Vintage 1960s Broom Label 🪶 Native American Chief Art, Unused Store Stock, Southwest Print

Order by Number Only 🪶 A Vintage 1960s Native American Chief Broom Label, Design No. 10, Unused Stock

Size: 6" x 3 1/2"

An unused broom label: a chief in profile in a feathered war bonnet, standing between two tall feathered arrows inside a stepped geometric border, with two pale blue panels above and below left blank for a broom maker's name. The only printing on it is PRINTED IN U. S. A. and the number 10. This is stock that never got wrapped around a broom - every one I have is unused, flat and bright.

🔢 That little 10

The 10 is the design number, the way a broom maker ordered it. Numbered stock labels like this were sold by John L. Denning & Company of Wichita, Kansas, a broom-corn house started in 1924 that grew to fourteen branches in different states. Its sample booklet said Order by Number Only on the cover, wouldn't take an order for fewer than 1,000 of any design, and this chief is one of its pages, in the same colors, marked 10 - LITHO IN U.S.A. The booklet carries a Wichita 1 postal-zone address, so it's from between 1943, when zones began, and 1963, when ZIP codes took over.

📅 The 1960s

This label has the later wording: the booklet's LITHO IN U.S.A. became PRINTED IN U.S.A., with the number held. The identical chief with this same foot line is known with a maker's name printed into the panel - No. 7 ALL CORN, Manufactured by Blandon Broom Works, Inc., Hamburg, PA., followed by a ZIP code. ZIP codes started in 1963, so that printing can't be earlier, and it puts this one in the 1960s. The picture itself had been on sale in Denning's booklet for years before this version came off the press.

🧹 Broom corn country

It's easy to forget the corn broom was once serious business. Broom corn is really a sorghum grown for its long, stiff seed heads, and the story goes that it was a Hadley, Massachusetts farmer named Levi Dickenson who first tied a broom out of it, for his wife, in 1797. The flat broom we all picture is credited to a Watervliet Shaker named Theodore Bates in 1798, and with the Shaker broom vise pressing them flat, broom-making went from a farmhouse chore to a real trade. Old-timers in the trade still talk about towns in Illinois and Missouri that proudly called themselves the broom corn capital of the world, hosting festivals around the harvest the way other towns celebrated apples or corn - Arcola, Illinois still throws its Broom Corn Festival.

By the time this label was printed, dozens of broom makers were turning out nearly the same corn broom, and the only difference a shopper could see at the store bin was the paper wrapped around the neck. That's why the panels are blank: a printer like Denning's ran one strong picture by the thousands and let every broom works put its own name on it.

🪶 Why a chief?

A chief in a war bonnet was one of the most common faces in American trade art - on baking powder, butter, tobacco, motorcycle badges and the Indian Head penny and Buffalo nickel. Manufacturers used him for strength and for something they thought of as purely American, and broom makers did too: a tough, dependable broom wanted a tough, dependable face on it.

🧹 About these

They're 6 by 3 1/2 inches. Frame one for a laundry room or a farmhouse kitchen, add it to a wall of crate and can labels, or give it to somebody who still sweeps with a real corn broom. The supply is finite - nobody's printing Denning's number 10 again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.