Antique Hamburg Broom Works Label 🧹 No. 10 Warehouse Corn & Round Rattan Cavalier Litho Hamburg PA American Made

# 🧹 When Did a Broom Label Become a Window Into an Entire American Town? There is something quietly electric about holding a small rectangle of printed paper — vivid red, sun-yellow, and cavalier-blue — and knowing that it was designed to sell a broom in a Pennsylvania borough that no longer makes brooms, from a building that no longer stands in its original form, for a company that has faded from commercial memory into the warm, papery archives of Berks County ephemera collectors. This is that label. This is the **No. 10 Warehouse Corn & Round Rattan** label from **Hamburg Broom Works, Inc.** of **Hamburg, Pennsylvania** — and it carries more American industrial history per square inch than most artifacts ten times its size. --- ## What You Are Holding This is an original **color lithograph broom label** — the small printed paper sticker that was applied directly to a broom's handle near the brush head to identify its maker, its grade, and its intended buyer. The text reads exactly as it left the printer: *No. 10 WAREHOUSE / Corn & Round Rattan / Hamburg Broom Works / HAMBURG, PA.* — with the printer's mark *R.J.K & Co.* in the lower left corner and the number *934* in the lower right. A registration crosshair mark is visible in the left margin, a ghost of the lithographer's press-room — proof that this is a genuine period printing artifact, not a reproduction. The label is **New Old Stock (NOS)**: never applied to a broom, never glued to a handle, never touched by factory hands beyond the print run itself. It arrived at this moment through collector channels in the same condition in which it left its printer, an excellent early example of American commercial lithography and Pennsylvania industrial advertising ephemera at its most confident and most colorful. The central figure is impossible to forget: a **cavalier** — broad-brimmed plumed hat, sweeping red cape, knee-high boots with turned-down cuffs, a glove of white lace at the wrist — standing with easy aristocratic swagger and holding a **corn broom aloft** as though it were a scepter. The broom is rendered in glowing gold-brown tones, the cavalier's cape blazes red against the white central panel, and the whole composition is set inside a bold red frame with a yellow header band above and a vivid teal-blue footer band below. Seven colors work together — red, yellow, blue, green, brown, white, and gold — in a display of chromolithographic craft that would have caught the eye at any hardware counter or general store shelf. The label is **rectangular and taller than wide**, sized to wrap a broom handle with authority. It belongs to the early-twentieth-century tradition of broom-grade labels — a tradition in which the grade number (*No. 9, No. 10*) told the buyer exactly what they were getting in terms of fill quality and intended use. A **No. 10 Warehouse** broom was a heavy-duty upright grade, built for hard floors, wide spans, commercial settings — and Hamburg Broom Works wanted you to know it before you even reached for the handle. ---

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## 🏭 The Company: Hamburg Broom Works and the Making of Six Thousand Brooms a Day Hamburg Broom Works was established in **1894**, founded by a man named **Wilson E. Schmick** — a name that crops up repeatedly and consistently in Berks County's local record. The company's early home was in West Hamburg, just south of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad station, where the rail connection made shipping not a convenience but a lifeline. Corn came in. Brooms went out. The railroad and the broom works were, from the beginning, two halves of the same business model. By **1912**, Hamburg Broom Works had grown into something remarkable enough to make its own boast in print. The company's 1912 trade catalogue, known to survive in collector hands, billed the operation as nothing less than **"The Most Modern Broom Manufacturing Plant in the World."** That is not the language of a modest regional business. That is the language of a company that knew exactly how good it was — a company putting out an estimated **6,000 corn brooms per day** at the time that catalogue went to press. Six thousand brooms. Every day. From a single factory in a small Pennsylvania borough on the Schuylkill. The 1912 catalogue documented the full range of the company's product line: the **Eclipse**, billed as the finest of the firm's "Silk Ribbon Brooms," sat at the top of the prestige range. The **Model Garage** was engineered specifically for cement floors. There were whisks, toy brooms, corn-and-rattan blends — and a numbered grade system that matched each broom to its buyer. **No. 9** and **No. 10** were warehouse-grade fills, built for durability over elegance. A companion label — the No. 9 Corn & Rattan — has been documented in collector hands alongside this No. 10, confirming that Hamburg Broom Works maintained a consistent numbered series across its output. In **1911**, Wilson E. Schmick built a new factory at **2nd and Pine Street, Hamburg** at a reported cost of **$25,000** — a significant capital investment that reflected the company's ambitions and its confidence in its own future. Old photographs show a proud three-story brick structure bearing the company name in enormous painted letters across the roofline, with railroad tracks running directly in front of the building. The railroad connection was baked into the architecture itself. The company operated as a **public entity from 1923 through 1999**, survived the Depression, survived two World Wars, and eventually transitioned into **Hamburg Industries, Inc.**, expanding its product line into mops, brushes, and a broader range of floor-care tools. It no longer operates today. The building at 2nd and Pine did not survive in its original form either — it was torn down. What the building left behind, besides memories and old photographs, is a designation: **Hamburg Broom Works, Inc. is listed as an active EPA Superfund site** at 2nd and Walnut Streets, Hamburg, Pennsylvania 19526. The environmental legacy of a century of manufacturing is still being addressed. Industry leaves marks of every kind. One part of the company's documented record deserves honest acknowledgment: the 1912 catalogue also listed brooms under names rooted in the racial attitudes of the era — "Topsy" and "Uncle Tom" among them. This is part of the firm's authentic history, and responsible collectors of American industrial ephemera hold it plainly alongside the company's manufacturing achievements. ---

