On a Wednesday afternoon along South Roselle Road, the deli counter at KD Market runs three or four people deep, and the language overheard between the smoked kielbasa and the fresh rye is almost always Polish. This is one of the quiet truths of the Poles in Schaumburg, Illinois: a German farming village, named for a tiny principality near Hanover, has become one of the most comfortable Polish addresses in the Chicago suburbs.
The Place
Schaumburg sits about 24 miles northwest of downtown Chicago, in northwest Cook County. It was incorporated in 1956 with a population of around 130, and it is now among the largest communities in Illinois, with 78,723 residents counted in the 2020 census.
For decades it was farmland. Then came the Northwest Tollway in 1956, the nearness of O’Hare, and in 1971 the opening of Woodfield Mall, once among the largest enclosed shopping centres in the country. Office parks, corporate headquarters and subdivisions followed, and Schaumburg turned into a prosperous edge city.
That prosperity is the backdrop to everything that follows. Poles did not arrive here to a struggling ethnic enclave. They arrived to ranch houses, good schools and a job market within easy reach, and they made a corner of it unmistakably their own.
How It Became Polish
A German village first
The irony is hard to miss. Schaumburg took its name from German settlers, many of them from the small state of Schaumburg-Lippe, who began farming the marshy prairie in the 1830s. The first recorded settler of Schaumburg Township was German-born Johann Sunderlage, part of an 1833 survey team who liked the land enough to bring his family from Germany.
By 1870, almost all the land in the township was owned by German immigrants or their families. German was the main language in most homes until the 1950s, and St. Peter Lutheran Church, the oldest Christian church in the community, held services in German until 1970, according to the village’s recorded history.
So when Poles began settling here in numbers, they were not displacing an established Polish community. They were the next wave to remake a Central European farming town, only this time the accent came from Krakow and the Tatra foothills rather than from Hanover.
The Chicago Polonia, moving outward
To understand the Poles in Schaumburg you have to understand Chicago. Metropolitan Chicago holds one of the largest Polish populations of any city outside Poland, and Illinois remains a national centre of Polish American life. In 2024, Poland was the third most common birthplace for foreign-born residents of Illinois, with 117,148 residents born there.
For much of the twentieth century, Polish Chicago meant the city itself: Milwaukee Avenue, the parishes of the Northwest Side, the bakeries and union halls. But like other groups before them, Polish families followed the same suburban path the Germans had taken a generation earlier, outward along the expressways toward more space and newer schools.
The northwest suburbs absorbed a large share of that movement. Substantial Polish communities settled across north Cook County, in Park Ridge, Palatine and Niles, and in the southwest suburbs of Burbank, Tinley Park and Lemont. Schaumburg, with its jobs and its housing stock, became one of the natural landing places.
A professional Polonia
What distinguishes Schaumburg is the kind of Polish community that formed here. This was not, for the most part, a first-stop immigrant quarter. It drew families who had often spent years in the city first, who worked in trades, engineering, healthcare, accounting and small business, and who could afford a suburb known for its strong economy.
Polish ancestry now accounts for roughly 9.9 per cent of Schaumburg’s population, one of the larger single ancestries in the village. That is a striking figure for a suburb whose founding identity was German and whose modern reputation is built on shopping and office space.
The community announced itself, as immigrant communities so often do, through food and faith and the small commercial strips where both are sold. And in Schaumburg, almost all of it gathered along one road.
Roselle Road becomes the high street
South Roselle Road, on the village’s south side, became the commercial spine of Polish Schaumburg. Within a short stretch you can buy fresh pierogi and smoked sausage, sit down to highlander stew, and pick up Polish newspapers and imported chocolate.
KD Market opened on Roselle Road in 1998 and grew into a full European grocery, the kind of anchor that signals a community has put down roots rather than passed through. Restaurants and delis clustered around it over the following two decades, several of them opening in the strip malls and plazas that line the road.
By the 2010s the corridor had a settled rhythm: weekday shopping after work, weekend crowds before and after Mass, paczki by the dozen in the days before Lent. The Daily Herald, the suburb’s own paper, has covered KD Market’s paczki season as a local event in its own right.
The Landmarks
KD Market (Krystyna’s Deli), 1102 S Roselle Rd. A family-run Polish grocery serving Schaumburg since 1998, KD Market stocks imported goods from Poland, Germany and Ukraine alongside house-made smoked meats and fresh-baked breads and pastries. Its deli counter is the social centre of Polish Schaumburg, busiest on Wednesdays and in the run-up to Fat Thursday, when its paczki draw lines out the door.
Bacowka, 1120 S Roselle Rd. A few doors from KD Market, Bacowka takes its name from the shepherds’ huts of the Polish Tatras, and the menu follows: oscypek smoked cheese, kwasnica sauerkraut soup, and placek po zbojnicku, the highlanders’ goulash-topped potato pancake. Open since around 2015 and remodelled in 2024, it is the corridor’s window onto Gorale mountain cuisine.
Opolska, 624 S Roselle Rd. Opolska opened in 2019 in the Weatherway Plaza shopping centre, named for the Opole region of southwestern Poland and serving its dishes alongside the familiar pierogi and stuffed cabbage. Its arrival signalled that the Roselle Road corridor could support not just groceries but full sit-down Polish dining built around a specific home region.
