Firefighters, Button Makers, and a Craft Carried from Žirovnice to the World’s Fair
In the story of Bohemia, New York, certain family names recur like a refrain: Vavra, Kratochvil, Koula, Novotny, Swanda, Hrouda. Among them, quietly threaded through the hamlet’s civic records, its industrial history, and even the roster of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, is the name Fischer. Across three generations, the Fischers helped organize the village’s first fire company, carried a centuries-old Czech craft across the Atlantic, fed their neighbors from a butcher shop on Smithtown Avenue, and placed Bohemia’s signature trade before a global audience. Their story is, in miniature, the story of the hamlet itself.
A Village Called Bohemia
The community the Fischers helped build began in 1855, when a small group of Czech immigrants — John Vavra, John Kratochvil, and Joseph Koula — settled on inexpensive, sandy land in the Town of Islip, on Long Island’s South Shore. Fleeing the aftermath of the failed 1848 revolutions and the constraints of Habsburg rule, they first named their settlement “Tabor,” after the Hussite stronghold in their homeland. By 1885 the name had been formally changed to Bohemia, an unambiguous tribute to the old country.
The village that grew up around them was compact, industrious, and strikingly self-sufficient. Cigar making became the economic backbone in the late nineteenth century, and hotels, general stores, churches, and fraternal halls clustered along Church Street and Smithtown Avenue. It was a community that built its own institutions — its cemetery, its school, its churches — largely without waiting for outside help. It was in exactly this spirit of self-organization that the first of the Fischers steps into the historical record.
Joseph Fischer and the Birth of the Fire Department
Before 1893, fire protection in Bohemia was a matter of improvisation. Residents relied on informal “bucket brigades,” summoned by the tolling of church bells or the shouts of neighbors. In a village built almost entirely of wood — steep-gabled homes, large-porched hotels, and cigar workshops — the arrangement was plainly inadequate, and the community knew it.
The turning point came on January 30, 1893, at a meeting convened to draft plans for a formal volunteer fire company. William Swanda served as chairperson and Louis Kautsky as secretary, but it was Joseph Fischer who made the decisive move: he formally proposed the motion to organize the “Hook and Ladder Company No. 1.” The motion carried with the unanimous support of the village’s leading families, transforming fire protection in Bohemia from a volunteer impulse into a structured institution. Fischer’s name appears on the department’s charter membership list alongside figures such as Theodore Gross, Charles Sebek, Joseph Thuma, and John Cerny — a roll call that reads like a census of the village’s most influential citizens.
The new company wasted no time. That same year, before its firehouse was even complete, it purchased a “Ramsey” hand-drawn hook and ladder truck for $375 — a machine the volunteers themselves hauled through Bohemia’s sandy, unpaved roads. In 1894 the department completed a two-story wooden firehouse at Church Street and Walnut Avenue, the busiest corner in the village, whose upper floor doubled as a meeting hall, band rehearsal space, and social center. The institution Joseph Fischer set in motion with a single motion on a January evening would grow into the modern Bohemia Fire Department, formally organized in 1930 and still serving the hamlet today.
Ferdinand Fischer: From Žirovnice to the Shell Piles of Long Island
If Joseph Fischer represents the family’s civic legacy, Ferdinand Fischer embodies its commercial one — and its deepest link to the old country. Ferdinand came to Long Island from Žirovnice, a small town in the south-central Czech lands renowned for centuries as a center of knoflíkářství, the button maker’s craft. Žirovnice’s specialty was mother-of-pearl: its workshops transformed shell into lustrous buttons prized by the fashion trade, and its thirteenth-century castle today houses a museum devoted to that very industry.
When Žirovnice’s craftsmen emigrated, they brought the trade with them, and Bohemia, New York, became one of its principal American outposts. Spurred by the protective McKinley Tariff of 1890, which made domestic button making highly profitable, Czech immigrants opened factory after factory; by the early 1900s, New York State counted roughly forty button works, with the hamlet of Bohemia standing out as a vital manufacturing center. The factories were unmistakable, marked by their “shell piles” — blinding white mountains of oyster, ocean, and Mississippi River mussel shell stacked outside, waiting for the cutters’ hollow drills. Firms like Math & Hrouda on Karshick Street and B. Schwanda & Sons supplied millions of pearl buttons to New York City’s garment district, just fifty miles to the west, while local women and children earned steady piece-work income sewing finished buttons onto display cards at their kitchen tables.
