The National Czech and Slovak Museum

In June of two thousand eight, the Cedar River flooded the National Czech and Slovak Museum with eight feet of water, causing damage estimated at eight to nine million dollars. What happened next became its own chapter in the museum's story. The museum's leadership and the Cedar Rapids community made an audacious decision.

Rather than rebuilding on the same flood-prone site, they would move the entire building, all fifteen hundred tons of it, to higher ground. On June eighth and ninth of two thousand eleven, the wood-frame and brick-veneer structure was relocated eleven feet higher than its original position, three feet above the two thousand eight flood line. A museum spokesman noted it was apparently the largest museum ever relocated for flood hazard mitigation, and probably the only museum ever elevated.

By two thousand twelve, an expanded facility of fifty thousand square feet had reopened, with larger galleries, a research library, and collection storage that the flooding had made urgently necessary. The museum itself had been decades in the making. In nineteen seventy-four, second and third-generation Czech Americans in Cedar Rapids founded the Czech Fine Arts Foundation to preserve what they saw slipping away, the language, the needlework, the documents, the memory.

The collection outgrew a three-room house by nineteen seventy-eight. On October twenty-first, nineteen ninety-five, with the leaders of the United States, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia in attendance, the museum was formally dedicated before seven thousand people. In two thousand eighteen it became a Smithsonian Affiliate.

Its permanent collection spans five centuries of Czech and Slovak culture, all of it rooted in this particular corner of Iowa where that culture came to replant itself.