Local History
Thirteen Men at Union Hall: The Bohemia Fire Department Since 1893
From a $375 hand-drawn ladder truck to a certified first-response agency — one company, in continuous service, for more than 130 years
The Meeting
Union Hall, January 1893
On January 31, 1893, thirteen men met at Union Hall to organize a fire company. William Swanda took the chair; Louis Kautsky kept the minutes. By the end of the evening the village had the Bohemia Hook and Ladder Company No. 1.
Bohemia in 1893 was barely a generation old. The first Czech families had taken up land in the scrub oak in the late 1850s, and the village that grew around them was built almost entirely of wood — frame houses, frame hotels, frame halls, and hundreds of backyard cigar workshops with stoves in them. There was no water main, no hydrant, and no help closer than Sayville. A fire that got going in that village would not be stopped by a bucket line.
The thirteen men who met that night were not officials. They were the carpenters, tradesmen, hotelkeepers and clergy of a working village, and what they founded has run without interruption ever since.
The Roll
The Thirteen Founders
Joseph Novotny, John Wild, Theodore Gross, Joseph Fisher, Charles Sebek, Joseph Thuma, Louis Ruzicka, Rev. John H. Prescott, Judge John Z. O’Brien, William Swanda, Charles Ruzicka, Thomas Bartick, Louis Kautsky
Several of these families still have descendants living in Bohemia, and some still have members in the Department — which is a rarer thing than it sounds. A volunteer company that can trace unbroken family service to its founding meeting is holding onto something most communities lost decades ago.
On May 19, 1893, the company elected Joseph Novotny its first Foreman. He was twenty-two years old, and already one of the village’s leading builders — a man who had put up a good many of the frame buildings he was now responsible for saving. His story is told separately in The Builder and the Fire Chief.
The First Apparatus
A $375 Ramsey, Paraded Home from Sayville
Later that year the company bought its first piece of apparatus: a Ramsey hand-drawn hook and ladder truck, $375. It came out from New York City by rail, and when it was unloaded at the Sayville station the men did not simply take it home. They paraded it — the whole way from Sayville to Bohemia, on foot, pulling it themselves.
It is worth pausing on what that truck actually was. No engine, no pump, no water. Hooks for pulling down burning walls, ladders for reaching upper floors, axes, and thirteen men on the rope. Everything depended on how fast they could run to the fire and how hard they were willing to work once they got there. That is the whole of the village’s fire protection in 1893, and it stayed close to that for twenty-two years.
The parade from Sayville makes more sense in that light. A village that had just spent $375 it could barely spare wanted every resident to see what it had bought.
Discipline
Red Shirts, Black Pants, and Sixty Copies of the By-Laws
At only its second meeting the company settled on a uniform: black pants, red shirts, firemen’s caps and belts. It then wrote by-laws and had sixty copies printed for distribution — sixty, for a company of thirteen. They were plainly expecting to grow, and they wanted every man who joined to have the rules in his hand.
Those by-laws were stringent — a code of proper, gentlemanly conduct laid out in a regimented, almost military style, with stiff penalties for anyone who failed to keep to them. Fines were real money to a cigarmaker or a carpenter, and they were levied.
The severity was not ceremony. Thirteen volunteers hauling a ladder truck through the dark toward a burning building have no margin for a man who does not show, does not listen, or has been drinking. The by-laws were how a company of neighbors turned itself into something that could be relied on — and they doubled as the village’s social contract, since the same men would face each other in the street the next morning.
A Home for the Truck
Church Street and Walnut Avenue, 1894
The first firehouse went up in 1894 at the corner of Church Street and Walnut Avenue. The land was conveyed to the company for one dollar — a village making a gift to itself — and the men held their first meeting in the finished building in early September of that year.
A firehouse in a village this size was never only a garage. It was a meeting hall, a polling place, a rallying point, and for a Czech-speaking community still finding its footing in an English-speaking county, a building that was unambiguously theirs.
Soda and Acid
The End of the Hand-Drawn Era
In 1915 the company bought its first chemical engine — a tank of soda acid for knocking down small fires. It was an advance, and it was still hand-drawn. Bohemia’s firefighters were pulling their own apparatus through the streets a full twelve years after the Wright brothers flew.
That ended on November 5, 1920, when the company took delivery of a motorized chemical truck built on a Reo chassis at a cost of $2,500. The new rig carried a forty-gallon soda acid tank with a hose reel, along with the hooks, ladders and axes the company had always carried. The chemistry was simple and effective: acid mixed with soda water inside the sealed tank generated carbon dioxide, and the pressure drove a stream of water out through the hose without any pump at all.
Set the two prices side by side and the change is stark. The 1893 truck cost $375. The 1920 truck cost $2,500 — nearly seven times as much, from a village that had grown but was hardly wealthy. Bohemia had decided what it was willing to pay for.
1921
A Company Becomes a Department
In 1921 the Bohemia Hook and Ladder Company No. 1 became the Bohemia Fire Department.
