Curious Iowa: Why did Czechs, Norwegians, Irish and Germans end up in Iowa?

Take a stroll down 16th Avenue in Cedar Rapids and you’ll find yourself in the heart of Czech Village, an area heavily influenced by Czech immigrants. Drive through Melrose, Iowa — aka “Little Ireland” — and you’ll be greeted by an Irish flag. Take a trip up to Decorah and you’ll be in the home of the Luther College Norse. These pockets of old country culture show the heritage of the Europeans who settled in Iowa.

Curious Iowan Dale Kueter of Cedar Rapids wondered why immigrants from certain countries decided to call Iowa home. In this edition of Curious Iowa, we look back on the reasons people left their homeland to build a new life in America.

Curious Iowa is a series from The Gazette that seeks to answer Iowans’ questions about the state, its culture and the people who live here.

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Why did people leave Europe for America?

The area we know today as Iowa was largely impacted by the second wave of European immigrants during the 1840s. To whittle down decades of European history to a brief synopsis, restrictive conservative policies and censorship, problems that sprouted from the Industrial Revolution, the great famine of 1845 and a desire for more freedoms led to revolutions that spread through Europe starting in 1848. This affected France, Germany, Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which Bohemia was a part of.

Additionally, thanks to the smallpox vaccine, more children were surviving into adulthood, contributing to a population boom and economic strain.

In America, non-Native people began to settle in the Midwest. Prior to Iowa being admitted into the Union, settlements were erected and cities were established, such as Davenport in 1836.

The region was occupied by a number of tribes before pioneer settlement, including the Winnebago, Iowa, Sioux, and Sauk and Meskwaki (Sac and Fox). The Sauk and Meskwaki controlled the most land. In 1842, the Sac and Fox treaty turned the land that is now Iowa over to the U.S. government. Nearly all Native people were moved to what is now Kansas, an area assigned to them by the U.S. government.

In 1857, the Meskwaki purchased 80 acres of land in Tama County. Today, the Meskwaki own more than 8,000 acres of land in the Tama, Marshall and Palo Alto counties. The Sac & Fox Tribe of the Mississippi of Iowa is the only federally recognized Indian tribe in Iowa.

Iowa officially became the 29th state in 1846.

Why was Iowa a destination for immigrants?

National Czech and Slovak Museum Library Director Dave Muhlena said the U.S. was attractive to immigrants because of farmland availability and the opportunity to thrive. A majority of Czechs that immigrated to the U.S. were literate and Cedar Rapids had two Czech newspapers that published up until the mid-1900s.

“For those who are living in Austria-Hungary at the time, maybe [they left] for greater freedoms because many of those immigrants established newspapers and journals and everything and they probably had more freedom to publish here than they did certainly back in Europe,” Muhlena said.

Some pioneers traveled over land from the east coast to reach the state. Some entered the country via Canada. Others traveled up the Mississippi River from ports in New Orleans and St. Louis. One of the first places Czech immigrants settled was St. Louis in 1848.

“They would have come up the river further to Iowa, and Eastern Iowa would have been the first part they would have encountered,” Muhlena said. “Some of the earliest communities at that time that were settled by Czech immigrants were Oxford Junction, Iowa City, Cedar Rapids and northeast Iowa like in the Protivin and Spillville area.”

Why Iowa has the ancestral makeup it does is a harder question to answer. Muhlena speculates that the proximity of Czech and German communities in Iowa could be due to groups interacting with each other in Europe.

“[In] the Austrian Empire, later, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the official language was German so it would not be unreasonable to think that some of these Czechs were bilingual, that they did speak German,” Muhlena said. “Their kind of foothold in coming here would be to live next to a German speaking community.”

Different groups had different behavior. Slovak immigrants were typically men that came to work in order to send money back home to buy more land, Muhlena said. Norwegians typically immigrated with their entire families.

Whether immigrants planned to stay permanently or return home, the availability of farmland and work in the mining, logging and railroad industries were attractive.

