Uploaded on: 06/24/2007
New Prague felt like home to St. Wenceslaus parishioners
By Zach Czaia
The Catholic Spirit
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One-and-a-half centuries ago, Jeannette Deutsch’s great-great-grandfather lived in Dubuque, Iowa. An immigrant from Czechoslovakia, he and 20 other immigrant families in Dubuque moved to southern Minnesota and founded what is now New Prague.
“They wanted land that looked like the old country,” Deutsch said of her ancestors. Apparently, Iowa wasn’t cutting it for them.
When the founding fathers first arrived in their new home, they found someone was already there. Anton Phillip, a Bavarian, had built a cabin for his family and was tilling the land.
At first, Deutsch said, relations between the two groups — the Czech founding fathers and Anton Phillip’s family — were “very cold.” This was probably because of the language barrier between them; Phillip would have spoken Bavarian. His new guests spoke Czech. Communication took great strides forward at dinner, however.
“When Anton Phillip saw these people bless themselves before eating, he knew that they were Christians as he was,” Deutsch said, citing the anecdote from an early history of New Prague.
Phillip helped the Czechs settle in to the area that summer of 1856. When September came, the founding fathers went back to Dubuque for their wives and children. With families in tow, the Czechs returned to Phillip and established the town of New Prague.
Those first few years were the toughest, Deutsch said. Because the families arrived in September, they’d had no time to plant any crops. As a result, in order for the settlers to get food and other necessities, they had to make the journey to neighboring Shakopee, a 26-mile trek from New Prague.
In 1857, the first Catholic church was built in New Prague. It was a small, wooden cabin. But there was more trial in store for the new settlers. In 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, as a result of negligence by one of the parishioners, the makeshift chapel burned down.
“At this point, many of the settlers considered moving back home, to the Czech Republic,” Deutsch said.
But the words of their pastor, Father Peter Maly, gave them hope, and they stayed. No one knows exactly the content of that speech, but it had a dramatic impact on the town of New Prague.
Those who go to New Prague today can see just how many people wouldn’t have been there at all had the first families packed up their bags after that first church burnt down.
New Prague now has 4,559 people. It is a city whose Main Street straddles two county lines — Scott and LeSeuer. Scott County is one of the fastest-growing counties in the nation.
“Everything is just booming,” Deutsch said.
The heart of that community, she said, has always been the parish, St. Wenceslaus, named for the Czech saint.
“The history of the town and the history of the church are so intertwined that you can’t talk about one without talking about the other.”
If that’s true, then Deutsch has spent a good portion of her life talking about the history of both her town and her church. For more than 12 years, she has been the tour guide for St. Wenceslaus, or “St. Wence,” as the inhabitants of New Prague have dubbed it.
Sitting in a St. Wenceslaus pew — her pew, as it happened, the one she sits in every Sunday — Deutsch talked about when she first became interested in the history of the place.
“I used to look at the windows as a child,” she said. “I don’t know why I was so interested in them.”
Each side of St. Wence’s has a set of seven stained-glass window panes. The left side depicts each of the seven sacraments above the image of a female saint in the church; the right has each of the seven parts of the creed above images of male saints.
“We never divided up the church: boys on one side, girls on the other, though,” Deutsch said.
“I know some older churches used to do it that way.”
Deutsch would know for certain if such a custom went on in the ‘old days’ at St. Wence. Her father had been there since the church’s inception.
“My father helped build the church,” Deutsch said.
Emanuel Deutsch would often tell his family the tale of how he fetched gravel from the gravel-pit for St. Wence’s base. It was 1906 when Deutsch’s father helped build the church that still stands today. He was six years old at the time.
While Deutsch was telling this story, a man and woman — George Tupy and his wife, Elsie — walked into the church. The Tupys sat down in their Sunday pew — which happened to be right behind Deutsch’s. The Tupys claim seven children and 26 grandchildren as their own. Thirteen of those grandchildren now attend St. Wence’s grade school.
Both Elsie and George said the school had a defining influence on their children’s lives. All of them went to St. Wence for grade school.
“Of the seven kids, all seven of them are still practicing their faith,” Elsie said of her children. She said she attributed much of that gift of faithfulness to St. Wence’s school and parish.
While the Tupy children have nurtured a deep affinity for New Prague, the Tupy parents have continued to nurture their love for the “old country.”
In September 1994, George and Elsie spent two weeks in the Czech Republic. Because both she and her husband speak the language fluently, Elsie said the experience was “just like coming home.”
Everywhere they went, the Tupys were treated as family members. “How long have you been gone?” the locals asked them. Elsie said the hospitality of the people was so great she sometimes almost wished it was less — just for privacy’s sake.
“The people were so nice — always inviting us up for drinks and coffee and food — that it was hard for George and I to spend time on our own, sightseeing or going out to eat,” she said.
Deutsch said when she has gone to the Czech Republic, she stays with relatives who live there. They speak Czech and a little English. She speaks English and a little Czech.
“We did most of our communicating in nouns and pointing,” she said.
George Tupy said it is not uncommon for many in the New Prague community to speak bits of Czech like this. His children, he said, can understand the language somewhat and speak it to members of the community from his generation.
“One of my boys, Jerry, is a chiropractor; he sees a lot of men my age. He speaks Czech to them, and I think they feel better because he’s speaking their language.”
Czechs in New Prague have passed on more than just their language, George Tupy said.
“A big part of the Czech heritage is the love for music and song and dance.” Both George and Elsie were members in the Czech Dancers, a club where the members dressed in traditional Czech clothing and danced to Bohemian tunes.
St. Wence is also a big part of continuing this musical tradition; the parish choir is respected across their archdiocese for their liturgical music.
But more important than sustaining the musical traditions, the language, or the eating of delicious Czech Kolackie rolls, George Tupy said, is sustaining the spirit of sacrifice that made it possible for the citizens of New Prague to build and maintain the Church of St. Wenceslaus.
“It’s up to us to keep that spirit going,” he said.