Antique Mayflower Broom Label 🧹 NOS 1930s A.F. Weymer Co. Syracuse NY Nautical Sailing Ship

Mayflower Broom Label ⛵ A.F. Weymer Co., Syracuse, New York

Size: 4" x 3"

A tall ship under full sail - cream sails catching the light, a little red-cross flag flying from the masthead, a big yellow moon low on the water - on a steel-blue sky, cut into an eight-sided label with a yellow border. Underneath, MAYFLOWER, and below that A.F. WEYMER CO. INC. / SYRACUSE, N.Y. Never used, back plain. I have a stack, so you'll get one like the one shown.

🧹 The Weymer Company

A.F. Weymer Co. was a Syracuse broom outfit, and the name on it was a real inventor: August F. Weymer of Syracuse filed for a patent on a broom-corn seeding and sorting machine in 1914 and got it in 1918, assigned to his own company and to the American Broom and Brush Company of Amsterdam, New York. His machine combed the seed out of broom corn and graded the straw in one pass. Weymer put out a whole family of brand labels - The Witch (a witch on her broom under a full moon, with a bat), Mother Goose riding a goose, a parrot, a cavalier, Pollyann - and the dealers who sell them date them to the 1920s and '30s. This Mayflower they call 1930s, and that's where I'd put it too.

Syracuse was the old Salt City of Onondaga County, made by its salt springs and by the Erie Canal, which opened in 1825 and ran right through downtown. Local legend has it the Weymer works sat near that canal corridor - the water that made the city a shipping hub in the first place, until it was filled in and paved over.

⚓ Why the Mayflower?

A broom brand named for the ship that brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth in 1620 was selling good old American reliability, and the picture does the rest.

📜 Broom Stories

The old legend is that Ben Franklin started American broom corn himself, from a seed he picked off an English whisk broom - and there really is a 1757 letter of his sending whisk seed from Virginia to his sister. Label collectors will tell you the artists who painted these little labels were real talents who worked anonymously for next to nothing, and the old-timers say it was the vacuum cleaner, more than anything, that finished off the fancy broom label after World War II.

📷 About the Last Photo

That one's just for history - you get the label, not the city! It's Clinton Square in downtown Syracuse in the old days, with the Erie Canal running right through it.