Bohemia Historical Society
The Priest Who Built the Little Church
Father James E. Bobier, 1841–1918 — from Wexford to Ontario to a wooden chapel on Locust Avenue
Every history of Bohemia begins with the Czech families — Vavra, Kratochvil, Koula — who came looking for affordable land and stayed to build a village. But the small wooden church that became the spiritual center of that village was raised under the direction of a man who was neither Czech nor a resident of Bohemia. He was an Irish-Canadian priest based nine miles away in Bay Shore, and his name was James E. Bobier.
Most local accounts give him a single line. He deserves better. When the Brooklyn diocesan newspaper The Tablet ran his obituary on December 21, 1918, it did not lead with his twenty years at one of Brooklyn’s most prominent parishes. It ran the headline “A Long Island Missioner” — and it stated, in plain words, that he built the church at Bohemia. That is our founding, in a sentence, in a primary source.
Rev. James E. Bobier, first resident pastor of St. Patrick’s, Bay Shore.
1798–1863
From Wexford to Ontario
James Bobier’s father, Patrick Bobier, was born in 1798 in County Wexford, Ireland — the year and the county of the bloodiest fighting of the United Irishmen rebellion. His mother, Mary Boen (Burns), was born in Ireland in 1797. Whatever combination of sectarian violence, penal-law disability, and simple poverty drove them out, they left — and they did not go to Boston or New York. They went to Upper Canada, and they married in St. Thomas, Ontario, in 1828.
This is worth stating carefully, because it corrects a common shorthand. The Bobiers were not Famine emigrants. They were out of Ireland nearly two decades before the potato failed — part of the earlier, quieter Irish exodus to British North America that is far less written about than the ships of 1847.
James was born to them on December 15, 1841, in Canada, and appears to have been their only child together. Patrick died on September 4, 1863, in Kent County, Ontario, and is buried at Thamesville. Mary outlived him by fourteen years and died in 1877 — not in Ontario, but in Utica, New York, at the age of eighty. Her son had by then been in the United States for twelve years, and 1877 was the same year he took his American citizenship. It is hard not to read the two facts together.
1865–1878
Fordham, Baltimore, and a Master’s Degree
In his early years James was educated by the Jesuits at a college in Canada — an unusual advantage for the son of Irish immigrant farmers, and one that shaped everything after.
He crossed into the United States in 1865, at twenty-four. He graduated from St. John’s College, Fordham, in 1870, then went south to St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore — the oldest Catholic seminary in the country — where he was ordained in 1872. He became a naturalized United States citizen in 1877, and in 1878 he took a master’s degree from St. John’s College in New York City.
That record made Bobier one of the better-credentialed priests available to the Diocese of Brooklyn, which then encompassed the whole of Long Island. When the diocese needed someone to organize a thinly scattered, fast-growing Catholic population across rural Suffolk County, there was a reason they sent him.
1883–1898
“A Long Island Missioner”
In 1883, Bobier was appointed the first resident pastor of St. Patrick’s, Bay Shore. Catholics had worshipped there since 1858, when the first Mass was said in Owen Drum’s house on Fifth Avenue, but they had been served as a mission out of Huntington. Bobier was the first priest to live among them.
What The Tablet described fifteen years later was not a parish. It was a territory. His ministrations extended to Bohemia, Islip — then newly opened as a mission, where he was the first priest ever assigned — Crooked Hill, near Commack, Central Islip, Fire Island, and the eastern part of the Sayville district.
He rode all of it. And while riding it, he built.
At Bay Shore he inherited a converted carpenter’s shop, ninety feet by forty, bought for $1,200. In 1890, out of his own pocket and at a cost of $1,500, he enlarged it to 125 by 64 feet, nearly doubling its capacity. He acquired the eight-room house at 23 Fifth Avenue as a rectory for roughly $1,600. He made additions to the church at Islip as well.
He also bought ground for the dead. The Tablet records that he purchased two cemeteries — St. Patrick’s of Bay Shore and one in Bohemia. The Bay Shore parcel was fifteen acres on Brentwood Road, bought in 1884 at his own expense. The Bohemia cemetery followed in 1886.
And from the day the state asylum at Central Islip opened, Bobier served as chaplain to its patients, continuing until 1895. In an era when institutionalized people were routinely forgotten by everyone outside the walls, that was a decade of unpaid, unglamorous, entirely voluntary work — and his obituary singled it out.
December 8, 1885
The Little Church
Bohemia’s Catholic families had no church and no priest of their own. In the language of the diocese, they were a mission of St. Patrick’s, Bay Shore — which meant they were Father Bobier’s responsibility.
“While laboring in this extensive field he built the church at Bohemia for the Bohemians and others residing in that district, which church is called St. John of Nepomuck.”