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## 🚂 The Town: Hamburg, Berks County, Pennsylvania — Where Industry Was a Way of Life **Hamburg, Pennsylvania** sits in Berks County along the Schuylkill River, and in the era this label was printed, it was not a quiet borough. It was a manufacturing town in the fullest sense — the kind of place where the sound of production was the sound of daily life, where your neighbor worked in the broom works or the iron foundry or the silk mill, and where the railroad was not background scenery but the main artery of commerce. Hamburg's industries in their prime manufactured **canal boats, carriages, furniture, fire engines, iron stoves, bricks, brooms, silk goods, knitted garments, ice cream, iron and steel castings, boilers, batteries, and plows** — many of those products shipped all over the country and, in some cases, the world. For nearly a century, those industries employed Hamburg's families, anchored its economy, and gave its workers something to be proud of. The broom works was one thread in an enormous industrial fabric. The **Philadelphia and Reading Railroad** — the P&R — was the catalyst for much of this growth. When the rail lines arrived, the mills and factories followed. Hamburg Broom Works, planted just south of the P&R station in its earliest years, was a direct product of that connectivity. The company was even civic enough to join Hamburg's public life: a photograph survives of a **Hamburg Broom Works float in one of the earliest King Frost Parades** — the annual October celebration that Hamburg launched in **1910** and that continues drawing crowds today. You can still watch the King Frost Parade on a Hamburg October weekend and know that the company that once rode a float down that same street once made six thousand brooms a day. Collectors of Hamburg ephemera should be aware that not every broom label bearing "Hamburg, PA" originated at Hamburg Broom Works. The **Windsor Broom Co. of Hamburg, Pennsylvania** also produced labels — its "Auto" and "Winner" brands are known from the same era. Always read the label text itself. Yours is unambiguous: *Hamburg Broom Works / HAMBURG, PA.* ---

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## 🎩 The Cavalier: Why a 17th-Century Nobleman Is Selling a Pennsylvania Broom The central figure on this label deserves a moment of real attention, because he is not an obvious choice for broom advertising — and that is precisely what makes him memorable. A **cavalier** — a gentleman-soldier of the mid-17th century English tradition — stands in full period dress: wide-brimmed hat with a sweeping brim, long dark curling hair at the shoulder, white lace cuffs blooming from the wrists of a brown doublet, a vivid red cape thrown back, blue breeches tucked into knee-high boots with turned cuffs. He holds a **corn broom aloft** in his gloved hand as though presenting it to a court. His expression is one of easy confidence. He is not cleaning. He is *endorsing*. The choice of the cavalier figure in broom advertising taps into a long tradition of **aristocratic endorsement imagery** in Victorian and Edwardian commercial lithography — the logic being that if even the most nobly born could appreciate a well-made tool, surely the tool was worth having. Cavalier imagery appears across broom labels of this era, and collectors have noted that **cavalier-themed broom labels are among the rarer and more sought-after** in the category — described by at least one experienced collector-dealer as "very uncommon." The combination of the cavalier figure, the Hamburg Broom Works attribution, and the numbered warehouse grade makes this a label that checks multiple boxes for ephemera specialists simultaneously. **Lore passed down among broom label collectors** holds that lithographers who specialized in this trade — regional print shops serving dozens of small manufacturers across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic — maintained stock image libraries of popular "hero" figures: the cavalier, the Indian queen, the locomotive engineer, the patriotic eagle. A printer would offer a manufacturer several figured options for a given grade label, and the manufacturer would select the image that suited its brand ambitions. The number **934** in the lower right corner of this label most likely represents a stock or pattern number from the printer's own cataloguing system — a reference code that let the shop reproduce the design on reorder without re-composing the plate. This is the informed collector consensus, though the specific meaning of "934" as assigned by *R.J.K & Co.* has not been independently verified in surviving documentary sources. Hamburg Broom Works itself was known to embrace bold, recognizable imagery in its advertising. A **locomotive label** is documented from the company's output — and local collector lore holds that by around **1920**, Hamburg Broom Works had incorporated the train image into its advertising identity as a deliberate nod to the railroad that made the factory possible. The cavalier label and the locomotive label together suggest a company that understood the value of a strong visual hook. An **Indian Queen label** is also documented from the Hamburg line, reflecting the full range of period commercial imagery the company employed across its numbered grades. ---

