{"product_id":"antique-1910s-hamburg-broom-works-broom-labels-set-of-3-priscilla-maid-acme-crown-and-cavalier-hamburg-pa-new-old-stock","title":"Antique 1910s Hamburg Broom Works Broom Labels 🧹 Set of 3: Priscilla Maid, Acme Crown \u0026 Cavalier, Hamburg PA New Old Stock","description":"\u003ch2\u003eWhat Do a Maid, a King's Crown and a Cavalier Have in Common? 🧹 Antique Hamburg Broom Works Broom Label Set of 3, Hamburg, Pennsylvania\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSize:\u003c\/strong\u003e Priscilla 4\" x 4\" ~ Acme 5 1\/4\" x 4\" ~ No. 10 Warehouse 5 1\/2\" x 4\" ~ New Old Stock, little to no wear\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThey all sold brooms for the same factory. This is a set of three antique broom labels from the 1910s, every one of them made for Hamburg Broom Works of Hamburg, Berks County, Pennsylvania, and you get one of each: the \u003cstrong\u003eNo. 1 PRISCILLA\u003c\/strong\u003e, a little maid holding her broom up like she just won the cleaning contest; the \u003cstrong\u003eAcme No. 6\u003c\/strong\u003e, a king's crown standing between two brooms; and the \u003cstrong\u003eNo. 10 WAREHOUSE, Corn \u0026amp; Round Rattan\u003c\/strong\u003e, a cavalier in a plumed hat who holds his broom like a battle flag. All three are New Old Stock - printed about a hundred years ago to be pasted on a broom handle, and never used. The backs are plain, and yours will look just like the ones in the photos.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1912 Hamburg Broom Works put out a 28-page catalogue titled \u003cem\u003eBROOMS: The Most Modern Broom Manufacturing Plant in the World\u003c\/em\u003e. These folks were not shy. That plant is a parking lot today. The maid, the crown and the cavalier outlived it, and I love having all three together - one factory, one town, three characters.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3\u003e🏭 Wilson Schmick's Broom Works\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWilson E. Schmick started making brooms in 1894 under the name Hamburg Broom Works. His first shop was over in West Hamburg, just south of the Philadelphia \u0026amp; Reading station - and that station sat on the west side of the Schuylkill, about half a mile out of town. The business grew until there was no room left, so in 1911 he spent $25,000 on a two-story brick plant at 2nd and Pine Streets, a modern design meant to \"afford an abundance of light,\" on the very lot where Hamburg's electric plant had burned down that same year. The old photo shows HAMBURG BROOM WORKS spelled across the roofline in giant letters and railroad tracks running right past the front steps. Hard to picture a better spot for a broom works.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBrooms were good to him. In 1918 he bought out every other shareholder and owned the whole thing himself. In 1921 he decided to downsize, sold the big plant to the Burkey Underwear and Hosiery Company, and kept making brooms in his building across the street on the south side of Pine. Burkey's enlarged the old broom plant in 1927 and again in 1931, Wright's bought the buildings in 1974 and ran them until they closed, and the 2nd and Pine building was finally torn down.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3\u003e👨‍👦 A Family on the Road\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt was a family outfit, too. Wilson's younger brother, George E. Schmick, born in Hamburg on March 30, 1881, went on the road as the broom works' traveling salesman right out of Hamburg High School in 1901. After about a year of that, Governor William A. Stone gave him a scholarship to the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia, where he took the illustrating course and earned his first certificate in industrial drawing in 1903. He taught a private drawing class in Reading for a spell, and by the fall of 1904 he was back selling Hamburg brooms all over Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and New York City. Their father, Elias H. Schmick, worked for his son in the broom business as well.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNobody signed these labels, so I can't tell you who drew them - but I love that the man carrying the Hamburg line all the way to New York City was a trained illustrator.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3\u003e⚖️ The Copycats\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSchmick guarded his brooms the way he guarded his labels. In 1917 he brought out his own brands: the Puritan, with two white velvet bands on a polished natural-wood handle, and the Eclipse, banded in blue velvet, sewn with blue cord and finished with a yellow silk label woven in blue. Buyers took to them, and a court later wrote of the \"enviable reputation and wide demand for the Hamburg brooms, as they are commonly known.