How a Musician from Ondřejov Played the Soundtrack to a New Village
If you stand in the middle of Bohemia today — amid the quiet streets and manicured lawns — it is almost impossible to picture what greeted Jan Kratochvil when he stepped onto Long Island in 1855. There were no roads. There were no houses. There was only the Pine Barrens: a sea of scrub oak, dwarf pine, and sandy, fire-scorched soil that most Long Islanders had written off as worthless.
To Kratochvil, that worthless ground meant something the old country had never offered him.
It meant ownership.
History often groups him into a collective “Founding Three” — Kratochvil, Jan Vávra, and Joseph Koula — but his story stands out for what it cost him. He was not a farmer. He was not a laborer. He was a 42-year-old musician from Ondřejov, in the Bohemian countryside east of Prague. And he was the one who, when everyone else’s plans collapsed, dug his hands into the sand and stayed.
From the Streets of Manhattan to the Scrub Oak
Jan Kratochvil was born on May 4, 1812. By the time he arrived in New York in 1854 with his wife Catherine, he was part of a wave of Czech immigrants leaving the Austrian Empire after the failed revolutions of 1848 — political refugees as much as economic ones.
Like most of his countrymen, he landed in the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side. The Czech community in New York City at the time numbered no more than forty souls. To put bread on the table, Kratochvil, Vávra, and Koula did what they knew how to do: they took to the cobblestones as street musicians, busking for coins.
The city was unkind to their health. When Vávra fell seriously ill, his doctor prescribed country air. Through a land agent, the three friends pooled their busking money and bought plots of land — sight unseen — in a place called “Lakeland,” about 50 miles east of the city.
The reality was a harsh dissonance. The “fertile farmland” was sand and soot, blackened by recent forest fires. The “Lakeland” train depot, when they got there, sat miles from their actual property.
The Fifty-Cent Struggle
The first years tested them in ways that would have broken most men.
The three couples threw up a small shanty on Vávra’s lot to share — a structure so primitive that locals in Sayville scoffed at the settlement, dubbing it “Tábor” after the old Hussite war camp in Bohemia. (The name stuck for decades.) With the sandy soil refusing to yield crops and their savings gone, Kratochvil traded the musician’s craft of his hands for the rougher work of his back. He and his neighbors walked miles each morning to Colonel William Ludlow’s estate on the shore of the Great South Bay, where they cleared brush and dug ditches for 50 cents a day.
It was a meager wage, but it bought them time. Slowly, the scrub oak came down. The pine roots were pulled up. The “camp” began to look something like a village. When Joseph Koula and his wife eventually gave up and moved to Boston, the Kratochvils and the Vávras were the last two couples standing.
A Village is Born
The true turning point came on April 1, 1858.
That day, Catherine Kratochvil gave birth to a son, Charles Peter Kratochvil — the first child born in the new settlement. The cry of that newborn changed everything. This was no longer a work camp shared by three immigrant friends. It was a place where families took root and a future was being written.
The Kratochvils would know joy and grief in equal measure on that sandy soil. A daughter, Mary Emma, died in 1864 at just four years old. A son, Eduard F., lived to twenty-four before he too passed in October 1889. Both were buried in what would become Bohemia Union Cemetery.
As more Czech immigrants arrived — drawn by letters home praising “the land of liberty” — Kratochvil grew into a pillar of the community. He was among those who, in 1885, helped petition the federal government for a post office and officially renamed the village Bohemia.
The Jan Hus Monument — and a Final Bow
Perhaps the most moving chapter of Jan Kratochvil’s life came near its very end.
On September 28, 1893, the village he had cleared from the scrub oak unveiled a 12-foot granite monument to Jan Hus in the Union Cemetery — funded entirely by Czech immigrants from around the world, and the first officially dedicated memorial in the United States erected in honor of a foreigner. Two of the three founders were there to see it: Jan Kratochvil and Jan Vávra. (Jan Koula had passed in 1886 and was already resting in the cemetery a few yards away.)
It must have been an extraordinary moment for him — standing as an old man on the very land he had cleared by hand, watching a monument rise to the seminal hero of the Bohemian Reformation on what was now, indisputably, Czech American soil.
He would not see another autumn. Just over a month later, on November 1, 1893, Jan Kratochvil died at the age of 81. He was buried in Bohemia Union Cemetery — beside his daughter Mary Emma, beside his son Eduard, and only a short walk from the Hus monument he had lived just long enough to see unveiled.
The Quiet Legacy
It is easy to drive past the cemetery on Church Street without a second glance. But the next time you do, slow down and look. The musician who traded his instrument for a shovel rests there. The first father of the first child of Bohemia rests there. The man who watched the Jan Hus monument rise — and then, his work done, slipped quietly away one month later — rests there.
Jan Kratochvil proved that while the soil of Bohemia may have been sandy, the roots he planted were made of iron.