Antique K and R Countrymaid Food Products Sign 🌭 K and R Inc Hastings Nebraska Meat Packing New Old Stock NOS 1920s 1930s

What Was K and R Countrymaid? 🥩 What a Grocer's Sign From Hastings, Nebraska Still Has to Say

Size: 7 1/4" x 4 1/4" ~ New old stock, never applied.

This is a K and R Countrymaid Food Products sign, new old stock, never used - the kind of small printed advertising piece that mostly got tacked up, rained on and thrown away. These sat in a stack instead.

🏷️ The Sign Itself

It's a flat piece of buff cardboard, landscape, with a navy-and-orange band running the full width behind a central roundel. Inside the roundel: a young woman in a ruffled bonnet, a braid falling on each side, a checked collar at her throat. "K" sits to her left and "R" to her right in serif capitals with a small script "and" tucked between them; "COUNTRYMAID" runs below in tall condensed capitals, and "FOOD" and "PRODUCTS" curve along the foot of the roundel. Nothing else is printed on it - no "Inc.," no Hastings, no Nebraska, no printer's mark, no date. Other K and R formats - a sausage counter sign, a lard label, a lard carton - print "K and R, Inc., Hastings, Nebr." in the same roundel style, so there's no question whose sign this is.

🏭 Two Men, a Brewery Building, and a Nebraska Grocery Company

In 1923, Karl Kauf and George Rinderspacher moved their meat processing and grocery wholesale business into the old Hastings Brewery building at 219 West 2nd Street. The brewery itself had gone quiet a few years before: Nebraska voted itself dry in November 1916, the law took effect in May 1917, and the building's owners kept it running a while longer as the Hastings Cream and Beverage Company, making ice cream and soft drinks, before that wound down too by 1919. Kauf and Rinderspacher took over a building built for cold, wet, heavy industrial work and put it to a new one - processing Nebraska meat and distributing Kraft cheese, canned goods and margarine to grocery stores across the high plains under the Countrymaid name.

By 1929, K and R, Inc. was one of the three largest businesses in Hastings. The two men bought their livestock locally whenever they could, and stayed in that same building for more than fifty years before closing in 1979. Local livestock was an old story around Hastings: Adams County is south-central Nebraska farm country, and by the mid-1870s, with the railroad in, it was already raising wheat, corn and other grains and breeding livestock.

Local legend holds that the old brewery's cold-storage rooms - thick brick walls, built for a different kind of chill - kept a more even temperature than newer purpose-built coolers, and that K and R's meat kept better for it. It's the kind of story that sticks to a company once it earns a reputation.

🍺 Before K and R: A Working Brewery

The building started life in 1906 as the Hastings Brewing Company, built in 1907 in the round-arched Rundbogenstil style, brewing lager under names like Ritter Brau, Prairie Pride Beer and Personal Liberty Brew, with a bottling plant added in 1910. After K and R closed, the building was used for cold storage for a time, then as a warehouse - you can see HASTINGS COLD STORAGE lettered on the lower wing in the building photo. It's still standing - listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2017, and reopened as apartments in 2018, a brewery turned sausage plant turned housing on the same Hastings corner for well over a century.

🌾 Hastings, Nebraska

Hastings was founded in 1872 where the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad crossed the St. Joseph and Grand Island line, and named for Colonel D. T. Hastings of that second railroad. It won a five-year fight with the town of Juniata to become the Adams County seat in 1878, and by 1920 counted 11,647 people - a real regional hub for the farm country around it, near the Platte River. Go the other way, one county south into Webster County, and you're down in the Republican River valley. The Adams County Courthouse that anchored the town through K and R's early years was the 1889 building, designed by Charles C. Rittenhouse and built by J. H. Sims for $77,815; it stood until 1964, when the present courthouse replaced it.

The Hastings Tribune has a story of its own, too. It went daily in 1905 as the Hastings Daily Tribune, and the men who owned it were something. Adam Breede bought the paper in 1894, covered the First World War as a war correspondent, then went on a big-game hunting trip to Africa, where he caught blackwater fever - its aftereffects killed him in 1928. In 1937 Fay Seaton and his sons Fred and Richard bought the Tribune, and Fred went on to serve as Eisenhower's Secretary of the Interior.

Hastings has one more claim to fame from those same years: Edwin Perkins invented Kool-Aid there in 1927, developed out of his powdered drink mix Fruit Smack, before moving production to Chicago in 1931.