Deli 4 You, 560 S Roselle Rd. A Polish grocery and deli whose hot-food case runs to stews, stuffed cabbage, blintzes and pierogi made fresh daily, Deli 4 You is the everyday counterpart to the corridor’s restaurants. Regulars come for takeaway dinners and the bakery counter, and the shop’s steady local following speaks to how routine Polish food has become in south Schaumburg.
Woodfield Mall, 5 Woodfield Mall. Opened on 9 September 1971 on a 191-acre site, Woodfield is the reason Schaumburg became an edge city, and it is part of why Polish families found work and customers here. For the community it is less a cultural landmark than the economic engine that made the affluent suburb affordable to aim for.
Town Square, 140 to 200 S Roselle Rd. At the corner of Schaumburg and Roselle Roads, within the Olde Schaumburg Centre historic district, Town Square anchors the same road that carries Polish Schaumburg. It is home to the Schaumburg Township District Library, among the largest public libraries in Illinois, a civic hub that the Polish corridor flows directly into.
Al Larson Prairie Center for the Arts, 201 Schaumburg Ct. Part of the village’s municipal complex, the Prairie Center hosts music, dance and theatre and a free outdoor summer concert series. It is the kind of well-funded civic amenity that defines the suburb the community chose, and where Polish families turn out alongside their neighbours.
Where They Came From
Polish Schaumburg is not drawn from one village or province. It reflects the broad sweep of Chicago’s Polonia, which itself draws on the whole of Poland. But the road’s restaurants hint at the regional textures inside that whole.
Opolska speaks for Silesia and the Opole region in the southwest, a part of Poland with its own dialect and its long history at the German border. Its presence on Roselle Road is a reminder that “Polish” is a federation of regions, each with its own kitchen.
Bacowka speaks for the Gorale, the highlanders of the Podhale region in the far south, around Zakopane and the Tatra mountains. The Podhale has sent migrants to Chicago for more than a century, enough that the Polish Highlanders Alliance of North America was founded in the city in 1929 to unite Goral organisations across the continent. A highlander restaurant in a Schaumburg strip mall is a small branch of that long story.
Beyond region, the through-line is class and timing. These were families who came in the later waves of Polish migration, many during and after the Solidarity years and the post-communist opening, who often started in the city and moved out as they prospered. They came to Schaumburg for the same reasons anyone does: the schools, the jobs, the safety, the room.
Schaumburg Today
Today the Poles in Schaumburg are woven into an ordinary, prosperous suburb rather than set apart from it. There is no Polish quarter in the old city sense, no streets of three-flats, no single dominant parish. There is instead a corridor of businesses and a population spread across subdivisions that look like everyone else’s.
That is, in its way, the immigrant success story working as intended. The deli is busy, the restaurants are full on weekends, the grocery has been open for more than 25 years, and the language survives in the aisles. But Polish families here are also simply Schaumburg residents, shopping at Woodfield, using the library, sending children to the township schools.
The corridor itself keeps evolving. Opolska arrived in 2019, Bacowka remodelled in 2024, and the dining options along Roselle Road have grown more varied and more confident over the past decade. A community that might once have driven into the city for a proper Polish meal now has the city’s equivalent on its own high street.
For comparison, Schaumburg’s story rhymes with that of its neighbours. The same suburban pull shaped the Pakistani community in Schaumburg, while in the southwest suburbs the Greeks of Palos Hills and the Greeks of Oak Lawn followed a parallel arc, from the city outward to comfortable suburbs they remade in their image.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Poles live in Schaumburg, Illinois?
Polish ancestry accounts for roughly 9.9 per cent of Schaumburg’s population, making it one of the larger single ancestries in the village. With a 2020 population of 78,723, that points to several thousand residents of Polish heritage, a notable share for a suburb founded by Germans.
Where do the Poles in Schaumburg shop and eat?
The heart of Polish Schaumburg runs along South Roselle Road on the village’s south side. KD Market at 1102 S Roselle Rd, Deli 4 You at 560, Bacowka at 1120 and Opolska at 624 form a compact corridor of Polish groceries, delis and restaurants within a short drive of one another.
Why is there a Polish community in a town with a German name?
Schaumburg was settled by German farmers in the 1830s and named for the German state of Schaumburg-Lippe. The Poles in Schaumburg arrived much later, as part of the twentieth-century movement of Chicago’s large Polish population out of the city and into prosperous northwest suburbs with good jobs and schools.
What kind of Polish food can you find in Schaumburg?
Roselle Road offers fresh pierogi, smoked kielbasa, stuffed cabbage and Polish baking, including paczki around Fat Thursday. It also offers regional specialities: highlander Gorale cooking at Bacowka and dishes from the Opole region of Silesia at Opolska, reflecting the many parts of Poland Chicago’s Polonia comes from.
Are the Poles in Schaumburg part of the wider Chicago Polish community?
Yes. The Poles in Schaumburg are an extension of metropolitan Chicago’s Polonia, one of the largest Polish populations of any urban area outside Poland. Many families lived in the city first and moved out to Schaumburg and neighbouring suburbs as they prospered, bringing their food, faith and institutions with them.
What is the connection between Schaumburg and the Polish highlanders?
The Gorale, or highlanders, come from the Podhale region of southern Poland and have a long history in Chicago, where the Polish Highlanders Alliance of North America was founded in 1929. Bacowka on Roselle Road, named for a Tatra shepherds’ hut, serves their distinctive mountain cuisine in Schaumburg.
If your family’s story passed through Schaumburg, or any of the places Poles have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in the Podhale or the Opole hills, to a deli counter on Roselle Road, to wherever you are now.