Vintage 1940s Maid Broom Label 🧹 NOS Red Portrait Litho #32 Kitchen Wall Art

Who Was the Maid on Stock Broom Label #32? 🧹 A Stock Label With No Name On It

Size: 4 1/2" x 3 1/2"

All that's printed here is a small "32" and "LITHO. IN U.S.A." in the corner of the red field. No broom company, no town, not even the word "broom." This was a stock design, sold by number to any broom maker who wanted to buy a run and print their own name in the empty red space above and below the portrait. This run never got a name and never went on a handle, so it's New Old Stock, the red as bold as the day it came off the press.

🎨 A Bobbed Maid in a Medallion

A young woman in a cream medallion, flanked by Art Nouveau stems and daisies, printed as a flat-color lithograph with fine stipple shading. It's ordinary commercial lithography, a few solid inks and the paper itself doing the work, which is exactly what a stock label was meant to be.

🔢 Ordered by Number, Printed in the 1940s

That little "32" is how a broom maker ordered it. Numbered stock labels like this were sold by John L. Denning & Company of Wichita, Kansas, a broom-corn house that began in 1924 and grew to fourteen branches in different states. Denning's sample booklet of designs carried one instruction on the cover, "Order by Number Only," and wouldn't take an order for fewer than 1,000 of any design. The booklet's "NN LITHO IN U.S.A." line is the same style as the line on the label, and because the booklet is addressed to "Wichita 1," a postal-zone address, it had to be printed between 1943, when zones began, and 1963, when ZIP codes replaced them. That puts the printing of the label in the 1940s.

👗 Old Fashion, Newer Printing

The bob and the pearl bandeau worn low across the brow are straight 1920s flapper styling, and it's tempting to date the sheet by her hairstyle. But stock art stayed on sale long after it was drawn: Denning's booklet sold an Edwardian lady and a Victorian-style peacock right beside a cartoon bird in 1950s style. A flapper's face on a 1940s printing is exactly what that catalog would lead you to expect.

🌾 The Broom Corn Trade

Broom corn is a stiff-fibered sorghum grown for one purpose, and it built real local economies across Illinois, Kansas, Oklahoma and Colorado. In Illinois, Colonel John Cofer planted broomcorn at Arcola around 1865, and the town grew into the country's broomcorn capital. At one time some 1,500 broom shops across the country turned out 45 million brooms a year, and the trade had its own journal, Brooms, Brushes and Mops, from its first issue on February 27, 1912. Wichita, Kansas had its own broomcorn dealers by 1904, and Denning sometimes owned 75 to 90 percent of all the broomcorn available. Labels like it were made for exactly that world: stock designs a broom company could order by number and put its own name on.

🖌️ Nobody Signed It

Whoever drew that portrait doesn't get a name on the label. Commercial lithography almost never credited its artists, so she stays anonymous, and hanging one of these up is about as much credit as that artist will ever get.

🧹 What Happened to the Broom Trade

The vacuum cleaner started it. "During the 1930s, the popularity of vacuum cleaners shrank the broom industry," as one Amsterdam, New York history puts it, and after the war came plastic bristles and cheaper imports. The broom companies that were left had less reason to buy stock labels, and a lot of unsold runs sat in a drawer until they turned up again.