Antique Rex #8 Broom Label 🧹 Amsterdam Broom Co New York NOS Chromolithography Advertising Ephemera

Rex No. 8 Broom Label 🧹 Amsterdam Broom Co., Amsterdam, New York

Size: 4 1/2" x 3 1/2"

An unused Rex broom label from the Amsterdam Broom Co. of Amsterdam, N.Y. - a big 8 in a laurel-crowned medallion, REX in bold letters, the company's globe trademark with its A and B, and along the foot the fine print: "This label is the exclusive property of the Amsterdam Broom Co., Amsterdam, N.Y. Infringements are forbidden," with TRADE MARK and REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. They meant it. I have a stack, so yours will look just like this one.

🏭 Julius Wasserman's Broom Company

Julius Wasserman started the Amsterdam Broom Company on lower Brookside Avenue in 1884, and his son David came in as a partner in 1889. By 1907 they had 169 men working a sixty-hour week - and on April 9, 1907, the plant burned, a loss of around $100,000. The Wassermans didn't quit: they moved into a former mill to keep everybody working and rebuilt bigger on Brookside Avenue, with room to turn out four million brooms a year. The local history society calls it the largest independent broom concern in the world. Julius, who also served as the city's postmaster, died in 1916; David ran the company through the decades when the vacuum cleaner was shrinking the whole trade.

The family sold out in 1957 to the Edy Brush Co. of New York City. Brooms stopped in 1966 - the last broom factory in Amsterdam - and Edy kept making paint brushes, rollers and trays there into the early 1980s. An Amsterdam Brush Corp. was still filing broom trademarks in 1964. The old mill was lost to a fire set by vandals in 2010. The colorized photo of the 1907 fire, with an Amsterdam Broom Co. wagon out front, is there for the history - it doesn't come with the label.

🏙️ Broom City

Amsterdam sits in Montgomery County on the Mohawk River, about thirty miles west of Schenectady, and brooms were in its bones long before Wasserman. Historian Hugh Donlon recorded a broom shop on Cedar Street employing about 175 hands as early as 1856. The old-timers called it Broom City; the lore among regional historians says Amsterdam may have been the first place in New York State to make brooms, with broomcorn growing on the rich Mohawk River flats, and that the city's seal once carried a broom among its symbols.

📜 The Stories

Local legend has it the Amsterdam Broom labels - Rex included - weren't printed in Amsterdam at all, but by lithographers in New York City or Albany, shipped up by rail to Brookside Avenue. Collectors tell the Wasserman story as the classic immigrant-success tale of the era, from a small shop to the factory floor to civic leadership. Rex, Brookside and Gold Bond were all Amsterdam Broom brands.

Wonderful framed for anyone with Mohawk Valley roots.