Antique 1920s Auto No 6 Broom Label 🧹 Windsor Broom Co Hamburg PA – Original NOS Racing Car Advertising

Why a Racing Car on a Broom Label? 🏁 Auto No 6: A Racing Car to Sell a Broom

Size: 6" x 3 1/2"

A broom is about the least exciting thing in a hardware store, yet the Windsor Broom Co. of Hamburg, Pennsylvania sold its Auto No 6 broom with a label that shows no straw, no handle and no housewife. It has a racing car. A dark open-wheel racer charges out of the lower right corner with its driver hunched behind the cowl, a pale streak of speed arcs down behind it, and "Auto" flies across the top in fat yellow script with NO 6 stacked beside it. This is a 1920s paper broom label, never used, from a small-town Pennsylvania factory most people have never heard of.

🔍 What Is on the Label

• At the top, a round seal: a cream cross on red inside a cream ring, with a curve of fine dark lettering beneath the cross
• "Auto" in yellow script with a dark drop shadow
• NO 6 in tall yellow capitals
• A black open-wheel racing car picked out in yellow line, the driver in a helmet, the front axle and wheels drawn in detail
• WINDSOR BROOM CO.
• HAMBURG, PA.
• A single line of very small type under the town name

Two cream bands cross the red ground, one under the seal and one under the car. The label measures approx. 6" x 3.5", printed on paper and made to be pasted onto a broom. This one never was: it is unused NOS, the colors are strong, and the back is blank cream paper with the front design faintly showing through.

🧹 The Windsor Broom Co.

Windsor was a broom maker in Hamburg, a Berks County borough on the Schuylkill River, and it sold its brooms under brand names with numbers. Auto No 6 was one. Another Windsor label, Winner, carries a patriotic Lady Liberty and shield design. A Windsor Broom Company billhead dated 1938 still survives, showing the firm in business that year.

Windsor was not the only broom name in town. Hamburg Broom Works, founded in 1894 by Wilson Schmick, stood at Second and Walnut Streets, and Berks County had been making corn brooms since at least 1840, when Henry H. Krouse started the first large broom business in Reading.

🏘️ Hamburg, Pennsylvania

Hamburg began in 1779, when Martin Kaercher Jr. took 250 acres from his father and divided them into town lots; for years people called the place Kaercher Stadt. It was formally established in 1787, and on July 1, 1798 it became the second town in Berks County, after Reading, to get its own post office. The Centre Turnpike between Reading and Pottsville came through in 1812, the Schuylkill Canal followed, the railroad from Philadelphia and Pottsville arrived in 1842, and Hamburg was incorporated as a borough in 1837. For about forty years it was a boat-building town for the canal, and its early workshops turned out whiskey, beer, leather, chains, nails, tools and hats.

The name has its own small mystery. Hamburg is generally thought to be named for the German port city, but the Kaercher family came from Langenselbold in Hesse, far from it, and historians think the name more likely came from Bad Homburg, because the Blue Mountain ridge above the town looks so much like the Taunus hills the Hessian settlers left behind.

🏎️ Berks County Was Racing Country

A racing car was not a strange picture to put in front of Berks County shoppers. On September 24, 1924, the half-mile dirt track at the Reading Fairgrounds, in Muhlenberg Township, held its first races. Through the 1920s and 30s the top Indianapolis drivers came to run on it, and the track stayed open until June 29, 1979. Tommy Hinnershitz won there early in his career. The Fairgrounds Square Mall replaced it in 1980, closed in 2018 and was torn down in 2020.

📜 How the Corn Broom Came to Pennsylvania

The broom this label was made for is an American invention. In 1797 a Hadley, Massachusetts farmer named Levi Dickinson tied a bundle of broomcorn to a stick and made a broom that outlasted anything else around; by 1800 he and his sons were making several hundred a year. The Shakers flattened the round bundle and stitched it, which gave the broom its familiar shape. By 1850 Massachusetts alone was making more than a million brooms a year, and then broomcorn growing moved west and the Northeast trade shrank. Much later, after NAFTA in 1994 made Mexican brooms cheaper, many American broom makers closed, and most natural-fiber brooms sold in the U.S. now come from Mexico.

🖼️ Where It Looks Best

• 🏎️ A garage, shop or man cave, next to racing and automobilia
• 🧹 A laundry room or kitchen, as a joke only broom people get
• 🗺️ A Berks County or Pennsylvania Dutch Country collection
• 🎨 A wall of old advertising labels, where the red and yellow stand out

❓ Questions People Ask

Who made the Auto No 6 broom?

The Windsor Broom Co. of Hamburg, Pennsylvania, printed right on the label.

How old is it?

It is a 1920s broom label.

Is it used?

No. It is unused NOS paper that was never pasted to a broom; the back is clean.

How big is it?

Approx. 6" x 3.5".

What was the label for?

It was made to be pasted onto a Windsor Auto No 6 broom.