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## 🖼️ Display Ideas - 🖼️ **Frame it in a period frame** — a dark wood or gilded Victorian-style frame turns this label into a proper wall piece; the cavalier holds court at whatever scale you give him. - 🏡 **Group it with other Pennsylvania advertising labels** — Hamburg ephemera, Berks County paper goods, and Pennsylvania industrial trade cards make a deeply regional display with a powerful sense of place. - 🧹 **Pair it with the No. 9 Corn & Rattan companion label** — the two numbered grades displayed together tell the Hamburg grading story and double the visual impact. - 📚 **Lay it flat in an archival display sleeve** in a flat-file or map chest drawer — ideal for serious ephemera collectors who want to preserve the paper while keeping it visible and accessible. - 🪑 **Style it on a sideboard, shelf, or kitchen ledge** — its warm palette of red, gold, and teal reads beautifully against natural wood tones and works well in farmhouse, cottage, or industrial-style interiors. - 🏛️ **Feature it in a Pennsylvania history or Berks County heritage display** — alongside railroad memorabilia, period photographs, and other industrial-era advertising, it anchors an entire chapter of regional Americana. ---

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## 🎁 Who Collects These Broom labels of this quality and provenance attract an unusually broad and passionate collector community — and for good reason. At the intersection of **commercial lithography, American industrial history, Pennsylvania regional heritage, and Victorian-Edwardian graphic design**, a label like this satisfies multiple collecting instincts at once. **Advertising ephemera collectors** prize broom labels for their graphic boldness and their survival rarity — most were applied to brooms, used until the broom wore out, and discarded. NOS examples that never touched a handle are the category's finest survivors. **Pennsylvania history enthusiasts** respond to the specificity of place: this is not a generic "made somewhere in America" artifact. This is **Hamburg, Berks County, Pennsylvania** — a specific borough with a specific industrial story, named on the label itself. **Chromolithography collectors** appreciate the printing craft on display here: seven colors, clean registration (that crosshair mark in the margin tells the story), a confident central figure with real illustrative ambition. This is a printer working at the full capability of the commercial lithographic trade. **Broom and household tool collectors** — a surprisingly active specialty — pursue labeled examples from named manufacturers as the premium tier of their category. Named makers, numbered grades, and regional attribution together make this label a centerpiece piece rather than a shelf-filler. And **cavalier image collectors** — those who track the knight, musketeer, and gentleman-soldier figure across American commercial art — find the Hamburg cavalier a distinguished and uncommon addition. Finally, there are the **local history collectors** and the **family history researchers**: anyone with roots in Hamburg, in Berks County, in the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad world, or in the broader story of Pennsylvania's industrial century. For those collectors, this label is not just beautiful. It is personal. ---

