Dreymiller & Kray
Sink Your Teeth into the Flavor of History By: Kelley White
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fter nearly 100 years in business, Dreymiller and Kray has seen decades of change come to the town of Hampshire, watching it grow from a dot on the map to a burgeoning smalltown community. Dreymiller and Kray has remained a pillar of Hampshire’s business community since 1929 and owner Ed Reiser talks about the artisan meat market and smokehouse, from its rich history to what it is today.
“My father worked here and growing up, we used to go to Howard Dreymiller’s house, who was one of the owners at the time, and he kind of became a friend of ours,” says Reiser, “I know the business because I grew up here. Back in 1929 when we started the business, the storefronts looked like old homes and wooden structures. There used to be a meat market directly across the street from us, and that’s where we believe Frank
“Happy” Dreymiller got his start. He always had a smile, so they called him Happy.” Eventually, Dreymiller and Kray moved across the street and Happy brought his brother, Howard, into the business. Tragedy struck in October of 1929 with a fire burning through about six different businesses on the west side of State Street. In those days, the buildings were all wooden structures, turning the town into a veritable tinder box. “By January of 1930, the buildings were all rebuilt, and the business got back up and running,” says Reiser, “They proceeded with their business until after WWII which is when Happy said he wanted to sell the business and retire. At that point, he sold to Edward Kray. That is how the name ‘Dreymiller and Kray’ came about.” Those owners ran the Dreymiller and Kray market until 1988 when Reiser and his wife Carol bought out the last two owners, one of them being Reiser’s father. Over the years, the business’s name has changed a handful of times from Dreymiller Brothers Proprietorship to the Hampshire
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n HAMPSHIRE AREA CHAMBER OF COMMERCE
Cash Market during the war and Depression Era, and then back to Dreymiller and Kray. The meat market is also a part of Illinois meat inspection history, having been the 42nd establishment to go under Illinois Meat Inspection Act after the processes began in the early 1960s. Over the majority of their history, Dreymiller and Kray has evolved from a slaughterhouse and retail market to a smokehouse and meat market with mostly wholesale retail. “In the late forties, early fifties, they did slaughter but then when meat inspection came around in the early sixties, they built a separate slaughtering facility here in town and they would custom slaughter for the most part,” says Reiser, “They stopped doing that in the early seventies and in the early nineties, business changed quite a bit because you had food service companies coming into the marketplace. When we stopped slaughtering, we went to more wholesale and retail. Predominantly today, the business is mostly wholesale.” For Reiser, it’s all about consistency and maintaining
