Having spent much of his childhood in a rural village in Bohemia, Czech immigrant Anton Zverina Jr. wanted to provide his American children with a glimpse of what life was like in such a village. So, in 1908, in the middle of the apple orchard in the backyard of his house on Miles Avenue, in what is today Cleveland's Union-Miles neighborhood, he built for them a traditional Czech log house to play in.
It's a long journey from the village of Čechtice, in the South Moravian region of the Czech Republic, to Cleveland, Ohio. However, like thousands of other Czechs who left their homes in Bohemia for America in the second half of the nineteenth century, eleven-year-old Anton Zverina Jr. made that journey with his parents and two siblings in 1874. The family settled in a neighborhood on the southeast side of Cleveland, near what is today the intersection of Broadway Avenue and East 55th Street. The neighborhood soon filled with so many Czech immigrants that it became known locally as "Little Bohemia."
Anton's father started several businesses in Little Bohemia, including a grocery store. Soon, young Anton was working for him in that grocery store—but perhaps sometimes, in idle moments, he would dream of what his more rural life in Čechtice had been like. His father's grocery store was first located on Dille Street, near Broadway and Forest (East 37th), and then later for several years on Willson (East 55th) near that street's intersection with Broadway and Hamlet Avenues. In 1889, the Zverina family left a more lasting mark on the neighborhood when the grocery store moved into a new three-story red brick commercial building on Broadway Avenue, just north of East 55th Street. The building, still standing today and known as the Zverina Building, was designed for Anton Zverina Sr. by fellow Czech immigrant Andrew Mitermiler, a prominent Cleveland architect who, among other historic buildings in Cleveland, designed Ceska Sin Sokol Hall on Clark Avenue on the city's west side..
Andrew Mitermiler had a daughter named Rose and, in 1895, six years after the Zverina Building was built, Anton Jr. married Rose. After marrying, the two moved into an apartment on an upper floor of the building that Rose's father had designed for Anton Jr.'s father. Here, they started their lives together. By 1904, they were sharing the apartment with their first four children, who ranged in age from the oldest (Rose), who was six years old, to the youngest (Frances), who was a newborn.
Like his father, Anton Jr. became a successful businessman in Little Bohemia. He expanded his father's grocery and real estate businesses, and started several new businesses of his own, including one on Blanche Avenue, near Weckerling (East 53rd) Street, just north of the CC&S railroad tracks. There, he built several commercial buildings, the chief amongst them a factory in which he manufactured a "coffee enhancement" made from the chicory herb.
By 1905, Anton Zverina Jr. had accumulated enough wealth to do what many other Czech immigrants in Cleveland had done once they were financially able to do so. Anton looked to move his family out of the crowded urban environment of Little Bohemia and into a more rural setting, perhaps somewhere that reminded him of his childhood village. He found the ideal setting in Newburgh Township, some four miles southeast of Little Bohemia. There, he purchased the former M. S. Robertson farm which consisted of about five-acres of land that fronted on the south side of Miles Avenue, near what is today that street's intersection with MLK Boulevard. The farm land included a large orchard filled with apple, pear and other fruit trees.
In 1906, the year after Anton Jr. had purchased the farmland, he, Rose and their children moved into a large new house built for them on the property. A year or so after they had settled into their new home, Anton undertook to build, in the middle of the farm's fruit orchard, a little piece of Bohemia for his children. By 1908, he had constructed a large single-story log house complete with a fireplace for cooking meat on one end of its interior and a large play area for his children complete with a large U-shaped table with benches on the other end. In 1909, one year after the log house was completed, the area of Newburgh Township in which Zverina family now lived and which in 1907 had been incorporated as the Village of Corlett, now was annexed into the City of Cleveland. These municipal events, however, did not seem to deter the Zverina family from enjoying their little bit of Czechia.
According to daughter Frances Zverina, who grew up to become a Cleveland public school teacher as well as a horticulturalist, Anton and Rose Zverina's children—who included youngest son Robert, born in 1911—played in the log house to their heart's content. In addition to being a constant source of entertainment for them, the log house also served as a place for gatherings of the extended Zverina family, for friends and their families, and for almost anyone else in the neighborhood who needed a pleasant place to celebrate any important event. According to Frances, the log house even served in 1914 as the site of a clambake at which future Cleveland mayor Harry L. Davis was nominated to become Cleveland's next mayor. Even after Anton Jr.'s death in 1934 , the Zverina family continued to use the log house for special events and occasions, and this continued for almost three more decades until the death of Anton's wife Rose in 1962.
In 1963, Frances Zverina and her brother Justin, who had inherited the property, parceled off and donated to the Cleveland School Board the log house and about a quarter acre of land upon which it stood, to be used in the School District's gardening program, which had been started in the early twentieth century. Frances Zverina, in addition to her job as a school teacher in the district, was also a lover of herbs, something passed on to her from her father. In the late 1960s, she successfully persuaded the Cleveland School Board to design and build a special herb garden near the log house that would enable children at nearby Miles Public School to grow, tend to, and learn all about the value of herbs to humans.
The new herb garden and log house were a successful addition to Cleveland school's horticulture programs from the time the restoration and garden work was completed in 1970, until the program was terminated during the Cleveland School Board's 1978 financial crisis. While the formal school program ended, the herb garden and log house were, starting in 1981, voluntarily tended to by Reverend Ralph Fotia, pastor of the nearby Shaffer United Methodist Church, and his staff, for another decade.
In 1984, while Pastor Fotia was tending to the log house and its gardens, the City of Cleveland, acknowledging the importance of the log house and its herb garden to Cleveland's history, made the log house a local landmark, but in the process erased its Czech identity, designating it simply as the "Miles Garden Log Cabin and Herb Garden." Moreover, even though it was now a local landmark, this did not seem to help improve the condition of the log house and the surrounding gardens, which severely deteriorated over the years that followed. In the early twenty-first century, several plans were advanced to repair and restore the building, as well as the herb garden. Only one—a cleanup of the grounds by students from Washington Park community school in 2018, was successfully completed. More recently, a community development organization in the newly designated Union-Miles neighborhood, undertook a review of the condition of the Zverina Log House, which it renamed "The Union-Miles Log House," but to date, no repairs have been done to the log house, nor does it appear that any additional restoration work to the grounds of the log house has been done.
While time may be running out for the more than a century-old Zverina Log House, it is hoped that a way can be found by the Cleveland Metropolitan School Board, which still owns the property, with help from Union-Miles neighborhood organizations, to restore the log house and its grounds not only as a remembrance to Cleveland's historic school garden program, but also to Czech immigrants like Anton Zverina Jr. who built this little piece of Czechia in Cleveland, and who, on a broader scale, played an important role in the development of Cleveland's southeast side in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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