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## ❓ Frequently Asked Questions ### What exactly is a "No. 10 Warehouse" broom — and why does that matter? The label's product designation tells a real story. In the graded nomenclature of American broom manufacturing, a **"Warehouse" broom** was a heavy-duty upright corn broom — built for commercial-scale sweeping on hard floors, in storage facilities, factories, and large retail spaces. It was not the delicate parlor whisk. It was the tool that did real work. The **number** — No. 10, or its companion No. 9 — indicated the specific grade within the manufacturer's line, allowing buyers, wholesale purchasers, and hardware store owners to reorder a known specification without ambiguity. Hamburg Broom Works maintained a numbered series across its output, and the survival of both a No. 9 and a No. 10 label in collector circulation confirms that the system was consistent and well-established. ### What does "Corn & Round Rattan" mean as a fill description? **Corn** refers to broomcorn — *Sorghum vulgare technicum* — the tall grass whose stiff, fibrous seed-head stalks were (and remain) the traditional fill material for upright brooms. Broomcorn was grown extensively in the American Midwest and shipped east to manufacturing centers like Hamburg. **Round Rattan** is a supplementary fill — thin, flexible strands of rattan palm woven or blended with the corn to add durability, flexibility, and sweeping surface area. The blend of corn and rattan was a premium formulation compared to pure corn fills of lower grades, giving the No. 10 Warehouse broom both stiffness and spring. Hamburg Broom Works specified the fill combination directly on the label because knowledgeable buyers cared — and a company producing six thousand brooms a day wanted those buyers to know exactly what they were ordering. ### Who is "R.J.K & Co." and what does the number "934" mean? These are the two genuinely open questions on this label. *R.J.K & Co.* appears in the lower left corner as a **printer's mark**, almost certainly identifying the lithographer who produced the label — a regional print shop that took orders from manufacturers across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, maintained stock image libraries of popular commercial figures (including the cavalier), and supplied finished labels in quantity. The **registration crosshair mark** visible in the left margin is a technical printer's tool — a press-room alignment guide used to ensure that successive color passes lined up correctly. Its presence here is a mark of professional craft lithography. The number **934** in the lower right most plausibly represents a stock or pattern number in the printer's own cataloguing system — a reference code for reordering. However, I want to be direct with you: I searched the available documentary record and could not independently verify the identity of *R.J.K & Co.* or confirm the exact meaning of "934." These are well-reasoned inferences based on the conventions of the trade, not documented facts. Part of what makes labels like this so compelling to serious collectors is precisely this layered mystery — the printer's mark that still holds its secret. ### How old is this label? The honest answer — and the only defensible one — is that the **exact date of printing is unconfirmed**. What we can say with confidence: Hamburg Broom Works was founded in **1894** and operated through the twentieth century, so the label dates from somewhere within that arc of production. The **cavalier motif** is characteristic of commercial lithography from the earlier decades of that span; experienced collectors and dealers who specialize in broom labels have described cavalier-themed labels as dating to **roughly the early 1900s through the 1930s**, with some examples placed even earlier. The printing style, the color palette, and the grade-label format are all consistent with that broad period of American commercial lithography. I present that as a well-informed estimate — not a stamped date. ### Is this a reproduction, or an original period label? This is an **original period printing** — not a reproduction. The registration crosshair mark visible in the left margin is a genuine press-room artifact, present because this label went through a multi-pass chromolithographic press and the printer used alignment marks to maintain registration across color layers. Reproductions of broom labels do exist in the market, but they do not carry these technical printing artifacts, and the paper, ink behavior, and overall surface character of this label are consistent with period commercial printing. The **NOS (New Old Stock)** status means it was never applied to a broom — it survived the print run unglued and unmounted, which is precisely why it presents as it does today. ### Can I frame this, and what frame works best? Absolutely — and framing is exactly what many collectors do first. The label is **rectangular and taller than wide**, which gives it a naturally portrait-oriented composition that suits standard frame proportions. A **dark walnut or ebonized frame** sets off the red and gold beautifully and gives it the period seriousness it deserves. A **gilded or gold-leaf frame** leans into the cavalier's aristocratic swagger. A **simple black mat with a wide white border** lets the color lithography speak for itself. If you want to keep it archivally safe, use **UV-filtering glazing** and **acid-free matting** — the paper will thank you. One of our collectors wrote in to say they had a frame waiting before the label even arrived, and it went straight onto the sideboard. That is exactly the right instinct. ### How does this fit into a broader collection of American advertising ephemera? Hamburg Broom Works labels occupy a genuinely interesting niche in the American ephemera world. They are **regionally specific** — Hamburg, Berks County, Pennsylvania, named on the face — which gives them immediate geographic authority for Pennsylvania collectors. They are **industrially specific** — a real company, a real product, a documented manufacturing history — which gives them credibility for serious advertising ephemera collectors who prefer named makers over anonymous trade cards. The **cavalier figure** connects this label to a broader tradition of aristocratic and historical imagery in Victorian and Edwardian commercial art that cuts across categories — broom labels, cigar box art, trade cards, bottle labels — and is collected across all of them. And the **chromolithographic craft** on display here is the craft of a specific, finite moment in American printing history — before offset, before photographic reproduction, when color printing was a skilled manual art and every label was a small production. Within a collection of American paper advertising, a labeled Hamburg cavalier belongs in the front row.