Antique Broom Label 🧹 NOS Early 1910s 1930s Dancing Lady Kitchen Advertising Lithograph New Old Stock 6 x 3.5 Inches

Dancing Lady Broom Label 🧹 BROOM, Unused Stock Label

Size: 6" x 3 1/2"

An unused broom label with a housemaid who looks like she's about to dance - skirt held out in a little curtsy, broom in her other hand - and the one word BROOM underneath. Nothing else is printed: no maker, no town. I have a stack, so yours will look just like this one.

🧹 A Label Any Broom Maker Could Use

A label that just says BROOM was made to go on anybody's broom. Small broom shops bought stock labels like this from label houses instead of paying an artist, and a pretty housekeeper was one of the favorite stock subjects - the trade printed maids and ladies with brooms by the thousand. In 1919 there were 1,034 broom factories in America, most of them small shops that needed exactly this kind of ready-made label.

Most of that broomcorn came out of the Midwest - around Arcola, Illinois, the town and its county museum say nearly half the broomcorn grown in the United States once came from their area.

🌾 Arcola, Illinois - Broomcorn Country

When the Illinois House honored Arcola's 150th in 2005, it told the story this way: Colonel Cofer brought in a few bushels of broomcorn seed and planted twenty acres, it came up so good that farmers all around took to growing it, and the area became the "Broomcorn Capital of the World." That was no small-town boast, either. In 1906 a newspaper clear down in Abbeville, South Carolina, told its readers that the corn for "practically all of the high class and best brooms of the world" grew within thirty miles of Arcola, which it called the broom corn center of the country and practically of the world. A ton of that Illinois corn made 1,200 to 1,500 brooms.

The county's 1900 history named P. H. Monahan "the father of the broom corn interests of Arcola." He was born in County Galway, Ireland, in 1837, came over to America at thirteen, settled first in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and then came west to Arcola when it was still "a mere hamlet." By 1900 his son Thomas was the town's mayor. The Thomas Monahan Company of Arcola celebrated its 100th year in business in 2022 and runs today as four companies - Brush Fibers Inc., Monahan Filaments, Whitley-Monahan Handles and Monahan Partners.

One broom maker came to the broomcorn, too. William Libman started the Libman Company in Chicago in 1896. In 1931 it moved down to Tuscola, to get away from the violence in Chicago and closer to the broomcorn, and in 1957 it moved again to a bigger place in Arcola, where the family still runs it - one of the last companies left making corn brooms. William's grandson Robert Libman told the News-Gazette in 2018 that at one time there were maybe ten broom factories within 20 miles of there, "but they're all gone," and that the company was making about 50,000 plastic brooms a day and maybe 1,200 corn brooms.

The vacuum cleaner and plastic bristles eventually did in the old corn-broom business, which is why unused labels like this are what's left of it.

📜 The Stories

Advertisers of the day did this on purpose: from the late 1800s, ads for housework products showed housework not as a chore but as the ideal homemaker's pleasure - and here she is, practically dancing with her broom. Collectors also say the artists who drew these were almost always anonymous, working for print houses that owned the designs outright. And old-timers in the collecting world tell of big caches of unused broom labels turning up in factory attic storerooms decades after the broom makers closed - printed by the hundreds or thousands for production runs that never came.

She's darling framed in a kitchen, laundry room or mudroom.