{"product_id":"antique-1910s-little-jewel-blindmade-broom-label-philadelphia","title":"Antique Little Jewel Blindmade Broom Label 🧹 Pennsylvania Working Home for Blind Men Philadelphia Patriotic Eagle 1910s WWI Era NOS","description":"\u003ch2\u003eWhat Did BLINDMADE Mean on a Broom? 🦅 Antique Little Jewel Broom Label, Pennsylvania Working Home for Blind Men, Philadelphia\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSize:\u003c\/strong\u003e 6\" x 3 1\/2\" ~ New old stock, never applied.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv style=\"max-width:315px;margin:0 auto 20px;\"\u003e\u003cdiv style=\"position:relative;padding-bottom:177.78%;height:0;overflow:hidden;\"\u003e\u003ciframe src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/HkJ1hVOdVak\" style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer;autoplay;clipboard-write;encrypted-media;gyroscope;picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen\u003e\u003c\/iframe\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp\u003e🦅 BLINDMADE. That one word, printed across the pink banner at the foot of this label, was a trade name. Behind it stood a four-story brick factory on Lancaster Avenue in West Philadelphia where blind men sorted, wound, sewed and clipped corn brooms by the hundreds of thousands a year, and the eagle on this label went out on brooms its makers never saw. This is a WWI-era \"Little Jewel\" broom label from the Pennsylvania Working Home for Blind Men, new old stock and never applied, and it is a surviving piece of an institution that ran for 105 years and served as the model for a workshop as far away as Oakland, California.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\n\u003ch2\u003eThe Label\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe label stands 6 x 3.5 inches, taller than it is wide, inside a border with a ragged, flame-cut inner edge. \"Little Jewel\" runs across the top in blackletter against a sky shot with rays. Below it a bald eagle spreads its wings, head turned, beak open, one foot planted on a stars-and-stripes shield with a sprig beneath it and a sheaf of arrows beside it, with leafy branches rising on both sides. The shading is built from fine dots of color. The banner at the bottom reads BLINDMADE, then PENNSYLVANIA WORKING HOME FOR BLIND MEN, then PHILADELPHIA. The back is plain paper with the printing faintly showing through. It is new old stock, printed and never pasted onto a broom.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003eBlindmade: A Trade Name With a Purpose\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Working Home put that word on its goods deliberately. Its 1926 pamphlet, \u003cem\u003eA Message from the Dark\u003c\/em\u003e, described the rugs, brooms and recaned chairs as \"the products of the slow, thorough hands of the blind\" and told readers they \"go out to the world under the trade-name BLINDMADE.\" The pitch to buyers was plain: inspect the goods, save money, and help a blind man earn his living. The same pamphlet introduced readers to the men themselves, among them Tim Callahan, a longtime resident who had, in its words, made the place \"a home for us all.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003eA Home for Blind Mechanics, 1874\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Pennsylvania Working Home for Blind Men was incorporated on July 23, 1874. Its first board was led by B. B. Comegys as president, with William Chapin, principal of the Pennsylvania Institution for the Instruction of the Blind, as a vice president, alongside Alexander Brown, treasurer Levi Knowles and secretary Charles D. Norton. The need was sharp. Pennsylvania had sent more soldiers into the Union Army than any state but New York, and many men blinded in the Civil War already knew a trade yet could find no one to hire them. Hinman Hall, who had been blinded in the war and had studied and taught at the Institution, became superintendent. The charter set out the aim in one long sentence: workshops and \"a Home for Homeless Blind Mechanics,\" useful trades for blind men who had homes of their own, and the sale of what they made.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003eThe Old Mansion on the Lancaster Pike\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCitizens raised just under $30,000 to buy the grounds, and the Home moved into Greenville, an old country house on the Lancaster Pike, known then as 3518 Lancaster Avenue. The house came with its own history. It is tied to Samuel Blodget Jr., the economist, merchant and gentleman architect who served as superintendent of the buildings for the new Federal City of Washington, and to his wife Rebecca Smith Blodget, a daughter of the Reverend Dr. William Smith and a well-known figure of Philadelphia society in the early Republic. From 1866 to 1876 the house was the Mission House of the Protestant Episcopal Church, a school that trained foreign missionaries, before the blind men took it over. A small brick outbuilding at the back, fronting Warren Street, became the first workshop.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003eBrooms by the Hundred Thousand\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe annual reports kept count. In the first stretch of work the men turned out nearly 14,000 brooms and 1,068 yards of carpet, along with brushes, mattresses, harness and leather goods. The Home had a presence at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, which spread its name. In 1877, forty-six workers made 80,001 brooms, 3,366 yards of carpet and 10,111 scrub brushes. In 1880 they made 157,632 brooms and even 5,350 cigars, and $5,455.29 was paid out in wages. By 1886 there were 105 men on the rolls producing 373,294 brooms, and in 1887 the count reached 398,616 corn brooms with $16,665 paid to the workers. Some of the men earned extra as outdoor salesmen, and others worked Sundays as organ blowers, pumping the bellows that fed the pipes.