CZECHOSLOVAKS IN AMERICA
being Czechs. A certain number of Czechs certainly did come to America with the Moravian brethren, as appears from the transactions of the Moravian Historical Society, and as one sees at a glance when examining the tombstones of the Moravian Cemetery in Winston-Salem, N. C., an opportunity which came to the writer in 1919. There is buried Mathew Stach, “the first Moravian Missionary to Greenland,” where he spent forty years.
The nineteenth century immigration begins in the ’forties and is prompted not only by economic, but political motives as well. The Czechs, too, had their ’forty-niners. But even before that, in 1836, Reverend John Nepomuk Neuman, with his brother Vaclav, emigrated to Philadelphia, later becoming Bishop of that city and diocese. In the ’fifties the first Czech settlement was founded in St. Louis; they came by way of New Orleans, sailing up the Mississippi. A Czech Catholic Church was founded there in 1854. The largest Czech non-Catholic fraternal society, popularly called the C. S. P. S., was also founded in that city in 1854. The gold fever in 1849 and the ’fifties brought to America about 25,000 Czechs. Between 1850–1868 some 43,645 Czechs came to the United States. In Cleveland they began to
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