Commemorating Our Dead: Artifacts of the Czech Diaspora

The failed revolution of 1848 and economic dislocations in rural parts of Central Europe led in the 1850s to large scale emigration from the Czechlands, particularly Bohemia and Moravia, to the United States and other parts of the western hemisphere.  The first sojourners were followed, after the American Civil War, by a second wave in the 1870s and 1880s, and a third in the twentieth century. Many of the newcomers who joined in the first Czech diaspora gathered in cities, particularly those with significant German populations, such as St. Louis and Milwaukee. But others sought a return to their rural roots and spread out into the agricultural heartland of America.  In keeping with the theme of the 2009 AHA Annual Meeting, “Globalizing Historiographies,” this poster presentation will explore the connections among Czechs who remained in Europe and those who settled in central Texas, southern Nebraska, and northeastern Iowa by looking at the ways they commemorated their dead – in the funerary folk art of their cemeteries, as well as in the location and layout of those burying grounds. 

Virtually all Czech funerary art is of metal or stone and has thus lasted longer than more ephemeral examples of folk art such as painting and needlework. Because they are relatively impervious to the negative effects of time, marble and zinc monuments afford mute testimony to community change, offering telling clues about economic and cultural shifts that might otherwise have gone undocumented.  Stone monuments in Czech cemeteries are usually the work of local artisans, but the distinctive zinc crosses that dot graveyards across the United States appear to be the work of one man, Charles Andera, of the Bohemian settlement of Spillville, Iowa – once the temporary home of the famed Czech composer Antonin Dvorak. Andera designed the seven-foot crucifixes with their bases portraying age-old motifs such as the skull and crossbones, had them cast by a foundry, then marketed them in Czech-language publications, linking communities around the country.

Historian and landscape architect Karen S. Kiest has observed that in Nebraska, in addition to their characteristic monuments, Czech cemeteries show typical patterns of location and layout that both respond to and shape the terrain. These patterns are also evident in other Czech settlements and will be illustrated here by maps and diagrams. The presentation will also use archival photographs and prints, as well as contemporary photographs of both stone and zinc monuments in the Czech section of the town cemetery in Fayetteville, Texas, to reveal commonalities and discontinuities in the ways Old World and New World Czech communities remembered their dead.  The poster will engage the conversation spurred by Drew Gilpin Faust’s recent This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, and will interest scholars of immigration and ethnicity, cultural historians working on visual representation and funerary practices, and environmental historians studying land use; as well as scholars of Czechs and the Czechlands, and more broadly, of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Central Europe, Texas, and the U.S. Midwest.