Bohemia Historical Society
The Brother Who Saved Bohemia
Josef Koula — the musician, the craftsman, the guardian
On a cold November day in 1854, a worn-out ship slid into New York Harbor after a punishing 42-day voyage from Europe. Among the Czech immigrants who walked down its gangway was a 27-year-old joiner and musician named Josef Koula, freshly arrived from a village called Mnichovice, near Prague, in the old Kouřim region of Bohemia.
His younger brother, Jan (John) Koula, would go down in the local history books as a primary founder of Bohemia, Long Island. But Josef’s story runs along a different, restless track — one that carried him from New York to Long Island, on to Massachusetts, and back again, and that ultimately saved a hundred and forty-six of his countrymen from disaster.
1854
A New World in the Shadow of the White Garden
The New York that greeted the Koulas in 1854 was not yet the metropolis we know. The city proper ended near a leafy edge known as “The White Garden,” somewhere around present-day 10th Street. Beyond that lay a wilderness of rocky outcrops, deep gorges, and forest. There were perhaps forty Czechs in the entire city.
Life was brutally expensive for the new arrivals. A barrel of white flour ran a staggering $15.00. Meat was cheaper — an ox head could be bought for 25 cents, and sheep heads were given away free at the slaughterhouses — but steady work was almost impossible to find. Czechs who took farm work out on Long Island earned just 30 cents a day.
Josef tried at first to survive in the city through his music, busking with the other Czech newcomers. Hunger soon drove him to look further afield. Luckily, the Koula family had crossed the Atlantic with what was, by the standards of their fellow travelers, a small fortune — roughly $1,000 in savings, money enough to buy a future.
February 1855
The First Notes of Tábor
In February 1855, Josef purchased a piece of land on Long Island. It was on that land, in the wilderness south of the Lakeland railroad station, that his brother Jan built the first house of the settlement — the seed of what would soon be called Tábor, after the old Hussite encampment, and later, Bohemia.
Josef’s brief stay on Long Island left behind some of the most charming stories in the hamlet’s early lore. He recalled marching in a procession for Suffolk County delegates on July 4, 1855, alongside a motley four-man “band” of clarinet, trumpet, and two valdhorny (forest horns). For their trouble, each man was paid a princely $5. On another evening, his three-piece ensemble — violin, clarinet, and tambourine — supplied the music for a ball at which 300 couples danced into the small hours.
1855–1857
Restless Feet: Piermont, Lowell, Boston
Josef was a man of too many trades to settle quickly. By the winter of 1855 he had moved on to Piermont, New York, to work in engineering, and from there to Lowell, Massachusetts, where his skill as a joiner caught the eye of General Butler. Josef was hired into Butler’s engineering workshop — the first foreigner the general ever employed.
In April 1857, Josef set down roots in Boston. He was, as far as records suggest, the first Czech to settle in the city. He would not be the last.
1862
The Rescue at the Train Station
Josef Koula’s defining moment came in the early 1860s. In 1862, a party of 146 Czech immigrants arrived in Boston, lured by what Josef would later call “conscienceless agents” — labor recruiters who had promised them work and land in New Brunswick, Canada. Josef, who knew firsthand from the failed venture of the Haman family what awaited Czechs in the Canadian Maritimes, raced to find them. He discovered the group camped at a train station, their luggage already loaded onto a northbound steamer.
He tried to warn them. They didn’t believe him.
Desperate, Josef ran to fetch Mr. Haman himself, a Czech who at that point was scraping out a living in Boston by collecting rags — and yet, as he explained to the gathered immigrants, even that was better than what awaited them in Canada. He survived, he said, on the small coins, stamps, and bits of paper money he found in discarded clothing.
That testimony broke the spell. The 146 immigrants chose to stay. The ship’s captain, furious at the lost passage fares, refused to release their luggage. It took a lawyer, a collection taken up among the immigrants themselves, and a payment to compensate the captain before the trunks and bundles were finally returned.
The Aftermath
Boston’s Czech Quarter
Almost overnight, Boston had a Czech community. Josef and his wife rose to the moment. Mrs. Koula stood at the stove cooking enormous pots of soup to feed the new arrivals; Josef found them work at a nearby sugar factory and eventually opened a hotel and inn to house them.
But Josef Koula had not forgotten Long Island. Knowing the noise and grind of city life would not suit every family, he organized a second migration — quietly arranging for many of the people he had saved at that train station to leave Boston, return to New York, and cross over to Bohemia, Long Island. By then, the worst of the early shortages had passed: flour was selling for a reasonable $4.00 a barrel, and a Czech-speaking community of “good people,” as Josef put it, was already taking shape.
The Legacy
The Craftsman and the Guardian
Josef Koula was, by every account, the best kind of pioneer: honest, patriotic, and resourceful. During the Civil War, when carpentry work slowed in Boston, he turned his joiner’s hands to crafting musical instruments to keep his family fed. He remained a fierce keeper of his culture, publishing Czech national songs in memory of his late brother through the August Geringer publishing house in Chicago — the largest Czech-language press in America at the time.
In 1900, Josef moved one last time, to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he built a house and lived out his remaining years in peace.
History books may give Jan Koula the title of founder, and rightly so — it was Jan who stayed behind and put down the first roots on Long Island. But it was Josef’s land purchase, Josef’s savings, Josef’s intervention at that Boston train station, and Josef’s quiet shepherding of family after family back to Long Island that filled out the village his brother started.
Without him, Bohemia would not have become Bohemia.
Research provided by Thomas McMahon.
A Restless Life at a Glance
1854
Arrival in New York
After a 42-day crossing from Mnichovice, Josef lands in a city with barely forty Czechs and busks to survive.
1855
The Land That Became Tábor
In February, Josef buys the Long Island land where brother Jan builds the settlement’s first house — the seed of Bohemia.
1857
First Czech in Boston
By way of Piermont and Lowell — and a job in General Butler’s workshop — Josef settles in Boston in April.
1862
The Rescue of 146
Josef and Mr. Haman talk 146 immigrants out of a doomed passage to New Brunswick; a Boston Czech quarter is born.
1860s
A Second Migration
Josef quietly shepherds family after family from Boston back to Bohemia, Long Island, filling out his brother’s village.
1900
Last Move to New Bedford
Josef builds a final house in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and lives out his remaining years in peace.