At the age of seventeen, Cal Polk joined lawman Pat Garrett’s posse, which was hot on the trail of Billy the Kid in the winter of 1880. He told the tale in a manuscript held at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, in Canyon. “Pat, why don’t you come up like a man and give us a fair fight,” he remembered Billy the Kid calling out while holed up in a stone shack in Stinking Springs, New Mexico, before his eventual surrender and arrest. Polk returned to working with cattle on the LX Ranch, in the Texas Panhandle, after the search, and he eventually returned to Prairie Lea, in his native Caldwell County, to serve as constable and deputy sheriff. In 1897, Polk opened a meat market in downtown Lockhart, which happened to be the linchpin of two of the town’s most prominent barbecue families: the Kreuzes and the Swearingens.
Two years ago, I attempted to trace Southside Market’s history, as it claimed it had been in operation since 1886 in Elgin, which would have made it the oldest barbecue joint still in operation in Texas. When looking into this assertion, I gave a lot of leeway to what counts as “oldest barbecue joint,” going off the loose definition of a retail meat market that, through a series of name and ownership changes—regardless of relocations—eventually became a barbecue joint that still exists today. Even though I chased the records of the various buildings, and even more records of ownership changes, I could only date Southside’s genesis to 1895. When it comes to my research on Kreuz Market, the archives seem to lay out a path that begins a little earlier.
I first saw the Swearingen family name a decade ago, in a June 12, 1930, article in the Lockhart Post-Register about the history of Kreuz Market. “The ground which the business occupies has been a meat market site 55 years, ever since the late Jesse Swearingen opened a market in 1875,” the article read. It continued, stating that, “S. B. Swearingen, son of Jesse Swearingen was perhaps the first man in Lockhart to begin the regular sale of barbecued meats in Lockhart.” When I first read this, it piqued my interest, but I couldn’t find any additional records to verify the claim. I put my limited research aside until earlier this year, when I got an email from Phil Norman, the great-great-grandson of Jesse Swearingen, who had some family records and photographs to share. Thankfully, the digital archive of Lockhart’s historical newspapers had also improved, making my search more fruitful.
Norman lives in San Antonio but grew up in Lockhart. His birth, in Lockhart’s centennial year as one of the “famous Norman triplets,” was local headline news in 1948. His great-great-grandfather Jesse Swearingen, a Missouri native, had arrived in town a century earlier, in 1848. The 1870 and 1880 censuses listed his occupation as butcher, but the first mention of his meat market in the local newspapers (Lockhart had several) was in November 1886, in the Lockhart News Echo. “Mr. Jesse Swearingen is enlarging his meat market and he will continue to keep a full supply of the choicest fresh meats,” the article read, adding that Jesse’s son, Samuel Blackstone Swearingen, who went by Tobe, was building a brand-new store adjoining his father’s meat market. Later advertisements would place both businesses along what is now San Antonio Street on the north side of the Caldwell County courthouse.
Tobe had a nomadic lifestyle before running the store. His obituary mentions that “in early manhood he engaged in farming and the cattle business, going a number of times up the trail with herds.” The famous Chisholm Trail ran through Lockhart, and Tobe joined cattle drives that went up to the railroads in Kansas. After settling down back in Lockhart, he followed in his father’s entrepreneurial footsteps.
A December 1892 ad was the last mention I could find of Jesse Swearingen’s meat market, still on the north side of the square, with “fresh meats on hand at all times.” Six weeks later, in 1893, Tobe became a partner in the Swearingen and Mohle Market, on the southeast corner of the square. The Lockhart Register used some odd wording to praise the new market, writing, “This market is the oldest in town, is well known and it is unnecessary to say anything in their favor.”
Referencing the Sanborn insurance maps from the late nineteenth century, there was only one meat market on block fourteen, which sits southeast of the square in Lockhart. It was situated in the middle of the block along what was then Gonzales Street and is now South Commerce Street, in the same location where Kreuz Market first opened and where Smitty’s Market operates today. A building denoted as a meat market on this same lot is on every Sanborn map after that, and the 1929 map even notes a “barbecue kitchen” at the back of the building.
