Antique Acme No 6 Broom Label 🧹 1910s 1920s Hamburg Broom Works Hamburg PA Crown New Old Stock Advertising Art Ephemera

Acme No. 6 Broom Label 👑 Hamburg Broom Works, Hamburg, Pennsylvania

Size: 5 1/4" x 4"

Acme across the top, and under it a big royal crown - gold band, red velvet cap studded with pearls, a little cross on top - set in a navy circle, with a corn broom standing guard on each side and a big 6 on a scroll underneath. Sky-blue sunburst rays behind it all and a red border around the edge. At the bottom: Hamburg Broom Works, Hamburg, Pa., with R.J.K.&CO. and 930 tucked into the corners. Never used. I have several, so yours will look just like this one.

👑 The Top of the Line

"Acme" comes from the Greek word for the very peak, and with a crown on top of it, that's about as loud as a broom maker could say "our best." The 6 is the grade number - Hamburg numbered most of its brooms, from No. 1 Priscilla up to No. 10 Warehouse, and its Elk label is a No. 6 too.

🏭 The Broom Works on Pine Street

Wilson E. Schmick began making brooms as Hamburg Broom Works in 1894, in West Hamburg just south of the P&R railroad station. By 1911 he had a $25,000 two-story factory at 2nd and Pine; in 1921 he sold it to the Burkey Underwear and Hosiery Company and moved the brooms into his building across Pine Street. His 1912 catalogue called it "The Most Modern Broom Manufacturing Plant in the World." In 1922 he won a court order against West Reading Broom Works for copying his labels and bands, and the company was publicly held from 1923 until 1999, later part of Hamburg Industries. In between, in 1918, he bought out every other shareholder and had it all to himself.

The town called him its broom king. His 1908 brick house on North Fourth Street, built with stained glass and treasures from his trips to Europe, is a bed and breakfast today. The broom works itself is long gone - the old site at 2nd and Walnut Streets even had to have an EPA cleanup.

The R.J.K.&CO. in the corner is the printer's mark - I'm pretty sure it's R.J. Kittredge & Co., the Chicago label printers - and my No. 1 Priscilla label carries it too, with 937.

🚂 The Stories

Local lore holds that Hamburg Broom Works advertising around 1920 prominently featured a Reading Railroad locomotive, a nod to the partnership between the factory and the line that kept it moving - the Philadelphia and Reading ran right through West Hamburg - and sure enough there's an old Hamburg Broom Works ad with a locomotive, and locomotive broom labels too. Local legend also holds that in the busy years you could smell the broomcorn dust on the wind walking through the borough on a weekday morning, and the old-timers thought nothing of it. Some of them will tell you Hamburg made more brooms than anywhere on earth in its day - the broom capital of the world, to hear them tell it. Collectors will tell you the artists who drew these were skilled people who got paid for the job and never got their names on anything.

The then-and-now picture of the Hamburg Broom Works building is just for the history - it doesn't come with the label.