Bohemia, Decade by Decade
The 1850s: The Origins of Tabor
Three families, one leap of faith
Every town has a birth date. Ours is March 5, 1855 — the day three families left the crowded tenements of New York City behind and staked their claim in the pine wilderness of central Long Island. The place they settled had no name, no roads, and no neighbors. For a brief time, locals would call it “Vavratown.” The settlers themselves chose something older and prouder: Tabor.
Those first settlers were Jan (John) Vavra, John Kratochvil, and Joseph Koula — neighbors in the city and street musicians who played together to make ends meet after fleeing the unrest sweeping the Austrian Empire. They had crossed an ocean to escape one hardship, only to find another waiting in the tenements. What they wanted was land of their own.
1855
A Doctor’s Orders
The move began, as so many great decisions do, with bad news. When Jan Vavra fell ill, his doctor prescribed the only remedy the age could offer: leave the smog of the city for “country air.” Through a land agent, Vavra learned of cheap property available on Long Island — part of the Alexander Wallis estate, carved from the original Nicoll grant. Pooling their savings, the three friends bought the land sight unseen.
When they stepped off the train at Lakeland Station (a stop that no longer exists) and walked south into the pine barrens, they discovered exactly what they had purchased: miles of scrub oak and pitch pine, and nothing else. No roads. No houses. No one.
The Long Walk
The Factory That Turned Out to Be the Sea
One of the most enduring stories of the founding began with a mystery. Whenever the wind blew from the south, the men heard a low, rhythmic pounding rolling through the woods. Hoping it was a factory — and with it, steady work — they set out on foot to find it.
They walked for miles through the pines until the trees opened onto the Great South Bay, and the truth revealed itself: their “factory” was the roar of the Atlantic surf breaking on Fire Island.
The trek was not wasted. Along the way they came upon the Oakdale estate of Commodore William Ludlow. Using sign language and broken German, they managed to ask for work, and the Commodore hired them at fifty cents a day. For months afterward, the men rose long before dawn and walked the miles to Oakdale, worked a full day, and walked home again by the light of pitch-pine torches.
1855–1859
Building the “Camp”
Most pioneers made do with rough log cabins. Tabor’s settlers had an advantage: Joseph Koula was a skilled cabinet maker. Koula is credited with building the settlement’s first three homes — modest but sturdy wood-frame houses that would have looked at home in any established village. Vavra’s stood on Locust Avenue; Kratochvil’s and Koula’s rose on Smithtown Avenue.
In 1859, the settlers made it official, recording their community in Riverhead as the “New Village of Tabor.” The name carried two meanings:
In Czech, tabor means “camp” or “encampment” — an honest description of a few families holding on in the woods. But it also honored the city of Tábor in Bohemia, the fortress of the Hussites, followers of the reformer Jan Hus, famed for their fierce independence. For a small band of Protestants and Freethinkers surviving alone in the wilderness, no name could have fit better.
April 1, 1858
The First Native Son
On April 1, 1858, the settlement celebrated a milestone: its first birth. Charles Peter Kratochvil arrived in a village with no church of its own, so in 1859 his family traveled to St. John’s Episcopal Church in Oakdale for his baptism. In the church registry, his birthplace is listed simply as “Islip, L.I.” — because on any official map, Bohemia did not yet exist.
1859–1862
The Colony Takes Root
Word of the “Bohemian colony” traveled back through the Czech community in New York City, and others followed. By 1859, eleven families had made Tabor their home. In 1862, Joseph Koula — the man who had built the village with his own hands — moved on to Boston, leaving the Vavra and Kratochvil families as the enduring anchors of the community he helped create.
The camp in the pines had survived its first decade. The decades ahead would transform it into something its founders could scarcely have imagined.