New Bohemia: Czech Farmers Reclaim Virginia Farmland

In the late nineteenth century, more than seven hundred Czech and Slovak families settled in Prince George and nearby counties, drawn by cheap land, farmland that tobacco cultivation and the Civil War had exhausted and abandoned. They were experienced farmers who had come first to Pennsylvania and Ohio mining towns, then pushed south looking for soil. Within a generation they had restored worn-out tobacco land, growing new crops including peanuts and demonstrating that the worn-out Southside Virginia earth could produce again.

Their community, originally called Wells Station, came to be known as New Bohemia. They built their own community and kept close ties with Czech and Slovak communities in Baltimore.