Antique 1920s-1930s K and R Countrymaid Sausage Counter Sign NOS Hastings Nebraska Meat Packing Advertising, Navy and Orange Litho

Size: 11 x 4.25 inches ~ New old stock, never used. They vary a little one to the next.

🧅 The Card

A round medallion tops the sign: a woman's head in a patterned cap, "K" and "R" on either side of her with "and" tucked beneath, ringed by "COUNTRYMAID FOOD PRODUCTS." Below that, "Finest" and "Quality" flank the medallion in cream serif, then "SAUSAGE" shouts across the middle in huge orange block letters shadowed in navy. "K AND R, INC." and "HASTINGS, NEBR." follow in solid cream type, with "NET WEIGHT" and "10 POUNDS" tucked into the bottom corners. It's printed navy and orange on tan card stock, with orange bands and black rules running to both edges - a topper card sized for a 10-pound wholesale sausage box, cut with slits at the corners so it stands up on the counter or tucks onto the box itself.

🏭 K and R, Inc.

In 1923, Karl Kauf and George Rinderspacher moved their meat-processing and wholesale grocery business into a big red-brick former brewery on Hastings' West Second Street. K and R, Inc. - their own two surnames, side by side, the same way they're monogrammed around the Countrymaid's portrait on this card - grew fast: by 1929 it was one of the three largest businesses in Hastings, buying Nebraska livestock locally and turning it into sausage and other meats under the Countrymaid name, while running a wholesale grocery line of Kraft cheeses, canned fruit and vegetables, and margarine out to stores across the state. The company expanded the old brewery building again in the 1930s and kept working out of it for more than fifty years before closing in 1979.

🍺 A Brewery First

That building had an earlier life. The Hastings Brewing Company put it up in 1907 and by 1911 was the second-largest brewery in Nebraska - until Prohibition in 1917 ended that business and the company turned to ice cream and soft drinks instead, as the Hastings Cream and Beverage Co., until 1919. It sat idle a few years before Kauf and Rinderspacher saw what a brewery's thick walls, cold storage and rail access could do for a meatpacking operation.

🏙️ Hastings, Nebraska

Hastings itself grew up in 1872 where the Burlington & Missouri River and St. Joseph & Denver City railroads crossed, and by 1930 it had reached about 15,000 people. It's the town where Edwin Perkins invented Kool-Aid in 1927, and where, during the Second World War, the Navy built a 49,000-acre ammunition depot - the largest naval munitions plant in the country - that pushed the population from 15,000 to 23,000 in under a year.

🏛️ Still Standing

The old brewery building outlived K and R by decades. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on July 31, 2017, and in 2018 it was converted into apartments known as the Brewery Lofts.

📅 How Old Is It?

Nothing on the card carries a printed date. K and R worked out of that Hastings building from 1923 to 1979, and the Countrymaid's cap and the bold two-color lettering read like the interwar years within that run.