# Pocahontas, Pocahontas County, Iowa On the open prairie of west-central Iowa, Pocahontas and the surrounding Center Township drew Bohemian families in the decades after the Civil War. For the immigrants who settled here, the appeal was land — raw, unbroken, and available to those willing to work it. ## The Bartosh Family and the Prairie Mathias Michael Matej Bartosh, born in Bohemia in 1832, carried a full life across the Atlantic before he ever saw Iowa. As a young man he had served as a soldier in the war with Italy in 1856, and in 1858 he married Anna Stejskal, born in 1829. The couple came to America in 1865 and first settled in Winneshiek County, in the northeastern corner of the state, among other Bohemian arrivals. In 1874 Mathias moved his family west to Pocahontas County, taking up the northwest of Section 29 in Center Township. He was the first to occupy and improve that ground, breaking prairie sod that had never been farmed. Over two decades he built the holding into a 320-acre farm and raised a family of seven children there, one of whom died in childhood. The children — Catherine, Mary, Anna, Elizabeth, John, Ella, and Wencel — married into other Bohemian families of the county and spread across Center and Lincoln townships, each on land of their own. The Catholic church at Pocahontas owed something to Mathias, who was among its founders and steady supporters — a reflection of how immigrant families anchored themselves not only in soil but in faith and community. In 1895 Mathias left the farm and moved into the town of Pocahontas. He was buried there on 26 March 1907, and his wife Anna Stejskal was laid to rest in the same community. ## Marriages and Burials Pocahontas marked the turning points of these interconnected Bohemian families. On 22 November 1892, James Reha married Anna Shimon here. The Reha name recurs among those laid to rest in the town — Elizabeth "Lizzie" Reha and Dora Magdelina "Maggie" Reha were both buried at Pocahontas. Eva Evaline Krejčová, whose surname is the feminine form of the Bohemian Krejčí, was also buried here, another of the community's Czech-speaking families who made this prairie town their final resting place. ## A Bohemian Community on the Prairie For a span of roughly fifteen years around the turn of the century, Pocahontas held together a cluster of Bohemian families bound by marriage, faith, and shared origins in the old country. They had come for farmland and stayed to raise children, build a church, and bury their dead in the town they helped make.