This grandfather of mine married twice, and both times without sense, although in the village they told him he could take his pick. He was the richest farmer in the Poděbrady district.

So begins the story, told years later by a woman who had married into the family and was still quietly annoyed about how it had ended.

The marriage she called senseless was the one that made him rich. The widow he took “without sense” arrived carrying the oldest and most valuable property in the village. Everything that followed — the money, the factory, the two chimneys on the skyline, and finally the ruin — came in through that door.

Everything turned on one building: house number 26.

Long before any of these people were born, it had been the free tavern of Milčice — not an ordinary public house, but a licensed monopoly. The right to brew, to sell drink, and to slaughter and sell meat in a village where almost no one held rights to anything at all. In a settlement of only a handful of farms it was among the most valuable things a person could own.

The Vavák family had held it since the late 1600s. They had rebuilt it after fires, held the butcher’s franchise, and produced one of the better-known figures the village ever sent into the wider world. For nearly a century and a half the tavern belonged to them.

Then, on a summer day in 1819, Matěj Vavák, master butcher, fell from a wagon. He was twenty-nine. Within two days he was dead.

He left behind a young widow, Marie, and one small surviving son, Václav. The second boy had already died in infancy. Marie sat in the best commercial property in the village holding a butcher’s monopoly she could not work herself. In a place like Milčice a woman in that position did not remain alone for long.

In the summer of 1820 she married František Čermák.

He was twenty years old, a farmer’s son from the same village, a Reformed Protestant marrying a Catholic widow. With the marriage, the ancient free tavern passed into Čermák hands.

Marie bore him nine children in eleven years. Four of them died young. Her last child, a boy named Karel, was born at the end of 1833. Sometime after that Marie herself died. František, still a relatively young man, married again — another widow, eighteen years old. She would outlive the fortune.

Years later the family said František had won a great sum of money — fifty thousand gulden — and decided to build something with it. At first the plan was a starch works. His partner was to be his stepson Václav, the butcher’s boy. František had already paid to educate the young man and set him on a path in trade. One of them had the sense, the family liked to say, and the other had the money.

They aimed higher than starch. In time the works at house 26 became a sugar refinery. The railway had reached the district. Sugar beet was transforming the flat country around Milčice. For a while the village flourished. Officials came from the neighboring towns with music. On Sundays the young people danced on the little island in the pond below the village. The inn was known far and wide.

František Čermák, once a farmer’s son, became the richest man in the district. Two chimneys stood on the skyline.

Then he made the decision that undid it all.

The Quarrel

Václav, the educated stepson, had expected to receive the inn. It had been Vavák property for generations. It had come into the family through his own mother. Instead, in 1859, František gave house 26 to his own younger son Karel — Marie’s last child — and counted the cost of Václav’s education as settlement enough.

The two young men were half-brothers. Both sons of the same woman. One carried the old name of the tavern; the other carried the name of the man who had turned it into an industry.

The quarrel that opened that year went to court and stayed there for more than a decade.

When it ended, Václav had won. The better lawyer, the family said afterward. The legal costs alone ran into tens of thousands. Around 1870 the property passed back into Vavák hands. A hundred and ninety-four years after the first Vavák had bought the tavern, and fifty-one years after a butcher fell off a cart, house 26 went home.

František was left with a life tenancy — a single room, the ordinary provision made for an aging peasant who has handed the farm to an heir. The richest farmer in the district finished his days living on the terms of a farmhand in a house that still belonged, in name, to the enterprise he had founded.

His second wife died there years later. The parish clerk recorded her as the wife of František Čermák, factory owner, on the life tenancy. Both titles, side by side, as if they still belonged together.

The prize itself did not last. Sugar prices fell. The refinery stood idle for seasons at a time. The machinery was sold. Parts of the building became cattle sheds. In the end the whole holding went to a bank.

Václav’s son later acquired a minor title of nobility and lost it again when the papers proved to be forged. The family that had won the long lawsuit on the strength of the better lawyer lost its small dignity on the strength of bad ones.

“When the glory of Milčice was dying out, they carted the whole little island away.”

In the village the memory lingered differently. An old woman who had married into the losing side still spoke, decades afterward, of “our inn.” She remembered the music and the dancing on the island. She remembered being told, as a girl, to run from a short-sighted man who called after her in the lane, “Wait — I’m your uncle.” He was telling the truth. She had been taught to flee it.

The Quieter Branch

Several rungs down the same village, another branch of the family was living a quieter life.

František’s older sister Anna had married a farmer. Their daughter married a man who worked as a tenant and day laborer. They moved from house to house in Milčice as the years required. Their daughter Kateřina was born in the village in 1837. She was a girl when the starch works opened, a young woman when the family went to law with itself, and a mother when the refinery’s chimneys were still new.

She had children in Milčice, buried at least one of them there, and afterward left with her husband for the town of Chrast, some distance to the east. There, in 1869, she gave birth to a son. A few years later the little family crossed the ocean and settled in Columbus, Ohio.

The boy grew to be my great-grandfather.

While one side of the family was winning a fortune and losing it in the courts, the other side was renting rooms in the same small village, burying children, and finally stepping onto a ship. Both stories were unfolding at the same time, only a short walk apart.

The branch that owned the tavern lost it. The branch that never owned anything carried the name forward into a new country.

Only one of those families still continues.