Vintage 1950s Acme No. 5 Broom Label 🧹 Hamburg Broom Works Hamburg PA NOS Flagpole Pennant

What Does the 5 Mean on an Acme Broom Label? 🧹 Vintage 1950s Acme No. 5 Broom Label, Hamburg Broom Works, Hamburg, Pennsylvania

Size: 5 1/4" x 4" ~ New old stock, never used.

An unused Acme No. 5 broom label, MANUFACTURED BY Hamburg Broom Works of HAMBURG, PA., that never made it onto a broom. I love that they flew the grade number from its own flagpole. The back is blank, and the one you get will look just like this.

🚩 Acme, No. 5

Acme comes from the Greek akmē, the very top, the peak, which is about as plain as a broom maker could say "our best." The 5 is the grade. Hamburg numbered its brooms, from a No. 1 all the way up to a No. 10 Warehouse.

📅 When It Was Printed

Nothing on it is dated. There's no ZIP code after HAMBURG, PA., and ZIP codes only started on July 1, 1963 - the company's later labels carry 19526. Add the flat, bright mid-century colors and that swooping script Acme, and this is a 1950s label.

🏭 Hamburg Broom Works

Wilson E. Schmick started making brooms as Hamburg Broom Works in 1894, in West Hamburg just south of the Philadelphia and Reading station. In 1911 he put $25,000 into a two-story factory at 2nd and Pine, and his 1912 catalogue called it "The Most Modern Broom Manufacturing Plant in the World." In 1918 he bought out every other shareholder, and in 1922 he won a court order against West Reading Broom Works for copying his labels and bands. The company was publicly held from 1923 until 1999 and ended up part of Hamburg Industries, whose assets went to Nexstep Commercial Products, the O-Cedar licensee in Springfield, Ohio, in 2011.

Hamburg called him its broom king. His 1908 brick house on North Fourth Street, with its stained glass, is a bed and breakfast today. The town sits on the east bank of the Schuylkill River in northern Berks County, at the foot of the Blue Mountains.

🧹 A Whole Trade on Paper

America had more than a thousand broom factories by 1919. Vacuum cleaners and plastic bristles thinned them out in the decades after, and a label like this one, unused and still bright, is what's left of a trade that once had a factory in nearly every county.

Wonderful framed in a kitchen, pantry or laundry room!

Everything here is stored in the dark, under 40% relative humidity, at a steady 72°F, climate controlled - whatever age a label shows, it had before it came to me.

The supply is finite - nobody's printing Hamburg Broom Works' Acme No. 5 label again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.