Vintage 1940s Bald Eagle Capitol Building Broom Label 🦅 Patriotic USA, Printer's Stock, Blank Panel

Bald Eagle and Capitol Broom Label 🦅 1940s Stock Label with a Blank Panel

Size: 6" x 3 1/2"

An unused broom label with a bald eagle swooping down over a domed capitol building, and a blank red panel across the bottom where a broom maker would have printed his own name. No words at all on this one. I have a stack, so yours will look just like this one.

🔢 Bought by the Number

This is a stock design out of a broom-label catalog. John L. Denning & Company of Wichita, Kansas, founded in 1924, sold numbered broom labels from a sample booklet - "Order by Number Only," and no orders under 1,000 of a design - and this eagle-and-capitol design is one of them: a loose copy sits in a Denning booklet lot, and other copies of the very same art carry the number line "46 LITHO. IN U.S.A." along the bottom. That booklet dates between 1943 and 1963 from its Wichita postal zone, which is why this one is a 1940s label rather than the 1910s-30s it was once called. Ours never got a maker's name - so the panel is still yours to fill.

🦅 Why an Eagle?

The bald eagle went onto the Great Seal of the United States in 1782, and nothing said "American-made" faster - especially swooping over a capitol dome. For a broom maker in the 1940s, that was patriotism and good marketing in one picture. And in 1940 Congress passed the Bald Eagle Protection Act, so the bird on this label was making news right when it was printed.

📜 The Story

Collector lore has a clear answer for what ended the era of broom labels: the vacuum cleaner. It's a story that turns out to be true, too - the vacuum and plastic bristles together finished off most of the old corn-broom factories after the war.

Great framed in a kitchen, a den or anywhere you want a little red, white and blue.