Bohemia Historical Society
The Swanda Farm
A working farm becomes a house — one room and one porch at a time
A rare vintage photograph of the Swanda farm has recently surfaced in our archives, and the comparison to the property as it stands today is a small lesson in how a Long Island village ages — quietly, in pieces, one room and one porch at a time.
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c. 1900
A Hive of Activity
In the older photograph, the farm is fully alive. A horse stands in the yard. Chickens wander loose. Outbuildings cluster around the main house. It’s a perfect snapshot of the agricultural Bohemia that flourished from the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth — a hamlet of cigar workers, button drillers, and farming families, almost all of them tracing their roots back to Czech-speaking lands of Austria-Hungary.
The Swandas themselves were already a name to know in Bohemia. In the early 1900s, they were the village’s premier masonry and construction family, often partnered with the Benedicts under the firm name Benedict & Swanda. They built many of the brick commercial buildings that gave downtown Bohemia its lasting character — including, in 1923, the state-of-the-art brick market that Cyril Cervenka commissioned at the corner of Locust Avenue and Church Street, the building that still stands today as the Locust Avenue Deli. The family’s civic involvement ran just as deep: William Swanda chaired the inaugural meeting of January 30, 1893 that organized Bohemia’s volunteer Hook & Ladder Co. No. 1 — the foundation of the Bohemia Fire Department.
So while the photograph shows the family farm in its workaday clothes — a horse, chickens, a kitchen garden — the Swanda name in Bohemia carried serious weight. The men who lived in this house helped build the streetscape outside it.
The Architecture
Hidden History in Plain Sight
The barn in the older image still stands proudly on the property today. The house, however, tells a more interesting story — one of evolution.
Look closely at the vintage photo and you’ll see what appears to be a small detached kitchen standing apart from the main residence. This was a feature common to nineteenth-century farmhouses across the Northeast, generally called a summer kitchen. Before electrification, before gas ranges, before air conditioning, the heat from a wood- or coal-fired cookstove made a kitchen unbearable in July and August — and dangerous in any month, since a flue spark could send a wood-framed house up in minutes. Building the kitchen as a separate outbuilding (or as a low ell connected to the main house) kept the heat, the smoke, the cooking smells, and the fire risk away from where the family slept. Detached kitchens of this type were common from roughly 1850 through 1930, after which improved stoves, plumbing, and electrification gradually made them obsolete.
At some point in the Swanda farm’s history, the family followed exactly that trajectory: the detached kitchen was physically moved and attached to the main house, folded into the floor plan as kitchens everywhere were folded back indoors. The welcoming front porch we know today was a later architectural addition, bridging the older farmhouse with what would become a more modern home.
These are quiet changes, but they tell a real story. They mark the moment a working farm became a residence — the moment electric light replaced the cookstove, the moment the horse moved out and the porch chairs moved in.
Get Involved
Share Your Memories
We’re actively building our community timeline and want to hear from you. Stories like these — the small architectural decisions, the names of the carpenters, the year a porch went up — are exactly the details that turn a photograph into a history.