The Tablet, December 21, 1918
The original wooden church — the building Bohemians have called the Little Church for a century and a half — was raised by the early Catholic settlers under his direction, and the first Mass was celebrated in it on December 8, 1885. The parish cemetery followed in 1886. St. John Nepomucene would not receive a resident pastor of its own until 1919, thirty-four years later. For that entire founding generation, the sacraments in Bohemia came from Bay Shore, on Father Bobier’s horse.
That the church was named for St. John of Nepomuk — patron of Bohemia, the martyr thrown from the Charles Bridge in Prague — tells us something about how it was built. This was not a chapel imposed on a community by an outside diocese. An Irish-Canadian priest helped Czech farmers and cigar-makers build a church, and then let them name it for home.
1898–1918
Brooklyn, and the End
Bobier concluded his fifteen-year Bay Shore pastorate in 1898. He did not retire.
In November 1898 he was appointed rector of St. Charles Borromeo on Sidney Place in Brooklyn Heights, succeeding the late Dr. Thomas F. Ward. Founded in 1849, it was among the oldest and most prominent parishes in the diocese, in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city. It was, unmistakably, a promotion. The circuit-riding missioner who had spent fifteen years on sand roads between Crooked Hill and Fire Island finished his career in the diocese’s front rank.
He held the post for twenty years, and The Tablet judged him “most successful in this busy parish.” In June 1913 a great celebration was held in his honor. In 1917, at seventy-five, he oversaw construction of a new parish school at a cost of $125,000 — an enormous sum, and the last major work of his life.
Father James E. Bobier died on December 18, 1918, in East Hampton, New York, three days after his seventy-seventh birthday. He had been a priest for forty-six years, thirty-five of them on Long Island and in Brooklyn, and he died in office.
He is buried in St. Patrick Cemetery, Bay Shore — Section 2, Row ZZ, Plot 2 — in the fifteen acres he bought with his own money in 1884, among the people he had served first.
The Legacy
Why He Matters Here
Bohemia’s story is usually told as a Czech story, and rightly so. The Little Church complicates it in a useful way.
In 1885, a Canadian-born, Jesuit-educated priest whose parents had left Wexford for Ontario sixty years earlier helped a community of Czech farmers and cigar-makers build the church that would anchor their village for the next century and a half. He bought them their cemetery. He came out from Bay Shore to bury their dead and baptize their children for years before the diocese gave them a pastor of their own. Then he went to Brooklyn and, as far as any surviving record shows, never spoke of it again.
The building survived the fire of April 2012 and stands today beside the larger church whose cornerstone was laid in 1981. It is his monument here, and it is a good one.
Do you have photographs of the Little Church in its early years, family records of baptisms or burials performed by Father Bobier, or anything relating to the founding of St. John Nepomucene? The Bohemia Historical Society would love to hear from you.
A Life at a Glance
1841
Born in Canada
James E. Bobier is born December 15 to Patrick Bobier of County Wexford and Mary Boen Burns, Irish emigrants settled in Ontario since the 1820s.
1865
Crossing the Border
Jesuit-educated in Canada, Bobier emigrates to the United States at twenty-four and enrolls at St. John’s College, Fordham.
1872
Ordained at Baltimore
Ordained at St. Mary’s Seminary, the oldest Catholic seminary in the country. He becomes an American citizen in 1877 and earns a master’s degree in 1878.
1883
First Resident Pastor at Bay Shore
Appointed to St. Patrick’s with a territory stretching from Crooked Hill to Fire Island — Bohemia among it.
1885
The Little Church
The first Mass is celebrated in Bohemia’s original wooden church on December 8. It is named St. John of Nepomuk, for the patron saint of the settlers’ homeland.
1886
Ground for the Dead
Bohemia’s parish cemetery is established. His obituary credits Bobier with purchasing two cemeteries — St. Patrick’s of Bay Shore and one in Bohemia.
1890
Out of His Own Pocket
Bobier personally funds the $1,500 enlargement of the Bay Shore church, expanding it to 125 by 64 feet and nearly doubling its capacity.
1898
Called to Brooklyn Heights
Appointed rector of St. Charles Borromeo on Sidney Place, one of the oldest parishes in the diocese, where he serves for twenty years.
1918
Home to Bay Shore
Father Bobier dies December 18 at East Hampton, three days after his seventy-seventh birthday, and is buried in the cemetery he bought in 1884.
Sources: The Tablet (Diocese of Brooklyn), “A Long Island Missioner,” December 21, 1918; Souvenir Journal of the Dedication of St. Patrick’s Church, Bay Shore, September 7, 1919; Find A Grave memorial no. 159517934; St. John Nepomucene parish history; Bohemia Historical Society timeline; genealogical records for Patrick Bobier and Mary Boen Burns.
Research provided by Thomas McMahon.