Antique 1935 Viking Broom Label 🧹 NOS NROG National Retailer Owned Grocers Chicago Art Deco Nautical Ship Dated Collectible

Viking Broom Label ⛵ 1935, National Retailer-Owned Grocers of Chicago

Size: 6" x 3 1/4"

Now this one has some swagger. A black Viking longship under a big golden sail, dragon head at the prow, a row of round shields along the side and a pennant flying from the mast, all riding white-capped waves against a fire-red sky. VIKING in bold white letters with "Broom" in script underneath, yellow sunburst rays below, and a deep blue band at the bottom with the little panel: N.R.O.G. - NATIONAL RETAILER-OWNED GROCERS, INC. - DISTRIBUTORS - General Offices - CHICAGO, ILL. - COPYRIGHT 1935. Never used, back plain. I have a stack, so you'll get one just like the one shown.

🛒 The Grocers Who Fought the Chains

Here's why that name matters. By 1933 the chain stores had only about a fifth of the grocery stores around Chicago but took around 60 percent of the sales - the A&P, Kroger and National Tea stores were on every other corner - and the independents were getting squeezed hard. Some went to the legislature, and in 1936 the shop owners formed the Associated Food Dealers of Greater Chicago. Others banded together in buying groups like IGA, or Central Grocers out of Joliet, so a corner store could buy and advertise like a chain and still be its own boss. National Retailer-Owned Grocers was owned by the very stores it supplied, and Viking was one of its house brands. Mity Fine, with the swan, is its sister label in the same line.

And Chicago was a broom town. William Libman came over from Lithuania in the 1890s, peddled brooms and clothespins from a pushcart, and in 1896 opened a corn broom factory on Kinzie Street, right in the heart of the Midwest broom corn trade - Libman is still making brooms down in Arcola. Who actually tied the Viking brooms for N.R.O.G. isn't printed on the label.

⚓ Why a Viking, in Chicago?

Chicago had a big Scandinavian crowd, and it had its own Viking ship. In 1893 a replica of the Gokstad ship - a ninth-century longship dug out of a Norwegian burial mound - sailed from Bergen across the Atlantic in 27 days under Captain Magnus Andersen, came up through the Great Lakes, and anchored at Jackson Park for the World's Columbian Exposition. Andersen gave it to the city, it spent decades in Lincoln Park (Chicago threw another World's Fair, the Century of Progress, on the lakefront in 1933-34), and you can still see it at Good Templar Park in Geneva, Illinois.

Collectors tell it that the Viking name was a deliberate nod to all those Norwegian and Swedish households. Nobody has turned up a paper that proves it, but look at that ship and tell me it isn't so. The other bit of trade lore: the artists who drew these labels in the Depression signed nothing and took the work because it was work, and the old-timers say it was wartime paper and ink shortages that finished off fancy broom labels by the mid-'40s.

📷 The Old Store Photos

I put in a couple of old grocery pictures for the feel of the times - a packed store counter, and the neon front of a Dominick's, the Chicago chain that started as one little west side deli in 1918 and served the city until its last day on December 28, 2013. They are just for fun; you get the label, not the photos.