Antique No. 1 Priscilla Broom Label 🧹 Hamburg Broom Works 1920s — NOS Art Nouveau Lithography, Hamburg PA

No. 1 Priscilla Broom Label 🧹 Hamburg Broom Works, Hamburg, Pennsylvania

Size: 4" x 4"

Look at her! A little maid in a big frilly bonnet with a bow on top, puffed white sleeves, a crisp white apron and black stockings, holding her broom up like she just won the cleaning contest. She stands in a bright red circle inside a swirling blue-and-teal Art Nouveau frame, with a pale yellow circle at her feet and NO. 1 PRISCILLA across the top banner. The bottom banner reads HAMBURG BROOM WORKS, Hamburg, Pa., and down in the corners, in tiny type, R.J.K.&CO. and 937. Never used, plain back. I have a stack, so you'll get one just like the one shown.

🏭 Wilson Schmick's Broom Works

Wilson E. Schmick started making brooms in 1894 under the name Hamburg Broom Works, first over in West Hamburg, just south of the P&R railroad station. In 1911 he put up a $25,000 two-story building at 2nd and Pine Streets, and in 1921 he sold that one to the Burkey Underwear and Hosiery Company and kept the building across Pine Street for the brooms. A 1912 catalogue of theirs was titled "The Most Modern Broom Manufacturing Plant in the World" - these folks were not shy.

Schmick guarded his labels, too. In 1917 he brought out his Puritan and Eclipse brands, and when West Reading Broom Works copied his bands, sewing and labels, he took them to court - in 1922 the Superior Court of Pennsylvania ordered the copying stopped. In 1918 he bought out every other shareholder and owned the whole thing himself; Hamburg Broom Works was publicly held again from 1923 until 1999 and ended up part of Hamburg Industries.

Brooms were good to him. In 1908 he built himself an imposing brick house at 63 N. Fourth Street, just off Fourth and State, with stained and leaded glass and souvenirs of his travels in Europe - and folks called him Hamburg's broom king. The house is still there; today it's The Bismarck, a bed and breakfast run by the borough's own mayor.

🏞️ The Town

Hamburg sits on the east bank of the Schuylkill River at the foot of the Blue Mountains in northern Berks County, about 4,300 people today. The name is likely a twist on Bad Homburg in Germany, because the Blue Mountains looked like the Taunus range back home. Hikers know it for the Appalachian Trail, Hawk Mountain and Pulpit Rock, and railroad folks know it for the Reading Railroad Heritage Museum - fitting, since the broom works got its start right by the P&R station.

👒 Why Priscilla?

Priscilla was THE housekeeping name back then. Priscilla Mullins, the Plymouth Pilgrim girl at her spinning wheel, was everybody's picture of a good homemaker, and The Modern Priscilla, a needlework-and-housekeeping magazine out of Massachusetts, ran from 1887 to 1930 and had about 600,000 readers by 1922. Put that name on a broom - right next to Schmick's Puritan line - and every housewife knew just what you meant.

🖨️ The Tiny Print in the Corners

R.J.K.&CO. is the printer's mark, and my bet is R.J. Kittredge & Co., the Chicago label printers; the 937 would be their design number. My Acme No. 6 from the same broom works carries the same R.J.K.&CO. with 930.

📜 The Stories

Local legend has it the broom works kept a good share of Hamburg's working families busy in its best years, and that the smell of dried broomcorn was as much a part of the town as the coal smoke was everywhere else in the valley. The story goes that visiting salesmen from other broom regions would come to town and find the whole place - lodging houses, lunch counters and all - running on the broom trade. The trade's other story is that the artists who drew labels like this were very good, signed nothing and got paid very little. And what finally did in the old broom trade is no legend at all: the vacuum cleaner and plastic bristles. Broom factories across the country peaked at 1,034 in 1919.

The picture of the old Hamburg Broom Works building, and the same spot today, is just there for the history - you get the label, not the photos.