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

What Did a Hastings Meat Packer Hang on the Counter? 🌭 Antique 1920s-1930s K and R Countrymaid Sausage Sign, NOS

Size: 11" x 4 1/4" ~ New old stock, never used.

🧅 The Card

What Does a Paper Label Tell You That a History Book Never Could? 🧅

There's a particular kind of document that historians overlook and collectors treasure - the working paper of everyday commerce. Not the ledger. Not the deed. The label: the thing that rode the box, caught the grocer's eye, and carried a brand's whole promise in a few square inches of color and type. What was it like to walk into a Nebraska grocery in the years between the wars and see a sausage card this bold staring back at you from the counter? Before shrink wrap, before barcodes, before a single national brand had locked down the American icebox, a butcher shop or grocery on the high plains sold you sausage under a name that meant something local - a name backed by a company you could practically see from Main Street. If you've ever wanted a piece of the real American food economy - not the romanticized version, but the livestock-buying, cold-storage-filling version that played out on the Great Plains between the two world wars - this is where that story lives.

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 out toward both ends - 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. "Finest Quality" still reads in a hand that hasn't faded a bit, and SAUSAGE practically shouts off the card. The Countrymaid is doing the same job so many "maid" and "farm girl" figures did on food packaging of that era - standing in for wholesomeness, for a home kitchen, for the idea that what came out of that big brick building on 2nd Street was made with care rather than churned out by machine. They were famous for their sausage and their lard, which were some of the finest at the time.

🏭 K and R, Inc.

Karl Kauf and his brother-in-law George Rinderspacher, both born in Germany, set up as butchers in Hastings back in 1887, and I love that by 1921 their company was already turning out 300,000 pounds of Countrymaid sausage a year. In December 1923 the company bought a big red-brick former brewery on Hastings' West Second Street and moved its meat-processing and wholesale grocery business in during 1924, throwing the doors open for three days of public tours that November - about 2,500 people came through on the first day alone. 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. By then the Rinderspacher sons had shortened the family name to Rinder (in 1926-27), and in 1950 Mrs. W. J. Rinder sold K and R, Inc. to L'Heureux and associates. The company kept working out of the old brewery for more than fifty years in all before closing in 1979. Food processing carried on in the building into the 1980s, before it went over to cold storage.

🍺 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 Nebraska's own state prohibition, which took effect in 1917, three years ahead of the national ban, 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 from November 1919, its owners paying $1,000 a year in taxes on a plant that earned nothing, until K and R saw what a brewery's thick walls, cold storage and its own rail spur could do for a meatpacking operation. You can still pick the building out today, as the picture shows: ornate red brick, arched window openings, decorative corbeling along the roofline and HASTINGS COLD STORAGE painted on the wall - the kind of confident, over-built industrial architecture small prairie cities put up when they still believed the boom would never stop.

🏙️ 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.

🖼️ Who It's For, and Where It Hangs

Frame it on its own in a simple black or navy mat and let the orange SAUSAGE do the talking; group it on a kitchen gallery wall with other vintage food and grocery advertising; hang it near a butcher block, farmhouse sink or old icebox; lay it into a collection of interwar advertising with other regional brand labels; or keep it in an archive of local business history beside photographs of the old brick building. This vintage advertising would look amazing hanging on your wall as home decor in any room! It's a fine gift for a Nebraska native, a Hastings history buff, or anyone drawn to old meatpacking and grocery Americana.

Advertising and ephemera collectors want it for the graphic design alone - that navy-and-orange palette and the Countrymaid vignette are strong period art on their own. Nebraska and Midwest regional history collectors want it because it's a tangible piece of Hastings' own commercial past, tied to a building that still stands. Meatpacking and grocery-trade collectors are a real and devoted niche, and lovers of old typography and unused printer's stock like a card that left the print shop clean and never had a job to do since. Somewhere between the wholesale sausage boxes and the modern apartment leases, cards like this one - printed, boxed and never used - sat quietly waiting, which is exactly how they've reached us looking the way they do.

📅 How Old Is It?

Nothing on the card carries a printed date. The Countrymaid name was on K and R's sausage by 1921, and K and R worked out of that Hastings building from 1924 until the company closed in 1979. To my eye the Countrymaid's cap and the bold two-color lettering read like the years between the wars within that run, so I have it in the 1920s-1930s.