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThen came a little drama. In 1919 some of his own people walked out and started West Reading Broom Works: John H. Hoffman, his salesman of six or seven years, as president; A. C. Oberholtzer, his office manager of nine and a half years, as secretary; and Walter Hess, who had put in nineteen years with Schmick, more than ten of them as foreman. Before long their American Beauty, Blue Bird and Black Beauty brooms looked an awful lot like his, and their salesmen were calling on his customers, pointing out the likeness and offering them for less. Schmick sued. The lower court threw the case out, but on July 13, 1922 the Superior Court of Pennsylvania reversed it, ordered the copying stopped and put all the costs on the other side.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3\u003e🏠 The Broom King\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA Berks County magazine calls Schmick Hamburg's broom king, and it fits. In 1908 he built himself an imposing brick house at 63 North Fourth Street, just off Fourth and State, with stained and leaded glass and souvenirs of his travels in Europe. It's still standing. Today it's The Bismarck, a bed and breakfast - named, I'm happy to report, for the owners' German Shorthaired Pointer.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe company kept going a long time. It was publicly held from 1923 until 1999, then went private, and later became one of the assets of Hamburg Industries, Inc. - still in town in 2011, more than a century after Wilson started, when Nexstep Commercial Products of Springfield, Ohio, the O-Cedar licensee, bought its assets and moved the work to Paxton, Illinois and Springfield. Hamburg Industries' president, Richard Stiller, went along to help the customers through the change. The Pine Street building that had housed the broom works was sold in 2013, and the EPA lists the old Hamburg - Broom Works ground at 2nd and Walnut Streets as a removal-only cleanup site.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3\u003e👒 No. 1 Priscilla\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLook at her! A little maid in a big plumed hat, puffed sleeves and a white apron, one hand on her hip and the broom held up high, dressed in the Gibson Girl style of her day and swirled in an Art Nouveau frame. Isn't she sweet?\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePriscilla was THE housekeeping name back then. Priscilla Mullins, the Pilgrim girl of Plymouth at her spinning wheel - the one Longfellow made famous in 1858 with \"Why don't you speak for yourself, John?\" - was everybody's picture of a good homemaker. \u003cem\u003eThe Modern Priscilla\u003c\/em\u003e, a needlework-and-housekeeping magazine out of Lynn and then Boston, Massachusetts, ran from 1887 to 1930 and had about 600,000 readers by 1922. Put that name on a broom, right next to Schmick's Puritan line, and every housewife knew just what you meant.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePriscilla had company on the shelf. A 1920s Hamburg Broom Works ad shows their No. 7 Lady, a maid in a green dress and white apron sweeping the floor, and the works had an Indian Queen brand, too, with a Native American woman before a camp of tepees.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3\u003e👑 What Did Acme No. 6 Mean on a Broom?\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFit for a king! \"Acme\" comes from the Greek word for the very peak, and then, for good measure, they set a crown under it - pearls on the arches, a cross on the orb up top, a corn broom standing guard on each side and a big 6 on the scroll underneath. Subtle it isn't. That's about as loud as a broom maker could say \"our best.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe 6 is the grade number. Hamburg numbered its brooms, from the No. 1 Priscilla up to the No. 10 Warehouse, with a No. 6 Elk, a No. 7 Lady, a No. 7 All Corn and a No. 9 Utility in between.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3\u003e⚔️ No. 10 Warehouse, Corn \u0026amp; Round Rattan\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd then there's the cavalier. He's dressed for a duel, not a warehouse floor: plumed hat, falling white collar, red cape tied with a bow, sword at his hip and tall cuffed boots - the romantic look of a 17th-century cavalier. He does not sweep. He poses, one gloved hand on his belt and the broom raised like a standard, and lets the label do the selling. Set him against the plain words No. 10 WAREHOUSE and he's half heroic and half funny, and he still stops people today.