# Center Township, Pocahontas County, Iowa ## A Bohemian Farming Community on the Prairie Center Township sat in the heart of Pocahontas County, on the open prairie of northwest Iowa. For the Bohemian families who settled here in the years after the Civil War, it was raw land—unbroken sod waiting to be turned into farms. The people gathered in this narrative were bound together by their shared origins in Bohemia, by the Catholic faith they carried with them, and by the land they claimed and improved along the same few sections of the township. ## Mathias Bartosh: First to the Land The story of the family in Center Township begins with **Mathias Michael Matej Bartosh** (b. 1832). A native of Bohemia, Mathias had served as a soldier in 1856 in the war with Italy before marrying **Anna Stejskal** (b. 1829) in 1858. The couple came to America in 1865 and first settled in Winneshiek County in eastern Iowa. In 1874, Mathias moved west and located on the northwest quarter of Section 29 in Center Township—land he was the first to occupy and improve. From that beginning he built up a farm of 320 acres. He and Anna lived here through the years, raising a family of seven children, one of whom died in childhood. Their children married into the neighboring Bohemian families and took up farms of their own, several on that same Section 29: their son John farmed 160 acres there after marrying Anna Sinek, and their son Wencel farmed another 160 acres in the township. By 1895 Mathias had left the farm and moved into the town of Pocahontas, where he was one of the founders and liberal supporters of the Catholic church. Anna remained part of the household through 1910. Their long presence—from 1880 through 1910—anchored the family in the township. ## The Bartosh and Reha Families The younger generation carried the family forward. **Frank Louis Bartosh** was born in the village of Neznašov in Bohemia in August 1864 and was only seven months old when his family immigrated and settled in Iowa. On June 7, 1887, he married Mary Reha, and their children were born in Iowa. Among them was **Anna Elizabeth Bartosh**, born in Center on August 4, 1888, and **James T Bartosh**, born December 22, 1894. Frank, his sons **Frank Albert Bartosh** and **Joseph R Bartosh**, and his daughter Anna all lived in the township in 1895. **Mary Eva Bartosh** remained connected to the area as late as 1915. The Reha family lived alongside them. **James Reha** appears in the township in 1900 and again in 1910, and his household included **Elizabeth Lizzie Reha**, **Anna Louise Reha**, and **Dora Magdelina Maggie Reha**, the young Reha women recorded here through the turn of the century. ## Neighbors and Kin Other Bohemian families shared this ground and were joined to the Bartosh and Reha households by marriage and neighborhood. **Eva Evaline Krejčová** lived in the township in 1895 and 1900. **Joseph J Sinek**, present from 1880 through 1900, was father to the Anna Sinek who married John Bartosh in 1894. **Anna Shimon** lived here in 1900 and 1910, **James Joseph Vodraska** in 1900, and **Joseph Franklin Adamek** in 1895 and 1920—the latter closing the period covered here. ## Life on the Land For these families, Center Township meant farming. Mathias Bartosh had come to a place where the land was still unclaimed, and he and those who followed spent their years breaking sod, enlarging their holdings, and passing farms from parents to children. The Catholic church at Pocahontas gave the community its spiritual center, drawing the scattered Bohemian farmsteads together. By the second decade of the twentieth century the family's presence began to thin. Frank Louis Bartosh moved to North Dakota in 1911 and died at Lisbon on July 14, 1919. Yet for a generation and more—from the first plow in Section 29 in 1874 to the last records here in 1920—Center Township was home to these Bohemian families, the place where they built their farms, raised their children, and kept their faith.