Munden and Cuba: The Bohemian
Colonies
The Bohemian settlement in Republic
County was made in two parts. One group settled in Fairview and
Rose Creek Townships. Munden was its center. The other group centered
around Cuba, in Jefferson and Richland Townships.
In 1870, John Rechesky with his family
and his father-in-law, Mr. Kornele, came in wagons from Muscady,
Wisconsin, and took a homestead near the present site of Cuba.
There were not many settlers near there at that time but they
came in numbers during the next two years.
In the year of 1871 a large group came
from Iowa. This wagon train contained about twenty families, most
of them from Marshall County. Some of them had come from Cedar
Springs. In Marshall County they organized, selecting John Kuchera
from the leader of the trip.
The group was composed of young couples,
most of them with small families. The wagons were drawn by oxen
and the children walked, driving the cattle. It took about three
weeks for the trip.
The following named families were in
this group: Hanel, Brush, Vech, Sphlical, Drashner, Strnad, Barton,
Rechesky, Sedlachek and Novak.
They came for better opportunities
offered on the farms of the new land. Many of them had been employed
in the stone quarries near Cedar Rapids; others had been shoemakers,
day laborers and craftsmen of various sorts. Friends in Republic
County had written of the land available in that county.
In 1872 another group of ten or eleven
families came. They were from Wisconsin. There was quite a large
settlement of Bohemians in Wisconsin at that time but it was [over-crowded],
the farms were small, and by selling a [forty-acre] farm there
one might buy a much larger farm in Kansas with the money received.
This contingent contained the families
of Wesley Kaska, Shorney, Benyshek, John A. Kalivoda, Bart Shulda,
Havel, Frank and Joe Kopsa, John Sedlachek, Hadechek, and Lethauchek.
Lethauchek and John Shriva had come to the county the year before
and Lethauchek went back for his family and guided the rest out.
There were few homesteads available by this time.
These people did not drive through
but came by train to Waterville.
In the fall of 1869, a young man by
the same of John Stransky came out from Chicago where he had been
engaged in the tailoring trade. This did not pay so he came west,
to Marysville first, and then on to Republic County afoot. He
picked out a homestead and went back to Marshall County, Kansas.
The next spring he came back, this time with a group.
These people were from Cedar Rapids,
Iowa, and had been farming there for some time. THe group was
made up of Frank Janosek, his wife and three children, Jon Houdek,
his wife and sixteen children, Mr. and Mrs. Stranskya and possibly
others. They settled on Mill Creek, in Rose Creek Township. Houdek
had four wagons, eight head of horses, twenty head of cattle,
hogs, chickens and geese. He immediately built a rock house that
became the home of the Bohemians
that came to the community until they might construct homes of
their own.
Most of the Bohemian settlers in Republic
County came from near Prague in Czechoslovakia. Living was a difficult
matter in that country then. Farms were very small and the young
people could not hope to stay on the farm but must learn a trade
of some sort or become day laborers. Children would be sent to
different communities and apprenticed to learn the trades of that
community or of a particular family.
Other reasons for leaving Czechoslovakia
to come to America were the conscription and military training
to which young men were subject and the accounts that came to
them from friends in the United States of the size of the farms
available here.
The group settling in Republic County
came here either from Wisconsin or Iowa. Kansas offered larger
farms at a lower price than either of these states and also offered
free land for a time. Not many of them could afford to buy land
at the prices in either of those states and had to work in quarries
and as laborers. Those that had farms could sell them and buy
much larger ones---large enough that their sons might have land---for
the price they received.
Cuba was laid out in the spring of
1884 and Munden in September of 1887 but the Bohemians had a store
before that at Tabor, a small village no longer
existent."*
Map of
Republic County
Sources
*Ida Lucretia Smith, “A History of the
National Group Settlements in Republic County, Kansas” (M.
S. thesis, Fort Hays Kansas State College, 1933), 48-49, 51-52,
53-54, 61.
Smith, Ida Lucretia. “A History
of the National Group Settlements in Republic County,
Kansas.” M. S. thesis., Fort Hays Kansas State College,
1933.
