Bohemia, Decade by Decade
The 1870s: Clearing the Path & The First School
The hardscrabble decade
By the 1870s, the first generation of settlers had built their cabins — but the land around them was still rugged, sandy, and stubborn. This was the hardscrabble decade: a time of clearing the dense pine barrens by hand, cutting the first real roads through the woods, and raising the settlement’s very first public institution. If the 1850s were about survival and the 1860s about growth, the 1870s were about work.
1870s
Clearing the Path — Literally
The defining task of the decade gave this chapter its name. Acre by acre, settlers uprooted the stubborn scrub oak and pitch pine by hand to carve arable farmland out of the barrens. It was slow, punishing labor — but even the obstacle had value. The cleared wood was cut and sold as cordwood to the Long Island Railroad, where it fueled the same locomotives that were transforming the region. Bohemia’s farmers were, quite literally, clearing their fields and powering the railroad with the same swing of the axe.
South Shore
Working the Bay
The sandy soil did not always cooperate, and when the harvest fell short, the men of Bohemia looked south to the water. Many found work in the fish and oil factories on Fire Island, where menhaden — the oily baitfish that swarmed the South Shore — were rendered into fertilizer and lamp oil.
The commute was staggering by any standard. Men would walk miles to the bay, row across to the barrier island, and work week-long shifts at the rendering plants, returning home only on weekends. It was grueling, foul-smelling work, but it kept families fed when the fields could not.
1867
The First Schoolhouse
For the settlement’s first decade, education was informal, held in private homes wherever a willing teacher and a spare room could be found. As the population grew, the need for a real schoolhouse became undeniable.
The community answered the way it always did — by pooling its resources. In 1867, the village built a one-room wooden schoolhouse for $600 (roughly $11,000 today), and the district was officially designated District No. 8. The first teacher was hired at an annual salary of $180 to instruct 48 children — a single teacher, every grade, one room.
That tiny building quickly became more than a school. With no church and no town hall, the schoolhouse doubled as the meeting place for the growing village — the first roof the whole community could gather under.
1872
The Czech Farmers’ Club
As more land came under cultivation, the farmers realized that what they could not accomplish alone, they might accomplish together. In 1872, they established the Czech Farmers’ Club (Český Rolnický Spolek) — one of the earliest organizations in the village’s history, predating even the Fire Department.
The club let farmers buy seeds and tools in bulk, share hard-won agricultural knowledge about the difficult Long Island soil, and support one another through bad harvests. It was mutual aid in its purest form — and the first sign that this loose collection of immigrant families was becoming a unified economic and political force.
Late 1870s
Cigars by Candlelight
The 1870s also planted the seeds of the industry that would one day make Bohemia famous. The large cigar factories — operations like M. Foster’s — were still decades away. But in this decade, the “kitchen table” factories were born.
Families began obtaining cigar licenses to roll tobacco at home, working by candlelight through the long winter months. Out of necessity, a dual economy took shape: farming in the summer, cigars in the winter. That rhythm — field and rolling table, season by season — would define life in Bohemia for the next fifty years.
By decade’s end, the village had a school, a farmers’ club, roads, and the beginnings of an industry. What it still lacked was a church of its own. That would be the story of the 1880s.