Antique Maid Broom Label 🧹 NOS 1920s Red Portrait Litho #32 Kitchen Wall Art

Size: 4.5 x 3.5 inches ~ They vary a little one to the next.

🧹 A Stock Label With No Name On It

All that's printed here is a small "32" and "LITHO. IN U.S.A." in the corner of the red field. No broom company, no town, not even the word "broom." This was a stock design, sold by a lithographer to any broom maker who wanted to buy a run and print their own name in the empty red space above and below the portrait. This run never got a name and never went on a handle, so it's New Old Stock, the red as bold as the day it came off the press.

🎨 What's Actually On It

The center of the label is a young woman's portrait inside a cream medallion ringed in navy - dark bobbed hair, a pearl-studded band worn low across her forehead, a dark bodice with a light collar underneath. She's flanked by curling Art Nouveau stems, six daisy-form flowers, black vertical bars, and a small four-square cross tucked into each corner of the red field. It's a flat-color print built up with fine stipple shading rather than a many-stone chromolithograph - red, navy, a soft flesh pink, and the cream of the paper itself doing all the work. Four inks, not a dozen, and they hold up beautifully.

👗 Dating the Design

That bob and the pearl bandeau worn low across the brow are straight 1920s flapper styling. Stock designs like this were reprinted for years after they were first cut, but the design itself is squarely 1920s, and that's enough to earn it the word Antique.

🌾 The Broom Corn Trade

Broom corn is a stiff-fibered sorghum grown for one purpose, and it built real local economies across Illinois, Kansas, Oklahoma and Colorado. In Illinois, Colonel John Cofer planted broomcorn at Arcola around 1865, and the town grew into the country's broomcorn capital. At one time some 1,500 broom shops across the country turned out 45 million brooms a year, and the trade had its own journal, Brooms, Brushes and Mops, from its first issue on February 27, 1912. Wichita, Kansas had its own broomcorn dealers by 1904. A label like this one was made for exactly that world: a lithographer's stock offering, waiting for a broom company to buy a run and put its own name on it.

🖌️ Nobody Signed It

Whoever drew that portrait doesn't get a name on the label. Commercial lithography almost never credited its artists, so she stays anonymous, and hanging one of these up is about as much credit as that artist will ever get.

🧹 What Happened to the Broom Trade

The vacuum cleaner started it. "During the 1930s, the popularity of vacuum cleaners shrank the broom industry," as one Amsterdam, New York history puts it, and after the war came plastic bristles and cheaper imports. The broom companies that were left had less reason to buy stock labels, and a lot of unsold runs like this one sat in a drawer until they turned up again.