Vintage 1950s-60s Liberty Broom Label 🧹 NOS Statue of Liberty Patriotic Lithographic Advertising Art

Liberty Broom Label 🗽 Statue of Liberty, Stock Design No. 107, Unused

Size: 6" x 3 1/2"

An unused Liberty broom label - Lady Liberty with her torch up inside a laurel wreath, a row of stars, LIBERTY across the top, and a blank panel at the bottom with the design number 107 and PRINTED IN U.S.A. in the margin. I have a stack, so yours will look just like this one.

🔢 A Label Bought by the Thousand

That blank panel is the tell. This is a stock label: broom makers ordered designs like this by number and had their own name printed in the empty box. John L. Denning & Company of Wichita, Kansas sold the numbered broom labels exactly that way - "Order by Number Only," no orders under 1,000 of a design. Denning was a broomcorn dealer first - started in 1924, it grew to fourteen branch companies in different states, and at times it owned 75 to 90 percent of all the broomcorn there was. Broomcorn is a sorghum, not a corn, and its stiff seed branches, up to three feet long, are the straws of a broom, so one Wichita outfit could sell a broom maker the straw and the label both. The older Liberty design in the same family, No. 15, turns up overprinted for L. Legendre of New Athens, Illinois, and for the Paper and Chemical Supply Co. of Sheffield, Alabama, a company Sam Israel - who came over from Lithuania in 1909 - started in 1949 with his son-in-law Jack Muhlendorf.

Ours is different: No. 107 redraws the statue facing you head-on, where design 15 shows her in profile. I have not found another copy of the 107 drawing offered anywhere.

📅 When It Was Printed

The "PRINTED IN U.S.A." foot line with the number standing on its own is the later style in this family - the earlier sample-booklet labels of 1943-63 say "LITHO IN U.S.A.," and the PRINTED style shows up on labels that carry ZIP codes, which began in 1963. So this one is a 1950s-60s printing, even though the patriotic look feels older.

🗽 Why Lady Liberty Sold Brooms

She was a gift of friendship from the people of France, dedicated in New York Harbor by President Grover Cleveland on October 28, 1886, and by World War I she was the face of the Liberty Loan drives. When the first Liberty Loan drive opened in 1917, the first three posters made to publicize it all featured her. Joseph Pennell's 1918 poster for the Fourth Liberty Loan turned her into a warning: German bombers over a burning New York harbor, a U-boat on the water, and Lady Liberty standing headless with her broken torch and her face at her feet, under "That Liberty Shall Not Perish from the Earth." The story that circulates among broom label collectors is that the patriotic broom label as a genre really took off with that wartime wave of Liberty imagery, and makers kept her on their brooms for decades after - cynical or genuinely patriotic, probably both, which is a very American answer. Collectors also like to say that once the surviving unused stock ends up in frames and collections, it is gone for good.

Frame it with some red, white and blue in a kitchen, a laundry room or a lake house.