"The story I remember is that our people came from a similar vast fertile plain south of Bratislava that resembled the Grand Prairie, which was a welcome refuge from the Pennsylvania steel mills," my friend wrote when I asked for the inside dope on Slovak migration to Arkansas.
The plains near Bratislava are part of the Pannonian Steppe, an exclave of the Eurasian Steppe, a long swath of grasslands, savannas, and shrublands running from Hungary and Romania some 5,000 miles east to Mongolia and Manchuria; it runs through Ukraine, providing the land where today's compromised grain exports are grown.
The soil of most of the Arkansas Delta (our portion of the Mississippi Alluvial Plain) is dark, deep, and on a geological time scale very new, having been replenished frequently until the imposition of modern methods of flood control.
Before drainage and clear-cutting, vast hardwood forests grew in Delta bottomlands. Because most of the hardwood forests have been clear-cut and replaced by cropland, the Delta now resembles the Grand Prairie to the naked eye, but because there was never much timber to harvest, and because of the substratum of clay that makes it less than ideal for cotton cultivation, the Grand Prairie remains a physical and cultural anomaly.
Once a 900,000-acre grassland, the Grand Prairie since the late 1800s has been a cultural exclave of the Midwest. In her essay "Strangers in the Arkansas Delta: Ethnic Groups and Nationalities" (in "The Arkansas Delta: Land of Paradox," University of Arkansas Press), Byrd Gibbens writes that early English-speaking arrivals in Arkansas, coming from Tennessee, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Mississippi, were alarmed by the lack of trees on the Grand Prairie and avoided settling there.
The lack of trees must indicate less fertile soil, they reasoned, and winters would be harsh without much firewood or standing timber to break the wind.
But the federal government offered grants of prairie lands to veterans. Gibbens quotes a story that Erwin Moehring recounted in his 1959 history of the Zion Lutheran Church at Ulm: A Union Army veteran of German descent, living in Illinois, received a grant of Arkansas prairie land, went south to check it out, and "promptly traded it off for several gallons of whiskey and went back to Illinois."
Other prospective settlers of German and Slavic descent were undaunted by the Grand Prairie's lack of timber and threat of harsh winters; whether they (or their parents) had immigrated in the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848, or in the second wave of immigration from central Europe that began after the American Civil War, they would have retained ways of getting by on vast plains like the plain my friend's ancestors recalled south of Bratislava. And in most cases, they were coming from plains to our north and northwest.
Though the Grand Prairie has long been known for rice cultivation, making hay was the original agricultural draw for the group of German immigrants who came from Iowa to found Stuttgart with the Reverend Adam Buerkle in 1878, and for the 25 Slovak families who settled at Slovactown (now Slovak) in 1894.
Organized efforts drew Slovak migrants. Arkansas landowners worked with Slovak fraternal and mutual aid societies to advertise Arkansas in the Slovak-language press in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois. In 1894, Peter V. Rovnianek organized the Slovak Colonization Company, which bought 3,000 acres of grassland in Prairie County. The original group of Slovak families came by rail as far as DeValls Bluff, then traveled by wagon to the Slovak settlement, a distance of 17 miles by modern highways.
Slovak men received labor contracts with an option to buy land surrounding the Slovak settlement. The nephew of one of the original settlers of Slovak recalled that his uncle had bought land at five dollars per acre. According to Gibbens, any man who bought forty acres of surrounding farmland was given a plot in the Slovak settlement, which was laid out to resemble a Slovakian village.
Gibbens quotes Sam Koneceny, a rice farmer and descendant of the first settlers of Slovak, who described their work and the land this way: "When you say prairie, you say prairie. When they came here this was just grass six or eight feet tall." "The men each cut 20 to 30 bales of hay a day," Gibbens writes, and sometimes got lost in the tall grass.
By 1909, about 50 families lived at Slovak; according to Jamie Metrailer's entry in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, some were Russian and Bohemian (Czech). Most, however, were Slovak. Gibbens quotes a rice farmer named Jacob Plafcan; his comments about forced national identities in the land he left behind foreshadow Milan Kundera's comments about Bohemia later in the 20th century: "I was born in Hungary. I left Europe in 1909 and I'll tell you why. I'm a Slovak--of Slovak nationality; they tried to make me a Hungarian when I was 6 years old. I don't know if I can explain what happened; but, anyway, King Joseph [Franz Joseph I of Austria] gave the Slovak nation to Hungary and tried to make a Hungarian out of a Slovak. That's why I'm here."
The Roman Catholic Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius at Slovak still holds services, the Knights of Columbus still holds its annual Oyster Supper, and Slovak surnames persist in the Grand Prairie; all offer evidence of a remarkable cultural persistence.
I will leave aside what may be the saddest story in the history of Slovak because Rex Nelson treated it in these pages last February: several Slovak families were forced off of their land to make way for Edgar Monsanto Queeny's creation, Lake Peckerwood.