Vintage Pollyann Broom Label A.F. Weymer Co Inc Syracuse NY Art Deco Silhouette Lithograph NOS 1910s–1930s 🧹

Size: 3.5 x 2.5 inches ~ New old stock, never applied. They vary a little one to the next.

🧹 Pollyann: One Letter Short of America's Most Famous Optimist

In 1913 Eleanor H. Porter published Pollyanna, the novel about an orphan girl who plays the "glad game," finding something to be glad about in everything. It was eighth on the bestseller list that year and second the next, Glad Clubs formed around the country, Mary Pickford played her on screen in 1920, and her name became an English word. A Syracuse broom maker printed a brand one letter shorter: POLLYANN, in cream capitals down a navy band, beside a lady in a bonnet and hoop skirt. Whether that missing "a" was a tip of the hat or just a printer keeping the word on one line, somebody in that shop knew exactly which bestseller they were borrowing a little shine from.

The maker is named in red at the foot: A.F. WEYMER CO., INC., SYRACUSE, N.Y. Behind that line stands August F. Weymer, a Syracuse broom manufacturer who patented a machine for combing the seed out of broom corn just as the American broom trade reached its peak. There were 1,034 broom factories in the United States in 1919. Twenty years later there were 320. This label is new old stock from that vanished trade, never pasted to a handle.

🏷️ What the Label Shows

• Brand: POLLYANN in cream letters edged in yellow, on a navy diagonal band
• Figure: silhouette of a lady in a bonnet tied with a bow and a full hoop skirt, in cream and pink halftone, on a blue ground
• Ornament: a blossom spray at the upper left and flower clusters at two corners
• Maker's imprint: A.F. WEYMER CO., INC. / SYRACUSE, N.Y., in red
• Border: yellow
• Back: blank paper
• Size: 3.5 x 2.5 inches
• Condition: new old stock, never applied

Look closely and the dots of the halftone screen show through at the pink edges of the figure; the blue ground and navy band are laid down as flat color around them. It's a nice reminder that this was commercial printing doing its best impression of a hand-tinted illustration.

🏭 August F. Weymer and the A.F. Weymer Co.

August F. Weymer was a broom maker who invented his own machinery. On May 13, 1914, he filed for a patent on a broom-corn seeding and sorting machine, and U.S. Patent 1,265,846 was issued on May 14, 1918. It names him as August F. Weymer of Syracuse, New York, and assigns the invention to two companies: the A. F. Weymer Co. of Syracuse and the American Broom and Brush Co. of Amsterdam, New York, on the Mohawk River. The machine stripped the seeds from broom-corn heads and sorted the straw by length in a single operation, using rotating drums with projections that combed the brush without damaging it.

The patent calls the firm the A. F. Weymer Co.; this label's imprint adds "Inc." The company sold its brooms under more than one picture brand. Besides Pollyann, labels survive for The Witch, a witch on her broom before a full moon with a bat, which dealers date to the 1920s; Mother Goose, a woman riding a goose in flight, dated to the 1930s; and Parrot, also given to the 1930s. Each brand put a different picture on a Weymer broom. The company was at work by May 1914, when Weymer filed that patent, and its sister labels The Witch and Mother Goose are dated to the 1920s and the 1930s. Pollyann's Art Deco lettering and halftone lady fit the same span, the 1910s to the 1930s.

🧹 From Hadley to Syracuse: The American Broom

The American broom as it was sold for the next two centuries began in Hadley, Massachusetts. In 1797 Levi Dickinson, a Hadley farmer, made a broom for his wife from the tassels of broom corn; her praise brought the neighbors asking, and Dickinson built machinery to keep up. A year later Theodore Bates of the Shaker community at Watervliet, New York, is credited with the flat broom, and the Watervliet Shakers are said to have grown broom corn on an island in the Mohawk River around 1800. By 1810 there was a foot-treadle broom machine.

Legend has it that Benjamin Franklin started it all by picking a single seed off a whisk broom brought over from England, planting it, and raising the stalk from which all the broom corn in the United States descended. An 1899 newspaper called it "a very pleasant little fairy story." Franklin's own letters tell a plainer version: on February 21, 1757, he sent his sister Jane Mecom "some whisk-seed" he had brought from Virginia and asked her to share it.

By 1849 the country counted 303 broom factories. The number peaked at 1,034 in 1919, the year after Weymer's patent issued, with at least one factory in almost every state and most of them in the East. Then the trade was reshaped: new floor-cleaning technology arrived, foreign brooms were allowed in duty-free, and by 1939 only 320 factories were left. Through the last years of the twentieth century the small factories that remained struggled against brooms from Mexico.

Syracuse built the machines as well as the brooms. Willard C. Lipe of Syracuse received U.S. Patent 718,263 for a broom-sewing machine on January 13, 1903, and in 1906 the Lipe & Walrath Company was incorporated by W. C. Lipe and L. G. Ford of Syracuse and A. A. Walrath of Fort Plain to build them.

🌆 Syracuse, New York: A Salt Town on the Canal

The second photograph with this listing is a period view of Clinton Square in Syracuse, with canal boats along the Erie Canal, a horse-drawn grocery wagon on the quay, and the Gothic tower of the Syracuse Savings Bank rising at the right.

Syracuse grew on salt. Commercial production at the Onondaga salt springs followed the Treaty of Fort Stanwix of 1788, and until 1900 the bulk of the salt used in the United States came from Syracuse. The Erie Canal, opened in 1825, ran straight through Clinton Square and sent salt sales climbing. The Syracuse Savings Bank, designed by Joseph Lyman Silsbee and opened in 1876 beside the canal, stood 171 feet tall, the tallest building in the city, and its passenger elevator, the first in Syracuse, drew curious visitors.

The square has its own stories. In 1851 crowds gathered there for the Jerry Rescue, when abolitionists freed a man held under the Fugitive Slave Act, and in 1869 the Cardiff Giant, the stone "petrified man" that turned out to be a hoax, went on exhibition there. The canal through the square was closed and filled in 1917, and Erie Boulevard, laid over its bed, opened to traffic in October 1924.

🎨 The Lady on the Label

The silhouette is a lady of an earlier century, in a bonnet with a bow at the chin and a wide hoop skirt: the figure known as the crinoline lady. In the 1920s and 1930s she was a favorite on embroidery transfers, stitched onto pillowcases and dresser scarves, often with her skirt worked in crochet. The lettering beside her is Art Deco, tall plain capitals set on a slant with a drop shadow, a style of the same years. I'm fond of her for that reason alone: she was already old-fashioned when this label was printed, a nod to a gentler era stamped in the same breath as a very modern typeface. A broom company selling nostalgia and progress on the same scrap of paper, and neither one of them pasted down.

Pollyann labels don't turn up for sale anywhere else that I've seen, which makes this a rare one. Once they're gone, they're gone.