Bohemia, Decade by Decade
The 1860s: Pioneers, Patriots & The Iron Horse
Still Tabor, for now
At the dawn of the 1860s, the village was not yet “Bohemia” — to the people who lived there, it was still Tabor, the camp in the pines. But the isolation of those first hard years was beginning to crack. Word of the little Czech colony had spread through the immigrant enclaves of New York City, and the woods were about to get more crowded.
1862
The Second Wave
The village’s first real population boom arrived in 1862, even as the Civil War raged far to the south. Records indicate that seven new families settled in Tabor that year alone, joining the original eleven. Nearly overnight, the settlement grew by more than half.
The newcomers called their home Tabor, as the founders did. But their English-speaking neighbors in Sayville and Islip had their own name for the place: “The Bohemian Settlement,” or sometimes “Bohemiaville.” The settlers may not have chosen it, but the name would eventually stick — and one day it would appear on every map of Long Island.
1861–1865
Patriots in a New Land
The “Patriots” in our story earned that title honestly. These were immigrants who had lived in America for less than a decade — many of whom did not yet speak English — and yet the Civil War reached deep into their small community in the woods.
With able-bodied men drawn away or consumed by the sheer work of survival, the women of the settlement became its backbone. Women like Katherine Vavra and Mary Kratochvil managed the farms, cleared the stubborn scrub oak, and raised the first generation of American-born children — alone, in the wilderness, in wartime. If the founders built Tabor, these women held it together.
1868
The Shooters’ Club
When the war ended, it left behind a new appreciation for marksmanship and community defense. In 1868, the village founded its very first organization: the Shooters’ Club, or Střelecký Spolek.
The club was about far more than target practice. It was Tabor’s first organized social hub — a place for the community to gather, compete, and celebrate together. In doing so, it laid the groundwork for the volunteer institutions that would define Bohemia for generations, including the Fire Department that would follow decades later.
1868
The Iron Horse Arrives
The most significant economic event of the decade happened just south of the village. In 1868, the South Side Railroad — today the LIRR Montauk Branch — extended its tracks to Sayville.
To understand what this meant, remember how the founders had arrived: by way of Lakeland Station to the north, near what is now the Long Island Expressway, followed by a long walk through trackless woods. For thirteen years, that northern station had been the settlement’s thin thread to civilization. The new Sayville station reoriented the entire life of the village southward.
More importantly, it opened a market. The wood chopped and the produce grown in Bohemia were no longer just for survival — they could be carted to Sayville and shipped by rail to New York City. For the first time, real cash began to flow into the struggling community. The railroad didn’t run through Tabor, but it changed everything about it.
1860–1869
Still Waiting: A School and a Church
For all its growth, the village of the 1860s still lacked two cornerstones of community life.
There was no schoolhouse. Children walked miles through the woods to reach the Lakeland School to the north or the Sayville School to the south — a trek in every season, in every weather. The village would not build its own one-room schoolhouse until 1872.
There was no church, either. The faithful continued the familiar journey to St. John’s Episcopal Church in Oakdale — the settlement’s “mother church” — for baptisms and marriages, just as the Kratochvil family had done for little Charles Peter a decade before.
Both would come in time. The 1870s would see Tabor finally begin building the institutions of a true village — starting with a road, and a school of its own.