A 100-Year Story

There’s a reason nobody in Samsula ever needed a street address for this place.

For a hundred years, the directions have basically stayed the same: take the dirt road out past the farms, and when you start smelling something a little funky, you’re close. The story goes that one year the cabbage crop came in so cheap that local farmers couldn’t afford to harvest it — so they shredded about 40 acres of it into the ground instead. The smell hung around for a while. So did the name. Bikers passing through would tell each other, “there’s a bar on the corner, right where it starts smelling like rotten cabbage — you’ll have a good time there.” Eventually nobody called it anything else.

The bar itself goes back to 1926, built on land where a Slovenian immigrant named Joe Sopotnick had settled in 1913 — one of the founding families of Samsula. Back then it was Sopotnick’s Corner Tavern, a farming-community gathering spot before it was a “biker bar” at all. It didn’t get renamed the Cabbage Patch until the 1950s.

Here’s the part most people don’t know: Joe Sopotnick wasn’t the only Slovenian family to put down roots in Samsula that year. In 1913, the Luznar family arrived too — and learned to farm this land using techniques passed down directly from the Sopotnicks. Two immigrant families, same year, same small farming town. Nobody could have guessed then that their names would end up permanently linked over a bar.

By 1967, Joe Sopotnick’s daughter — everybody called her Aunt Ollie — was running the place. Legend has it she’d drag race a motorcycle once a year just to prove she still could. Under her watch, the Cabbage Patch grew from a local tavern into something bikers planned their routes around. The Slovenian National Benefit Society cooked for visiting riders in exchange for whatever they could donate, and by the early 1980s, Bike Week alone was bringing something like a thousand bikers a day down that dirt road.

When Aunt Ollie passed in 1986, the bar found its way back to the family that had helped build Samsula alongside the Sopotnicks in the first place. The man who took it over, Ron Luznar Sr., had a Sopotnick for a mother. He wasn’t an outsider taking over a piece of local history. He was coming home to it.

Ron was a schoolteacher first — chemistry and physics at New Smyrna Beach High, where he also coached football, for two decades. He was part of UCF’s very first graduating class back in 1970. And underneath all of that, he had a passion nobody would’ve guessed from behind the bar: polka music. He got inducted into the National Polka Hall of Fame, toured Europe with a group called the Polka Pals, and hosted a polka radio show on WSBB every Saturday for more than thirty years.

For thirty years, if you showed up early enough, you’d find Ron out at the picnic table, barefoot, playing accordion while his dog Baby Doll napped nearby. Regulars still talk about it — that image of him out there most mornings, music going, before the bar even opened for the day.

Ron ran the Cabbage Patch until 2016, when the community lost him unexpectedly in a car accident. It was a hard year for everybody who knew him — and a lot of people did. What we’d rather remember, and what he’d probably want people to remember, is everything he built: three decades of teaching kids down the road, three decades of Saturday polka on the radio, and a bar that kept getting bigger and better under his watch without ever losing what made it special in the first place.

Today, his son Roger Luznar carries that same torch, running the same bar the Sopotnick and Luznar families both had a hand in building a hundred years ago. Coleslaw Wrestling, the Kickoff Parties, the Survivor Sundays, the free BBQ every third Sunday of the month — all of it sits on top of a hundred years of two families who never stopped showing up.

So when you pull in off that dirt road and catch that first whiff of the name that started it all, know that you’re not just walking into a bar. You’re walking into a hundred years of Samsula — cabbage fields, polka music, a few thousand motorcycles, and a family that never left.

Come pull up a stool. We’ll pour you something cold and tell you the rest of the story in person.