Tobe closed his market sometime before November 1897, which is when the aforementioned Cal Polk advertised his new meat market, “at the old Swearingen market on Gonzales street,” in the Lockhart News Echo. Polk had been cowboy and a lawman most of his life, and his time running a meat market was short-lived. In 1898, he and his wife, Annie, moved north of the Red River to the town of Holdenville, in the Creek Nation in present-day Oklahoma, where he served as the town marshal. Polk died after accidentally shooting himself in the head while cleaning his revolver in 1904.
Back in Lockhart, Charles Kreuz announced in the Lockhart Register in May 1900 that he was taking sole ownership of a meat market he owned with a Mr. Schlather but still had “a full line of the best fresh meats.” A location wasn’t noted, though later that year, Kreuz purchased the land where Polk’s market had sat; he wrote in the Register in August that he had “moved my market in the new building one door south of my old stand for a few days during the construction of my new market building.”
Combing through historical deed records at the Caldwell County Clerk, I found that Kreuz purchased lot two of block fourteen on August 20, 1900, from Jonathan Nix, a local lawyer. Though I searched during several visits to the clerk’s office, I couldn’t locate Nix’s deed from when he purchased the lot. The Swearingens sold lots one, four, and five of that block, but I couldn’t find a record of them purchasing or selling lot two. The direct ownership connection from Swearingen to Kreuz I was seeking never materialized.
Barbecue boomed in Lockhart in the decade after Kreuz Market opened. Poth’s Meat Market, on the north side of the square, was the first to advertise “barbecued meats and sausage on hand all times,” in 1901. “Wootton & Chesser are fixing up an eating house next to their market, principally for the purpose of serving barbecue and sausage,” the Lockhart Weekly Post wrote in 1904. The same paper called Kreuz’s store a “model market” later that year, when the owner installed three electric fans, an electric sausage mill, and a marble slab counter. Kreuz’s first ad asking locals to “try some of our barbecued meats and sausages” came out in 1906. The following year, Stubbs & Blackwell offered barbecue and sausage, and a year after that, C. S. Lay opened the fanciest new joint in town. “Everything from the barbecue pit to the building in which he is located is new and clean,” reported the Lockhart Post.
Charles Kreuz sold the market to his sons in 1911, and they would expand the business as the other local markets closed. “Kreuz Brothers have installed in their meat market a refrigerator counter with the latest appointments for the sanitary display and preservation of meats,” the Lockhart Post-Register reported in 1921. Three years later, the brothers purchased the lot on the east side of the market, giving them access to the side that didn’t face the square. The Lockhart Register rejoiced, writing that Kreuz Market would now cease “the unsightly process of crossing the pavement in front of the market with carcasses of slaughtered animals.”
Kreuz Market got a dose of national fame in 1926, when Henry Ford’s weekly newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, published a detailed profile of this barbecue establishment with its strange eating customs. “In the Kreuz market in Lockhart, butcher knives are furnished to cut the meat with and are chained to the tables that they may not be carried away,” the article read. It also contained a description of the big brick barbecue ovens and noted that “beef, mutton, pork and sausages are roasted in the ovens and sold hot to be eaten at the tables or benches near at hand or taken home.” Kreuz Market moved into a new building several blocks north in 1999, though the remnants of those chains can still be found inside Smitty’s Market, which is housed in the same building where Kreuz Market resided.
So, is Kreuz Market the oldest barbecue joint in Texas, according to my definition? The documented history that leads back to its founding is clearer than the circuitous path that leads to Southside Market’s. I can trace the lineage of meat markets on the plot of land where Kreuz Market was founded back to 1893, when the Swearingen and Mohle Market opened. That’s two years earlier than the first documented thread of Southside’s history as a retail market.
The problem with determining which is the older barbecue joint is that I can’t really nail down when either started serving barbecue. There is an advertisement for Kreuz’s barbecue from 1906, which already marks the business as selling barbecue before the first mention of Southside doing the same, in 1917. But I still think the question of the oldest barbecue joint in Texas is up for debate.
The good news is that, no matter which of these two barbecue joints has been around longer, they can both trace their lineages to the nineteenth century. I don’t know another state that can boast that.
