Meat and sausage: the smokehouse scale of the Polish trade

1921 — 2025 · the west side and the county edge

The trade in the directories: South Bend's meat record is a retail record. The 1921 Polk directory's west-side listings set Woodka Bros, meats, amid the Polish grocery trade, and the pattern holds for a century: small market houses, their own smokehouses, a Polish sausage that carries the maker's name. By the early 1900s the city's Polish settlers held many of the mainstream food-retail fronts — grocery stores, meat markets, and bakeries — as the Rev. Joseph Swastek's history of the settlement records and the Skillet's own house history repeats. Two houses carry the documented modern record.

Jaworski's, 1997–2025: Jaworski's Market, at 58413 Crumstown Highway, served from 1997 by its own account — "Serving Michiana since 1997" — with three smokehouses and a Polish sausage its copy calls famous. The house's end is documented as precisely as its run: owner Chris Jaworski died on November 28, 2025, and the store held a closeout sale on December 12–13, 2025, its last operating days under the family's ownership, as the Tribune reported on December 12, 2025. The family's own posts record the mechanism of the end: the Polish sausage had sold out for Thanksgiving, and after Chris Jaworski's death it could not be made again. A sausage institution of twenty-eight years closed because the making of it lived in one man.

Eby's, and the Easter measure: Eby's Old Fashion Meat Market, at 56977 South Mayflower Road, trades under its own sign's claim — "The home of Eby's Famous Polish Sausage." A local family's 2018 account of the Polish-Ukrainian Easter in South Bend documents the season's trade at both houses: Jaworski's cabbage pierogi and sausage, and at both Jaworski's and Eby's the sheep-shaped Easter butter — the butter lambs of the Polish Easter table. A figure for Eby's Easter-week sausage volume, 20,000 to 30,000 pounds, circulates in 2026 food writing; no account in the press of record carrying that figure was found, and it is tested in the claims entry rather than printed here as fact. Eby's founding year was not found in the record reached; the gap is named in this section's note.

Sources:

1. Polk's South Bend city directory, 1921 — Woodka Bros, meats, in the west-side listings (directory OCR as republished).
2. Jaworski's Market, house copy — "Serving Michiana since 1997"; the three smokehouses; the famous Polish sausage; 58413 Crumstown Highway.
3. South Bend Tribune (12 December 2025) — Chris Jaworski's death on 28 November 2025; the closeout sale of 12–13 December 2025 as the market's last days under family ownership.
4. Eby's Old Fashion Meat Market, house copy — "The home of Eby's Famous Polish Sausage"; 56977 South Mayflower Road.
5. Jenny and Jason Photography, "Ukranian Polish Easter in South Bend" (4 April 2018) — the Easter trade at Jaworski's and Eby's, the cabbage pierogi, the sheep-shaped Easter butter at both houses.
6. The Skillet's house history, citing the Rev. Joseph Swastek — Polish food-retail fronts by the early 1900s: groceries, meat markets, bakeries.