[2] Karel Jonas was born in 1840, the son of a weaver in Malešov, a village in Bohemia, then under the Habsburg Empire.

When that ended in 1871, he slipped back into Prague for six or seven months, and wrote tracts like "Reasons for the Defeat of France" and "Women in Human Society, Especially in England and America."

But he had left Austria ten years before without an exit visa and without serving his military obligations, so he soon returned to America.

He produced a primer called Spelling Book and First Reader for Czech-Slavic Youth in America, and the first known Czech-English dictionary.

Where the round corner and turret now stand was open space, so the original house had a gabled-ell form, 2-story brick Italianate with segmentally arched windows and deep eaves supported by wooden brackets.

In 1887 his political connections got him placed as diplomatic consul in his beloved Prague, where he advocated expanding U.S. trade with the region and shared American farming techniques with Czech farmers.