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe words up top are the recipe. Corn is broomcorn, a sorghum grown not for grain but for its long, stiff tassels. Round rattan is cane from the rattan palm, blended in with it. Warehouse names the job: a big upright broom for hard work on wide floors. And here's the fun part - the name outlived the company. You can still buy a Hamburg\/Nexstep corn-and-rattan warehouse broom today, made from broomcorn, rattan and sotol fiber and sold for heavy and medium debris.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3\u003e🖨️ The Little Marks in the Corners\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGet a magnifier on the bottom corners. All three carry the same tiny printer's mark, R.J.K.\u0026amp;CO., and each has its own design number: 930 on the Acme, 934 on the cavalier and 937 on Priscilla. Those initials match R.J. Kittredge \u0026amp; Co., the Chicago label printers, who numbered their stock designs the same way - one of their corn can labels reads \"R. J. Kittredge \u0026amp; Co., Chicago #330.\" Three designs only a few numbers apart from one printer came off the same presses in the same years, and Kittredge was printing labels in Chicago through the 1910s. Nothing on the sheets is dated, but that, and a broom works that had just put up a brand-new plant in 1911, is how I get to the 1910s.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eUp close you can see how they were made: big fields of strong, flat color, a fine dot pattern in the cavalier's face and clothes, and a little crosshair target out in the cavalier's margin that the pressmen used to line up each color on the press. The trade's story is that the folks who drew labels like these were first-rate, never signed a thing and got paid very little - and sure enough, not one of these three carries a name.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3\u003e🏞️ Hamburg, Pennsylvania\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHamburg sits on the east bank of the Schuylkill River at the foot of the Blue Mountains in northern Berks County, sixteen miles north of Reading and some sixty miles northwest of Philadelphia - about 4,300 people today. Martin Kaercher got a patent in 1772 for 250 acres in Windsor Township, a tract that already went by the name Hamburg, and his son Martin Kaercher Jr. laid out the first town lots in 1779. In everyday talk folks called it Kaerchertown, and an act of April 3, 1837 made it a borough. The name is likely a twist on Bad Homburg in Germany, because the Blue Mountains looked like the Taunus range back home.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGetting things from place to place made the town. A canal went in along the east bank of the Schuylkill between 1815 and 1822 and opened in 1824, and for some forty years Hamburg was a great boat-building borough, until the canal was leased to the Philadelphia \u0026amp; Reading. The railroad had come through in 1842, linking Hamburg with Philadelphia and Pottsville. Over the years the town turned out canal boats, carriages, furniture, trucks and fire engines, iron stoves, bricks, brooms, silk goods, knitted clothing, ice cream, castings and boilers. In just a few square blocks in the southwest part of town there were once over a dozen substantial foundries, plants and mills employing thousands of people, and Hamburg was reputed to have more jobs per capita than any other town in the country. Hikers know it now for the Appalachian Trail, Hawk Mountain and Pulpit Rock, and railroad folks for the Reading Railroad Heritage Museum - fitting, since the broom works got its start right by the P\u0026amp;R station.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3\u003e🎃 King Frost\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe town also knew how to throw a party. The King Frost Parade started in 1910 as a Halloween parade to keep children out of trouble - Jack Walker's idea for a King Frost Carnival - with horse-drawn floats on a route lit by torches, and the \u003cem\u003eHamburg Item\u003c\/em\u003e put the early crowds at 15,000. The Hamburg Area Historical Society has a photograph of a Hamburg Broom Works float in one of those very first parades, and I'd love to have been on the curb for it. In 1916 there was no parade at all, called off over the threat of war, a polio epidemic and the rebuilding of the State Street bridge over the Schuylkill Canal. By 1924 King Frost had a queen, Elda Dietrich, and 50,000 people lined the streets. Highway traffic on the route and World War II ended it in the 1940s, until the Hamburg Jaycees brought it back in 1964. It has been held on the last Saturday in October ever since, except in 2020, and these days the parade runs more than three hours.