Vintage 1940s Tru Blu Broom Label 🧹 Windsor Broom Co Hamburg PA No. 6, Airbrushed Art NOS

Who Made a Broom Called Tru Blu? 🧹 A Vintage 1940s Windsor Broom Co. Label from Hamburg, PA

Size: 4 1/4" x 3 1/2" ~ New Old Stock (NOS)

Look at that glow! Tru Blu is lettered in big navy brush script across a pale yellow spotlight, the teal border fades to deep blue in the corners, and a white cross on a red disc sits up top like a seal of approval. Below the name a navy band reads WINDSOR BROOM CO. HAMBURG, PA., and the grade, no.6, is set in black Old English letters at the bottom. It never went on a broom. The back is plain, clean paper. Look close at the bottom of that red disc and you can read TRADE MARK REGISTERED in tiny letters around the rim.

The last four photos are just for history: a 1938 Windsor billhead, a 1938 Windsor invoice, a Windsor White Cross blotter, and the Hamburg Broom Works factory that Windsor merged into in 1960, then and now. You get the label.

🧹 The Windsor Broom Company

Pennsylvania chartered the Windsor Broom Company at Hamburg, in Berks County, on April 22, 1912. Its president was H. Raymond Shollenberger, a Hamburg boy who had clerked at the Hamburg Broom Works and in 1907 became the first cashier of the town's First National Bank. That summer he wrote to the trade paper Wood Craft that the new plant had a two-story factory 120 by 30 feet, a 96 by 40 foot warehouse and two acres of ground, and would turn out 100 dozen brooms a day starting August 1. A year later the trade press counted 200 dozen a day, with ten winders and three Baltimore sewers, and called it "one of the most up-to-date plants in the country."

The broom corn came a long way to get there. In October 1921 Windsor brought in 14 carloads from Lindsay, Elk City and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and when the railroads ran the cars the long way around through Chicago and St. Louis, Windsor took them to the Interstate Commerce Commission and won its money back in 1927.

Shollenberger ran Windsor from 1912 until he died in July 1951, and the trade paper Broom and Broom Corn News wrote that the broom industry had lost one of its more prominent and influential men. His son-in-law, Garland J. Bear, was president by 1961. In 1960 Windsor merged into its old neighbor, the Hamburg Broom Works, and the Hofmann Broom Works moved into the former Windsor plant. The Windsor name stayed on in the directories into the 1980s.

➕ That White Cross

The red disc with the white cross is Windsor's own trademark. The company claimed its White Cross broom from September 1914, registered it in 1918, and registered the cross by itself in 1922. White Cross brooms were still being made in Hamburg in 1995. Windsor also had a Miss America broom it sold only through churches and women's clubs as a fundraiser, "the patriotic broom" in a 1942 ad.

📅 Why the 1940s

Tru-Blu turns up as Windsor's broom brand in the House Furnishing Review trade-name lists of 1947 and 1949, and the airbrushed spotlight look is right out of that era. As for the no.6, Ralph and Terry Kovel wrote that the number on a Windsor label tells how much straw went into the broom. Windsor's own 1938 invoices show what that meant at the store: Apex #6 brooms at $4.50 a dozen and #8s at $5.50.

🏡 Hamburg, the Broom Town

Around 1913 a correspondent wrote that Hamburg was "getting to be a very prominent center for the manufacture of brooms," a small place "making a name for itself the same as Amsterdam, N.Y.," with 600 to 700 dozen brooms a day coming out of town. Local lore says Hamburg once had more jobs per person than any other town in the country, and in a few square blocks of the southwest corner of town there were more than a dozen big factories.

This is Pennsylvania Dutch country, too, and brooms carry lore of their own here. Folklorist Edwin Fogel wrote down in 1915 that witches ride on brooms, that no witch will step over one, and that if you lay a broom before the door, the first one to stand it up is the witch. Windsor's own float in Hamburg's King Frost parade carried a witch riding high among the brooms.

And the name? "True blue" means loyal through and through. The story goes that it comes from Coventry blue, a cloth dyed in Coventry, England, whose color never ran. A broom called Tru Blu was promising to stick with you.

Frame it for a laundry room, a kitchen or a Pennsylvania wall. Once the limited supply for sale is gone, these will be very difficult to acquire.