Antique 9XXXX Streamliner Train Broom Label 🚂 NOS 1930s 1940s Hamburg PA Railroad Art Deco Locomotive Advertising Paper Ephemera

Who Made the 9XXXX Streamliner Broom Label? 🚂 Hamburg Broom Works, Hamburg, Pennsylvania

Size: 6" x 3 1/2"

A broom label with a streamliner on it! A sleek, shrouded passenger train with a red star on its nose comes racing toward you through a golden yellow field, its cars trailing off behind under a sky full of white clouds. 9XXXX runs across the top in big navy letters, and HAMBURG BROOM WORKS, HAMBURG, PA. sits along the bottom. These are New Old Stock, never pasted on a broom.

Look close at the corners. Down at the lower left, in tiny type, it says REG. R.J.K. CO., and at the lower right there's a little 918, a plate or stock number. Its sister label, the Hamburg No. 10 Warehouse broom label, carries 934 in the same spot.

🚂 Two Trains, One Grade

Here's something that trips people up. Hamburg used the 9XXXX grade line on two completely different labels: this streamliner, and an older-looking one with a steam locomotive in a fancy red and gold scroll frame. Sellers list them both as "9XXXX locomotive," but they're not the same picture, and this is the streamliner.

That train tells you roughly when the art was drawn. Shrouded, streamlined passenger trains didn't hit American rails until 1934, the year the Burlington's Pioneer Zephyr made its famous dawn-to-dusk run from Denver to Chicago, and the look took over everything from the Pennsylvania Railroad's GG1 to the New York Central's 20th Century Limited. So this design can't be any earlier than the mid-1930s. Nothing on the label prints a year.

Those trains were born of hard times. The Depression had hit the railroads hard, and sleek new equipment was how they set out to win passengers back. On June 24, 1935 the Baltimore and Ohio's Royal Blue went into service as the first lightweight streamlined train in the eastern United States, running between New York and Washington, and in 1937 Otto Kuhler gave it a fresh look in light gray and royal blue with gold striping. Then on June 15, 1938 the Pennsylvania Railroad's Broadway Limited got new lightweight streamlined cars, styled by Raymond Loewy, the same designer behind the GG1, on the very day the 20th Century Limited was streamlined. The look goes by the name Streamline Moderne, the late Art Deco style that traded ornament for smooth curves and long horizontal lines, and it went onto locomotives, telephones, buses and appliances alike. A Pennsylvania broom maker putting one on a label was right in step with the times.

🧹 Wilson Schmick's Broom Works

Wilson E. Schmick started making brooms in Hamburg in 1894 under the name Hamburg Broom Works. His first shop was in West Hamburg, just south of the Philadelphia and Reading railroad station. In 1911 he put up a $25,000 two-story building at Second and Pine Streets for the works, and by 1912 he was putting out a catalog called "Brooms: The Most Modern Broom Manufacturing Plant in the World." Schmick wasn't shy.

He also wasn't going to let anybody copy him. In 1917 he brought out his own brands, Puritan and Eclipse among them, with their own bands, sewing and labels, and before long the West Reading Broom Works was selling brooms dressed up almost the same way under names like American Beauty and Blue Bird. Schmick sued. The lower court threw it out, but on July 13, 1922 the Superior Court of Pennsylvania reversed that and stopped West Reading's imitation cold.

By 1918 Schmick had bought out every outstanding share and owned the business outright. In 1921 he sold the Second and Pine building to the Burkey Underwear and Hosiery Company and kept the building across Pine Street for brooms. It was a public company from 1923 until 1999, when it went private, and in later years it became one of the assets of Hamburg Industries, Inc.; it doesn't make brooms anymore. Its later labels read Hamburg Broom Works, Inc. with the 19526 ZIP code, so those are 1963 or later. That's more than a hundred years of brooms out of one small borough.

Most broom makers didn't last nearly that long. The United States had 1,039 broom factories at the 1919 peak and just 320 by 1939, and with imported brooms and synthetic bristles moving in, most of the rest had closed by the 1960s, by which time Hamburg was printing ZIP codes on its labels.

🏘️ Hamburg, Berks County

Hamburg sits on the east bank of the Schuylkill River at the foot of the Blue Mountains in northern Berks County, a borough of about 4,270 people as of 2020. The railroad ran right along the river through town, which is how a broom maker in a little Pennsylvania Dutch borough could ship all over. Trains were already part of the company's look, too: a 1920 Hamburg Broom Works advertisement shows a locomotive from the nearby Reading Railroad. A streamliner was the natural next step.

📷 The last photo, the Hamburg Broom Works building in an old photograph above the empty lot where it stood, is there for history only and isn't included; you get the label.

🖼️ Show It Off

I love this one framed by itself in a little black frame with a navy mat, where it reads like a tiny railroad poster. It's a natural for a train collector, anybody from Hamburg or Berks County, or a wall of old Pennsylvania advertising, and at 6 by 3 1/2 inches it fits a standard 5 by 7 frame turned sideways. The supply is finite - nobody's printing the Streamliner broom label again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.