Ferdinand Fischer was not merely a skilled hand in this industry — he was one of its pioneers. Bringing his Žirovnice training directly across the Atlantic, he opened his own pearl button factory, joining the ranks of the immigrant proprietors who made the hamlet a manufacturing center. But the button trade was as volatile as it was profitable, and Ferdinand’s venture ultimately failed — decades before the industry’s broader collapse. The failure forced a reinvention that says much about the man: rather than leave the village, he pivoted into the retail food business, co-opening a meat market with Joseph Emer in 1925, the same year his family settled in Bohemia. The butcher shop on Smithtown Avenue became a village staple, complete with a delivery horse whose most memorable moment, family lore records, was bolting into the cemetery in the middle of a parade. The partnership was soon a family affair in every sense: Joseph Emer married Ferdinand’s daughter Rose in 1926, in what village memory recalls as the last traditional old-fashioned Czech wedding in Bohemia, celebrated at the CSA Hall with pork, sauerkraut, dumplings, and dancing to the Melody Masters.
Rose (Fischer) Emer and the World’s Fair
It was Ferdinand’s daughter Rose (1909–2010) who carried the family’s — and the village’s — signature craft to its largest stage. When the New York World’s Fair opened at Flushing Meadows in 1939, promising visitors “the World of Tomorrow,” organizers also made room for the living crafts of the old world. Rose was chosen to demonstrate Bohemia’s traditional button-drilling craft before fairgoers, representing the hamlet’s button industry at an exposition that drew some 45 million visitors over its two seasons. For a village of a few thousand people, having one of its own — a button maker’s daughter, trained in a craft that traced straight back to Žirovnice — on display at the century’s grandest fair was an extraordinary distinction.
The moment was bittersweet in ways few could have foreseen. The fair celebrated a gleaming future, yet that future had little room for the pearl button. After World War II, the zipper and cheap mass-produced plastics devastated demand for genuine shell buttons; the Math & Hrouda factory burned in 1947, and Bohemia’s last button factory closed its doors in 1969. Rose’s demonstration at the fair thus stands, in retrospect, as something close to a farewell performance for a three-generation craft tradition.
Rose herself, however, was anything but a relic. When World War II came, she emerged as one of the village’s most capable logistical leaders. Beyond her duties as an air raid warden, she initiated and managed a massive, community-wide fund drive in 1944 for Bohemia’s War Memorial — an effort notable not only for its scale but for the scrupulous transparency with which she ran it, and one that culminated in the memorial’s dedication in November 1947. Her wartime mobilization work earned formal recognition more than six decades later, when the New York State Assembly presented her with the “Rosie the Riveter” Award in 2007.
The geography of that century of service can be traced along a single street. Rose lived on Locust Avenue for eighty-four of her one hundred years, and the avenue became the staging ground for her civic life: she frequently led the village’s parades down it, flag in hand, until she was less a participant in Bohemia’s traditions than their symbolic face. Fittingly, Locust Avenue is also where the Bohemia Historical Society — an institution she helped spark in the 1980s, after a group performance of the Beseda, the Czech national dance — keeps its museum today. In a 2008 oral history recorded in her home, at age ninety-nine, she was still telling the stories of the button trade, the butcher shop, and the runaway delivery horse.
Holding the Town Together
Rose’s longest work, though, came after the war, in the decades when the Bohemia that raised her was quietly disappearing. The button factories died — Math & Hrouda burned in 1947, the last factory closed in 1969 — and the arrival of MacArthur Airport, the great zoning changes of the 1960s, and waves of suburban development transformed the Czech farming village into a bedroom community. Against that upheaval, Rose built a quieter kind of infrastructure: thirty-five years leading the Bohemia Senior Citizens Club and twenty years on the Bohemia Union Cemetery board, which she painstakingly reorganized as treasurer. Historians of Long Island’s postwar transformation point to precisely this kind of “memory work” — performed largely by women of Rose’s generation — as the soft infrastructure that kept places like Bohemia from losing their small-town identity entirely during the rapid suburbanization of the 1960s and 70s. The clubs, the cemetery records, the parades down Locust Avenue: these were the threads that held the old village together inside the new suburb.
A Legacy in Miniature
The pearl button is a small thing — a disc of shell no wider than a fingertip — and it is tempting to see the Fischer family’s history the same way: a motion at a meeting, a shop counter, a demonstration booth at a fair. But small things, in Bohemia, were the whole economy and the whole civic fabric. Joseph Fischer’s motion in 1893 gave the village an institution that has protected it for over 130 years. Ferdinand Fischer’s drills and his meat market fed the community twice over, in wages and in dinners. And Rose Emer’s hands, drilling buttons before the crowds at Flushing Meadows, showed millions of visitors what a few families from the Czech lands had built on the sandy soil of Long Island.
Bohemia’s shell piles are long gone, and the old firehouse at Church and Walnut was itself lost to fire in 1977. What remains is memory, carefully kept — much of it by an historical society Rose helped inspire. In that sense, the Fischer family’s final gift to Bohemia may be the story itself.