The new name followed the new truck by a matter of months, and the two belong together. “Hook and Ladder Company No. 1” describes a single crew with a single specialty. “Fire Department” describes an institution with apparatus, officers, a district and a budget. The men who paraded a hand cart from Sayville had, in twenty-eight years, built the thing they had only been pretending to be in 1893.
April 20, 1937
Firefighter Frank Cizek
In more than 130 years, the Bohemia Fire Department has lost one member in the line of duty.
On April 20, 1937, Frank Cizek — an Islip Town Fire Warden and a Bohemia volunteer — died fighting a brush fire in the South Side Sportsmen’s Club woods, near Pond Road and O’Neil Path. That ground is now Connetquot River State Park Preserve.
Brush fire is the danger particular to this part of Long Island, and it always has been. The pine barrens and scrub oak that made the land cheap enough for Czech farmers to buy in the 1850s are the same fuel that has burned across Suffolk County in every dry spring since. A structure fire has walls and a roof and stays where you left it. A brush fire moves with the wind, changes direction without warning, and can put a man in front of it before he understands what has happened.
Today the Department marches past that same preserve in its parades, and sits as a member of the Friends of the Connetquot River State Park. The connection is not incidental.
Medical Response
The Ambulance, 1950
In 1950 the Community Ambulance Company was formed to cut response times for medical emergencies across the area. Bohemia voted to join the ambulance district, and a good number of the Department’s own members signed on to help staff the new company as well.
Community Ambulance remains an independent organization — not a fire department squad — and today serves Sayville, West Sayville, Bayport, Oakdale and Bohemia. The Bohemia Fire Department works alongside it as a certified first-response agency: Bohemia’s members reach the patient, begin care and stabilize, and hand off to Community Ambulance when its crew arrives.
It is worth naming what that change meant. For its first half-century the Department existed to fight fire. Today, as in nearly every volunteer department in the country, the majority of the calls are medical. The truck still rolls, but most of the time what arrives is a neighbor with a trauma bag.
Growth
Two Firehouses: 1961 and 1975
The Department held its first meeting in the present Main firehouse on February 21, 1961 — sixty-seven years after the little building at Church and Walnut, and squarely in the middle of the suburban boom that turned Bohemia from a village into a hamlet of thousands.
It was not enough. The fire district’s population doubled over the following decade, and in 1975, under Chief Allen “Bones” Behounek, a substation was built to cover the ground the Main house could no longer reach quickly enough. A department founded to protect a few hundred people in a handful of frame buildings was now covering an airport, a highway corridor, and a hamlet many times its original size.
September 2001
Fifty Miles West
In the first hours and days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Bohemia was called in on mutual aid to staff an FDNY firehouse, and members went in to assist with the recovery at Ground Zero.
Staffing a city firehouse is the quieter half of that sentence and deserves saying plainly. With FDNY companies destroyed or committed downtown, whole neighborhoods were left without coverage, and volunteers from Long Island and beyond drove in to sit in someone else’s quarters and answer someone else’s alarms. It is not the work anyone remembers. It is exactly the work that had to be done.
The apparatus that made the trip was a century removed from a hand-drawn Ramsey. The premise had not changed at all.
Today
Parades, Blood Drives, and Santa
The Department remains one of the anchors of civic life in Bohemia. It marches every Memorial Day and runs the Christmas Parade with Santa, which is for a great many children the first time they ever see a fire truck up close.
It hosts blood drives and Adopt-A-Family programs, awards scholarships to college-bound seniors, and teaches fire prevention and First Aid and CPR classes. It is active in the Bohemia Civic Association and belongs to the Friends of the Connetquot River State Park.
None of that is incidental to the fire service. A volunteer department only works if the community keeps producing people willing to leave dinner and run toward something everyone else is running away from. The parades and the scholarships and the Santa run are how a department stays woven into the place it protects — and how a company founded by thirteen men in 1893 still has, on its rolls today, the descendants of some of them.
Help Us Fill In the Blanks
A great deal about the Department’s early years is still unrecorded. We would like to know where Union Hall stood, whether any of the sixty printed by-laws survives, what became of the 1893 Ramsey truck and the 1920 Reo, and whether a photograph exists of either. We would also like a full list of the Department’s chiefs from 1893 to the present.
Above all we would like to know more about Frank Cizek — his family, his years of service, where he is buried, and whether any account of the April 1937 brush fire survives in the local papers. A department’s one line-of-duty death deserves more than a sentence, and we would be glad to give him a page of his own.
If your family has served in the Department, or you hold photographs, minute books, parade programs or news clippings, please contact the Society. Corrections are welcome and encouraged — the people who lived it know it better than any document does.
Sources: Bohemia Fire Department records and departmental history; Bohemia Historical Society, “The Builder and the Fire Chief: Joseph Novotny”; Community Ambulance Company, Inc.