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, was a broomcorn dealer - broomcorn being the sorghum whose stiff seed heads, cut by hand, become the straw of a broom. Denning grew to fourteen branches in different states and at times owned 75 to 90 percent of all the broomcorn on the market, and it sold numbered broom labels from a sample booklet - "Order by Number Only," no orders under 1,000 of a design, and "Do Not Tear Out These Labels" right on the cover - 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 1" postal zone - zone numbers started in 1943 and gave way to ZIP codes in 1963 - which makes this a 1940s label, whatever its old-fashioned art suggests. Old-fashioned art never dated these things, either: the same booklet sold an Edwardian lady and a Victorian-style peacock right beside a cartoon bird drawn in 1950s style. Denning itself kept going for decades - its last ad ran in February 1995, and that year it was no longer in the broom suppliers' directory. 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, making it illegal to kill, sell or possess the birds - so by the time this label came off the press, the real eagle was protected by federal law.

📜 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.

The trade was already shrinking before then: the country had 1,034 broom factories at the 1919 peak and only 320 by 1939. On a finished broom, a label like this one was glued around the fastening, where it covered the clamp marks the wiring machine left behind.

Great framed in a kitchen, a den or anywhere you want a little red, white and blue. The supply is finite - nobody's printing the eagle-and-Capitol broom label again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.