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLife inside ran by the clock. The men rose at six, ate breakfast half an hour later and started work at seven. Dinner ran from noon to one, then work again until five or six. After supper came evening prayers and the newspapers, read aloud to the men by Mrs. G. M. Vernon, and before lights out at ten there were embossed books, music and games.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003eA Factory Built for Men Who Could Not See\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBy 1890 the shops were crowded past the point of safety and applicants were being turned away. With money from the Pennsylvania Legislature, the managers hired architect John Ord, the Scottish-born Philadelphian who that same year succeeded John McArthur Jr. on the design of Philadelphia City Hall. Ord's new factory, built on a $33,148 contract at the corner of 36th and Warren Streets, was designed around its workers. It had none of the rows of columns found in an ordinary factory, because columns would have been a hazard to blind men moving across the floor, and its fireproof stairway ran entirely outside the building.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe work flowed downhill. Wagons delivered bales of broomcorn to the basement, and a gas engine lifted them to the fourth floor, where the men sorted, sized, wetted, cut and colored the straw. It dropped through chutes to the third floor, where the brooms were wound, sewed, combed and clipped, and down again to the second floor for painting, drying and finishing before shipment. The three main floors held room for 250 workmen. Rooms for mattress making, rag-carpet weaving and chair caning shared the first floor with the office and salesroom. When California opened its Industrial Home of Mechanical Trades for the Adult Blind in Oakland in 1887, it was modeled on the Philadelphia Working Home.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003eThe Legend of Ben Franklin's Whisk Seed\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEvery broom factory ran on broomcorn, and broomcorn in America comes wrapped in a Philadelphia legend. As an 1899 newspaper story told it, Benjamin Franklin was examining a whisk broom brought over from England, found a single seed caught in it, planted it, and raised the stalk from which all the broomcorn in the United States descended. The record is a little different. On February 21, 1757, writing from Philadelphia, Franklin sent his sister Jane Mecom some \"whisk-seed\" he had brought from Virginia, telling her the tops \"make the best thatch in the world\" and that the same plant made the whisks she used on velvet. Legend or letter, the plant that Franklin mailed out of Philadelphia ended up in bales on the fourth floor of a Philadelphia factory run by blind men.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003eThe Eagle\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAn eagle with a shield and a sheaf of arrows is the language of the Great Seal of the United States, adopted in 1782, and commercial printers borrowed that eagle freely. On a Working Home label it sat above the word BLINDMADE, pairing the national emblem with men supporting themselves by their own hands.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003eWhat Came After\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Working Home never built a real endowment, and money troubles began with the Depression of 1893 and returned again and again. It kept the name printed on this label until a merger on September 15, 1955, after which it became the Pennsylvania Working Home for the Blind, then in 1963 the Pennsylvania Working Home and Philadelphia Association for the Blind, in 1966 The Working Blind, Inc., and in 1970 the Center for the Blind. Between 1965 and 1969 it won ten Army and Navy contracts worth $5,668,000 to make M8A1 bayonet scabbards, and bayonet collectors still hunt for scabbards stamped \"PWH\" and the scarcer \"TWB.\" After the scabbard work ended in 1970, the government went on ordering brooms, mops and rugs.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt was not enough. After a long decline and a drawn-out bankruptcy, the institution closed in 1979, after nearly 105 years at the same address. Its legacy did not end there: the lineage that began with the Working Home in 1874 continues in Associated Services for the Blind and Visually Impaired, formed in Philadelphia on November 30, 1983 and today the largest nonprofit serving blind and visually impaired people in southeastern Pennsylvania. The brick buildings on Lancaster Avenue still stand, converted to apartments, and the exterior fire escapes built for blind workmen were preserved as part of that conversion. I'm glad they made it, because the avenue around them has been remade more than once. In the 1950s and '60s, urban renewal zones took in portions of Lancaster Avenue for Drexel's northward expansion and for the University City Science Center, which Penn and Drexel helped found in 1963, and today the old road begins as a diagonal walkway across Drexel's campus. As Drexel kept growing and developers set their sights on student housing, the Powelton neighbors pushed back. The Powelton Village Civic Association nominated these very buildings, known by then as the Old Quaker Apartments, to the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places in 2016, and in 2022 most of Lancaster Avenue from 34th to 40th Street went onto the Register as part of the Powelton Village Historic District. 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