Antique Hudson River Steamboat Broom Label 🚢 NOS 1910s–20s Advertising Art

Hudson Broom Label 🚢 Steamboat on the Hudson River, U.S. Printing & Lithograph Co., Baltimore

Size: 6" x 3 1/2"

HUDSON in big yellow letters on a navy band, and below it a whole river scene: a two-stack steamboat with smoke rolling out and three little flags flying, steaming up the river between steep wooded bluffs, mountains behind and a stand of pines in the corner. A red frame holds it all, with a blank yellow panel at the bottom where the broom maker put his own name - this was a stock label, sold to whoever wanted a Hudson broom. Along the foot: MADE IN U.S.A. and the printer's line, U.S.P.&L. CO., BALTO. Never used. I have a stack, so yours will look just like this one.

🚢 The River Where Steamboats Began

Robert Fulton's steamboat made its famous run from New York City to Albany in 1807, and the Hudson never looked back. History remembers her as the Clermont, but her real name was the North River Steamboat - nobody at the time called her Clermont, and the name first turned up in an 1817 biography of Fulton. She left New York on August 17, 1807, stopped at Robert Livingston's Clermont estate on the way up, and ran the 150 miles to Albany in 32 hours under steam. Fulton wrote that he left the sloops and schooners behind "as if they had been at anchor." In 1863 Alfred Van Santvoord and John McB. Davidson started the Hudson River Day Line, carrying passengers between Manhattan and Albany, and their big two-stack day boats became the picture everybody had of the Hudson. It all began with two boats, the Daniel Drew and the Armenia, running on one schedule as a single line. The company incorporated in 1879 and made Hudson River Day Line its official corporate name in 1899, and folks called its fast white steamers the "white flyers." The 1920s were the Day Line's best years - the New York State Library's history says the line then had the largest and finest fleet of steamers on any river, and in 1925 seven steamers carried nearly two million people - and the last regular through trip, on the Robert Fulton, came on September 13, 1948. The steamboat on this label is a two-stacker just like those, chugging past the kind of bluffs you see in the Highlands.

And that scenery was famous long before it landed on a broom. The Hudson runs 315 miles, past the Palisades, the Highlands and Storm King, with the Catskills off to the west, and the Hudson River School painters - Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt - had made those bluffs and mountains into America's idea of a beautiful landscape. A label artist putting the Hudson on a broom was borrowing from the best.

🖨️ Printed in Baltimore

U.S.P.&L. Co., Balto. is the United States Printing & Lithograph Company, and it has a good story behind it. It started out in Cincinnati in 1867 as Russell, Morgan & Co., printing circus and theater posters and labels, and in 1891 it became the United States Printing Company. The playing-card side grew so big that it split off in 1894 as the United States Playing Card Company - the Bicycle and Bee card folks. The printing side was renamed the United States Lithograph Co. in 1901, was incorporated as the United States Printing & Lithograph Co. in 1912, and ran under that name until a 1959 merger, with a plant in Baltimore. That name on the foot of the label tells you it was printed in 1912 or later. Big label houses like that printed stock designs by the thousands, and a broom maker anywhere could buy a stack of Hudsons and stamp his own name in the yellow panel. The broomcorn that went into the brooms themselves was a Midwest farm crop - a 1912 history of Kansas called it one of the greatest broom-corn growing states in the Union, and Arcola, Illinois still holds a Broom Corn Festival every year, the weekend after Labor Day, in honor of its days as a broomcorn center in the late 1800s.

📜 The Stories

Local legend in Hudson Valley paper circles holds that a lot of the river-themed broom and household labels came out of little print shops in the river towns themselves - Newburgh, Kingston, Hudson, Catskill and the like. This one, though, came from Baltimore. Collectors also tell of hardware-store back rooms and farm-supply warehouses where unopened label stock sat for decades after the broom trade faded, and the vacuum cleaner and plastic bristles really did finish off most of the old broom factories.

A great one for a Hudson Valley home, a river lover, or anybody who collects steamboats. The supply is finite - nobody's printing the steamboat broom label again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.