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3\u003e🌾 How America Learned to Make a Broom\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBenjamin Franklin grew French broom, and Thomas Jefferson took it up after him and had broomsticks made from the plant. The story goes that the real turning point came in 1797 in Hadley, Massachusetts, when a farmer named Levi Dickenson made his wife a broom from the tassels of the sorghum he was growing for seed - it swept so well that the neighbors wanted one too. The Shaker Theodore Bates invented the flat broom in 1798, and the foot-treadle broom machine came along in 1810. America had 303 broom factories by 1849, and the count peaked at 1,034 in 1919, right in the years labels like these were going on Hamburg brooms. By 1939 it was down to 320. And what finally did in the old broom trade is no legend at all: the vacuum cleaner and plastic bristles.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHamburg is Pennsylvania German country, and the broom has older lore here than any factory. The old belief, written down in a 1915 book of Pennsylvania German superstitions, was that no witch will step over a broom - and that you swept the house and barn on Good Friday to keep everybody healthy. Might be worth keeping one of these by the back door.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3\u003e📜 The Stories\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe story goes that visiting salesmen from other broom regions would come to town and find the whole place - lodging houses, lunch counters and all - running on the broom trade. Hamburg Broom Works liked its trains, too - the Philadelphia \u0026amp; Reading ran right through West Hamburg, where it all started. One of its old ads puts a Reading Railroad locomotive right in the picture, it ran locomotive broom labels as well, and local collector lore holds that the locomotive was a nod to the railroad that made the factory possible. And Hamburg was never a one-broom town - the Windsor Broom Co. made brooms there too, under labels like Auto and Winner.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3\u003e🖼️ Three on the Wall\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFramed together in a kitchen, pantry or laundry room, these three are adorable - a maid, a king's crown and a swashbuckler, all working for the same broom works. Everything here is stored in the dark, under 40% relative humidity, at a steady 72°F, climate controlled - whatever age a label shows, it had before it came to me.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe brooms are long gone, the plant is a parking lot, and nobody is printing Hamburg Broom Works labels again. The supply is finite, and once these last unused ones are framed and hanging on collectors' walls, they'll be very difficult to acquire.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e📷 The Hamburg Broom Works then-and-now photo at the end is there for history only and isn't included - you get the three labels.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"relatedBlock\"\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e🔎 More From The Vintage \u0026amp; Antique Gifts Archive\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/antique-acme-no-6-broom-label-hamburg-broom-works\"\u003eAntique Acme No 6 Broom Label 🧹 1910s 1920s Hamburg Broom Works Hamburg PA Crown New Old Stock Advertising Art Ephemera\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/very-rare-antique-no-10-warehouse-broom-label\"\u003eAntique Hamburg Broom Works No. 10 Warehouse Corn Round Rattan Broom Label 🧹 Cavalier Lithograph Hamburg PA 1910s\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/rare-antique-no-1-priscilla-broom-label-hamburg-pa\"\u003eAntique No. 1 Priscilla Broom Label 🧹 Hamburg Broom Works 1920s — NOS Art Nouveau Lithography, Hamburg PA\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Vintage and Antique Gifts","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":68081293361384,"sku":"VAG-15417002229992","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0597\/2718\/4037\/files\/il_fullxfull.8781248918_5fs2.jpg?v=1793576281","url":"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/antique-1910s-hamburg-broom-works-broom-labels-set-of-3-priscilla-maid-acme-crown-and-cavalier-hamburg-pa-new-old-stock","provider":"Vintage and Antique Gifts","version":"1.0","type":"link"}