. In the villages of the Písek and Budějovice regions, a family's future had been fixed by tiny holdings passed down and subdivided until there was little left; in Iowa, the same labor bought outright ownership of farms that would have been unthinkable at home. They knew two very different Iowas. The northeastern corner — Winneshiek, Howard, and Chickasaw counties, with towns like Calmar, Spillville, Fort Atkinson, and Cresco — was rolling, well-watered country, cut by the Turkey and Upper Iowa rivers and settled early, already possessed of towns, mills, churches, and a growing Bohemian community when the family's first immigrants arrived in the mid-1860s. The country to the west, in Pocahontas County, was a different world: level, treeless prairie with deep black soil among the richest in the nation, but slow to be broken because it lay far from timber, water, and railroads. When the family began moving there in the 1870s and 1880s, families were often the first to occupy and improve a given section, breaking sod that had never been turned. The single force that transformed the prairie counties was the railroad; once the tracks arrived, land that had gone begging suddenly commanded real prices, and the early breakers of the first furrows — Mathias Bartosh among them — found their gamble rewarded. Through it all, the Catholic parish was the anchor of community life, where Czech was preached and marriages and baptisms recorded. These were tight, intermarrying communities in which the same surnames — Bartos, Reha, Riha, Sinek, Stejskal, Adamek, Vodraska — recur as neighbors, in-laws, and wedding witnesses. ## Frank Louis Bartosh and Mary Eva Riha The infant carried across the sea in his parents' arms grew up entirely within this transplanted world. By 1870 the household of Jakub Bartoš was at Calmar, and by 1880 at Utica in Chickasaw County, so that **Frank Louis Bartosh** came of age among the Czech-speaking farming settlements of northeastern Iowa. Census records later recalled his origins variously as Bohemia, New York, and even "at sea" — the confusion of a life that began in transit. On 7 June 1887, Frank married **Mary Eva Riha** at Fort Atkinson in Winneshiek County. Both were of Bohemian heritage, and together they raised a large family, with eight children born in Iowa. Their residences trace a household in steady motion: from Winneshiek County westward to Center, Grant City, and Pocahontas in Pocahontas County through the 1890s and early 1900s, and back east to Jackson Township in Winneshiek County by 1910 — a homecoming to the region of Frank's own upbringing before the largest move of all. In 1911 Frank made the final major move of his life, crossing into North Dakota and settling in Ransom County, first at Lisbon and by 1915 at Casey. This followed the well-worn path of Midwestern farm families pressing north and west toward newer, cheaper land — the same restless search that had first carried his parents out of Bohemia. Frank died on 14 July 1919 at Lisbon, at the age of fifty-four, and was buried there the same day. Mary Eva carried on, moving into the town of Lisbon by 1930, where she spent her final years amid relentless household labor across a lifetime that had begun a continent away. She died at Lisbon on 1 April 1943, at the age of seventy-five. ## The Children of Frank and Mary Eva The eight children of Frank Louis Bartosh and Mary Eva Riha carried the family across the northern plains and beyond. **Anna Elizabeth**, born 4 August 1888 in Center, Pocahontas County, married first Jesse Perry — with whom she had a son, William — and, after a divorce, married **Charles Calvin Cooper** on 25 November 1913, who adopted young William, thereafter known as Bill Cooper. Her life carried her from Iowa to Minnesota and finally to Spokane, Washington, where she died on 24 November 1964. Frank Albert, born 2 March 1890 in Pocahontas, lived across Iowa and North Dakota before settling at East Moline, Illinois; he married Mary Adamec on 23 June 1925 and reached the remarkable age of 102, dying at Moline on 25 November 1992. Joseph R., born 22 March 1892, made his home chiefly at Casey in Ransom County, married Florence Portz in 1914, and died at Enderlin, North Dakota, on 22 December 1968. James T., born 22 December 1894 in Center, married Anna Martinek in 1922 and lived in both Iowa and North Dakota. Mary Eva, born 18 May 1896, married Frank Zerr in 1915 and made her way to the Lisbon area, where she died on 9 November 1969. John Frank, born 29 April 1900, spent much of his life at Casey and Island Park in Ransom County and died at Lisbon on 2 October 1970. Stella A., born 28 October 1902, moved from Casey to Fargo and died at Lisbon on 3 March 1980. The youngest, William Lawrence, born 28 July 1907 in Winneshiek County, settled in Minnesota, married Loretta Rose Anderson in 1957, and died at Alexandria on 22 October 1995. ## The Other Children of Jakub Frank's sister Mary Bartoš, the eldest of Jakub's children and born in Bohemia in 1860, married Wenceslaus (Wenzel) Všetečka on 22 February 1876. She spent her life in Winneshiek County, in the townships of Sumner, Jackson, and Washington and near Fort Atkinson and Calmar, and died in Iowa on 12 January 1938. Their brother John Bartosh, born in Iowa in May 1870, lived throughout Winneshiek County in the townships of Jackson and Washington and near Calmar; he married Theresa (Tresi) Zack on 7 September 1895 and in later years moved to Minneapolis, where he died on 12 January 1934. Several others of the same stock are remembered by name alone — Jiří "George" Bartoš, Maria Magdalena Bartos Bartosh, and a further Frank Albert Bartosh among the Pocahontas line — their exact places within the family still to be worked out. Three generations after František Bartoš held his cottage at Albrechtice house number 31, his descendants were scattered across the farming country of Iowa, the prairie townships of Ransom County, North Dakota, and points as far afield as Illinois, Washington, and Minnesota — landowners and townsfolk in a country their emigrant forebears had reached as landless cottagers with an infant in arms. The villages along the Vltava had become a place remembered rather than lived in, while the parish registers of Winneshiek, Chickasaw, and Pocahontas counties, and the graves at Lisbon, marked where the family had come to rest.