Stanley L. Kostoryz

Before Texas, Kostoryz was a Nebraska newspaperman. In Wilber he bought a Czech type font and founded Osveta, which grew from a semiweekly into the state's first Czech daily, and he wrote for Pokrok Zapadu. As a leader of the Komensky Club in Omaha he asked the state university for a Slavic languages department. The regents declined for want of public interest, but the club kept pressing, and one opened in 1907. He was also a Nebraska presidential elector pledged to William Jennings Bryan.

What the plaque says

Stanley L. Kostoryz The Bohemian Colony Lands, a vision of Sanley L. Kostoryz, changed the landscape of the Coastal Bend and drew Czech immigrants from central Texas and Nebraska to south Texas. Stanislav l. Kostohryz was born in 1866 in Jemnice, Strakonice district, Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1886, he immigrated through New York. Kostoryz lived in Chicago and then moved to Nebraska where he earned his teaching degree at Western Normal College. In 1896, he married Alice Ruzicka. In addition to his teaching abilities, Kostoryz was also a journalist, publisher and land developer. In 1902, he traveled to south Texas looking for land investments and established the Bohemian Colony Lands two miles southwest of Corpus Christi. Over the next two years, Kostoryz purchased over 7,783 acres that he subdivided into 80-acre farm tracts for purchase. Utilizing his journalistic prowess, he placed advertisements for the Bohemian Colony Lands in Czech language newspapers throughout Texas and the Midwest. In 1906, Kostoryz moved his family to Nueces County and continued to sell acreage to Czech pioneers. In 1907, the Kostoryz Common School District No. 26 was established, and in 1909, a one-room schoolhouse was erected. He departed the U.S. in 1921 for Czechoslovakia to pursue a new business interest, and although he renewed his U.S. passport with plans to return, those plans never materialized. Kostoryz died in 1942 and is buried in Pisek (modern Czech Republic). By the time he left Nueces County, the Bohemian Colony Lands community boasted a school, church and several mutual aid societies. His vision and determination turned approximately 10,000 acres of brush into a productive Czech agricultural community. (2013, 2022)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mirador de la Flor — 5.5 mi
  Corpus Christi's bayfront memorial to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, the Tejano singer from this city, killed in 1995 at twenty-three, visited by about thirty thousand people a year.
• Art Museum of South Texas — 6.4 mi
  Philip Johnson's 1972 museum on the Corpus Christi bayfront, joined in 2006 by Ricardo Legorreta's Miller Wing, holding more than 2,000 works mostly from Texas and the Americas.
• Texas State Aquarium — 6.6 mi
  A nonprofit aquarium on the tip of Corpus Christi Beach built around the Gulf and the Caribbean, with the largest coastal wildlife rescue center in Texas behind the exhibits.
• USS Lexington Museum on the Bay — 6.8 mi
  An Essex-class carrier of 1943 moored off North Beach, the Blue Ghost that Tokyo Rose kept reporting sunk, and the Navy's training carrier for nearly three decades after.

More markers nearby

• Moravian Club of Nueces County — steps away
• St. John Baptist Church — 2.0 mi
• Clara Driscoll, The Driscoll Foundation and Driscoll Children's Hospital — 2.8 mi
• Rabbi Sidney A. Wolf — 3.2 mi