Antique 1910s-1930s Atlantic Broom Label 🧹 Early 20th Century Lithograph Maritime Ship Advertising Collectible

Atlantic No. 6 Broom Label 🚢 Atlantic Southwestern Broom Co., Baltimore, Maryland

Size: 5" x 3 1/2"

An unused Atlantic broom label: an ocean liner named ATLANTIC steaming through heavy seas, a big No. 6, and across the top ATLANTIC SOUTHWESTERN BROOM CO. BALTIMORE, MD., with MADE IN U.S.A. in the corner. I have a stack, so yours will look just like this one.

🧹 Paid in Brooms

The company started with a grocery bill. August Rosenberger got into brooms by accident in the late 1800s: one of his customers, a farmer who couldn't make ends meet, offered him a little shack with one broom machine and one sewing machine to settle what he owed at the store. Rosenberger said yes, and by 1907 he had a successful broom business and was looking at Baltimore.

That grocery was in Evansville, Indiana, where Rosenberger and his brother-in-law, Mr. Klein, were partners, and it was big enough to keep 12 horse-drawn wagons out on deliveries. Rosenberger wasn't one to own a machine that didn't work, so he went down to the shack with another man from the store and the two of them taught themselves to make brooms. They sold them right through the grocery. The brooms did so well that he sold the store to Klein and stuck with brooms, and his Evansville outfit was the Southwestern Broom Company.

Baltimore came next. On March 7, 1907, he formed the Atlantic Broom Company and bought up the equipment, inventory and contacts of Calvert Broom and Brush, a broom works that had been running out of the Baltimore City jail. Atlantic also made brooms at a plant in Jessup's Cut and in an old church on the Boston Street site.

Construction on the Atlantic-Southwestern Broom Company started at 3500 Boston Street, on the Canton waterfront, in 1910, back when that ground was still part of Baltimore County. On January 30, 1911, the Atlantic Broom Company and the Southwestern Broom Company of Evansville merged, and that's the name printed across the top of this label: Atlantic for the Baltimore side, Southwestern for the Indiana side. The factory grew by 57,500 square feet between 1922 and 1924, and in 1932 it peaked at 3.6 million brooms a year with 300 employees. Over the years its brooms went out to accounts like Safeway, Giant Foods and the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, better known as A&P. In 1977 the photographer Elinor B. Cahn, shooting for the East Baltimore Documentary Photography Project, photographed Chris Martin at the plant; he had been making brooms there for forty years by then. The company held on until 1989, closing its doors that November after 101 years. These days the old factory is the Harbor Enterprise Center, home to more than fifty local businesses.

⚓ Why a Ship?

A Baltimore broom company called Atlantic putting an ocean liner on its label makes perfect sense for a harbor town, and the 6 is the broom grade. The label itself doesn't carry a date; dealers who sell it mostly call it 1920s, which sits right in the company's best years.

Atlantic was a name with some weight on the water, too. Early on April 1, 1873, the White Star liner Atlantic, out of Liverpool for New York and running short of coal, turned for Halifax and struck the rocks off Nova Scotia. At least 535 people died. Fishermen from the little villages of Lower Prospect and Terence Bay put out boats and brought people in off the rocks and the wreck. No civilian shipwreck on the North Atlantic was deadlier until La Bourgogne went down in 1898. She looked nothing like the liner on this label, though: she was rigged with four masts, and this one carries two. Kind of an ironic name to hang on a label, when you know that story.

📜 The Story

A great one for a Baltimore fan, a beach house or anybody who loves old ocean liners.