“If you were raised on a farm in Norway, unless you were the eldest child, your chances of inheriting that farm were pretty slim and so you had to think about how are you gonna make a living? Well, at the same time here in the U.S. we had land opening up to settlement,” President of Decorah’s Norweigan American Museum Vesterheim Chris Johnson said. “A key part of that in 1862 is the Homestead Act.”

In the 1850s, Chicago and Rock Island Railroad completed key projects that would allow immigrants easier travel to Iowa. This included the first railroad bridge to cross the Mississippi River and the feat of connecting the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Ocean.

Davenport was a common door immigrants used to enter Iowa and the city was shaped by German and Irish immigrants. Today, the German American Heritage Center & Museum is housed in Davenport’s Standard Hotel, which is where thousands of immigrants stayed.

As immigrants set down roots in the U.S., they wrote to family and friends back in Europe about opportunities that would attract more people to immigrate.

“You see that the pattern of Norwegian immigration sort of leapfrogs across the country from east coast to west coast,” Johnson said. First, a person or group would join their family or friends to get their bearings in the U.S. Then they would move west to take advantage of land and resource availability.

A look at Cedar Rapids

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Iowa farmland had already been acquired by the time some immigrants arrived so they found work in factories, mines, and meat packing plants. By the late 1800s, Cedar Rapids had become a thriving city. Many immigrants worked for T. M. Sinclair’s Meat Packing Plant. Sinclair was an Irish immigrant and was known to hire other immigrants.

“[Sinclair Packing House] certainly was a draw because you didn’t have to learn English in order to butcher a hog and that’s interesting. You know, that was in the 19th century,” Muhlena said. “But today you have immigrants coming from other parts of the world who are employed in the packing house industry and it’s essentially the same kind of situation where they might not have a command of the English language, but again, they don’t have to know English in order to render a hog.”

In 1896, the National Bohemian Church Convention was held in Cedar Rapids. The city was highly revered as a center of culture and the home to the largest Bohemian Presbyterian church in the country. Cedar Rapids earned the title of “Bohemian Athens.” To be compared to Athens was to be called cultured.

The Sept. 25, 1896 edition of The Gazette said “Bohemian Athens” was a “fit companion for ‘Parlor City,’” the city’s nickname in Iowa.

A quote from that edition of The Gazette read, “Cedar Rapids is cosmopolitan, it is Bohemian and has earned the regard in which it is held as the home of education by its broad, liberal and yet conservative character.”

Today, the New Bohemia and Czech Village districts are central to Cedar Rapids’ culture.

Iowa’s Babel Proclamation vilified foreign language

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Tensions came to a head in Europe in 1914 with the start of World War I. On May 23, 1918, Iowa Gov. William F. Harding codified a Babel Proclamation. He believed that using foreign languages during wartime disturbed the peace and “creates discord among neighbors and citizens.”

This law had four rules:

The law promoted anti-German sentiments and it erased the cultural heritage of German Americans and beyond. Town names and last names were changed to avoid German ties. In total, 18,000 Midwesterners were charged with breaking this and other English-only laws.

After the war ended, Harding rescinded the Babel Proclamation, although in 1919, he signed a law that restricted the teaching of foreign language in schools.

A look at Decorah

As the generations pass, the American melting pot has blurred many of the distinct cultures brought by immigrants. In Decorah, there were early efforts to preserve Norwegian American history.

Luther College was established in 1861. By the 1870s, Norwegian Americans decided to collect pieces of their history at the college.

“They were seeing this is almost getting into a generation of living in this area and so they were starting to look at ‘how do we preserve that history of how we got here’,” Johnson said.

The collection grew and in the 1920s and ‘30s, Norway presented the collection with a large gift of objects. By the early 1930s, a building was purchased in downtown Decorah to house the collection. It is home to Vesterheim and its 33,000-object collection today.

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Take a visit to Decorah and you might hear Norwegian being spoken. “Ja” is said in place of “yes” and “Uff da” is said in place of a sigh. It translates to “I am overwhelmed.”

Johnson said his mother would sometimes tell him to “hoist up your buksa” if his pants were hanging low. Buksa is the Norwegian word for pants.

“You hear maybe a little less Norwegian spoken here than in the past but it’s still here and there’s still people who are very much appreciative of that Norwegian heritage.”

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