Everything authentic. Nothing reproduced. 🏛️ Vintage and Antique Gifts is a multi-channel...
Vintage and Antique Gifts
🚚 Free US Shipping — ships within one business day. International shipping calculated at checkout.
Couldn't load pickup availability
Size: 5 1/2" x 3 1/2"
Plenty of brooms got a rooster, a pretty girl or a catchy name on the label. Somebody at a supply house in northwest Alabama looked at a plain household broom and decided it deserved Lady Liberty. I love that choice, and I love it even more for the people who stood behind it.
This is a vintage LIBERTY broom label, new old stock (NOS), never used, made for the Paper and Chemical Supply Co. of Sheffield, Alabama. It measures 5 1/2 by 3 1/2 inches (about 14 x 9 cm), a shade bigger than a 3x5 index card. The company named on it was founded in 1949, so that is the earliest it could have gone to press, and the 1950s suit it best. It is a hard one to find. The same Liberty drawing turns up blank in blue every so often, but this Sheffield imprint is one I have not seen offered anywhere else by itself.
The name in that panel belongs to a company, but a company is only people, so let me introduce the man who started it. Samuel Jacob Israel came from Ponadel, Lithuania, to Sheffield, Alabama, in 1909. He was eighteen. His first job was clerking in a grocery store, and he boarded in the home of a man named Phillip Olim. In 1912 he married Bessie Kreisman. That is a long way from home for a teenager, and he stayed.
The grocery clerk did not stay a clerk. He opened a wholesale grocery business of his own and kept at it until 1952. In 1949, with the grocery still running, he and his son-in-law, Jack Muhlendorf, founded Paper and Chemical Supply Co. in Sheffield. It was incorporated in January 1969 to deal in paper, plastics and chemical supplies, with Jack, Jack's wife Beatrice (Sam's daughter) and Sam himself as the incorporators. Sam stayed chairman of the board until he retired in 1984 at the age of 93. He died at home on November 21, 1990, at 99, and he is buried in Sheffield's Oakwood Cemetery.
If that were the whole story I would still want to tell it. It isn't:
In January 1991 Senator Howell Heflin put a tribute to him into the Congressional Record. Dick Biddle of WOWL-TV summed him up in a single line: "People worked with Sam and not for him." That was exactly how Sam wanted it, and when he was laid to rest, employees of Paper and Chemical Supply were among his honorary bearers.
The firm outlived him by a long stretch. By 2015 his grandson David Muhlendorf was running it, with about 35 employees, and that January American Paper & Twine of Nashville bought it. Sixty-six years after Sam and Jack opened up in Sheffield, it was still a going concern.
Sheffield is a town that was built on big ideas, and the firm on this label grew up in the middle of them. A Montgomery businessman, Captain Alfred H. Moses, bought the land in 1883 with Colonel Walter Gordon and C. E. Gordon, and the town was incorporated on February 17, 1885. They named it for Sheffield, England. Blast furnaces were running by 1887, so when young Sam arrived in 1909 they had been at it for more than twenty years. They shut down in 1926.
Then the twentieth century came through in a hurry. In October 1917 President Wilson picked Sheffield for an ammonium-nitrate plant, and Wilson Dam was begun in 1918. In the 1930s the Tennessee Valley Authority took over the dam and the plants, and when the Second World War arrived an aluminum plant was built for Reynolds. So by 1949, when Paper and Chemical Supply opened, the Shoals was a valley with a federal dam, a federal power program and aluminum, and a wholesale grocer turned supply man was setting up shop right in the middle of it.
A label like this was not drawn for one company. It is a stock design from a numbered series that a broom maker or supply house could order by number. The same Liberty drawing turns up in blue on blank labels printed "15-LITHO IN U.S.A.," which makes it design No. 15. The series was sold through John L. Denning & Company of Wichita, Kansas, a broom-corn house begun in 1924 that ran 14 branches in different states. The trade story is that it sometimes owned 75 to 90 percent of all the broomcorn available.
A Denning sample booklet advertised forty designs, told buyers to "Order by Number Only," and refused any order under 1,000 of a design. Its address carries an old postal zone number, the kind the Post Office used from 1943 until ZIP Codes arrived in 1963, so that catalogue belongs to the same stretch of years as this label. A Denning booklet and a loose copy of this very Sheffield label have turned up together in one collector's lot, which tells you the kind of world these labels lived in.
The panel at the foot was left empty on purpose. The same drawing exists blank, and it exists overprinted for other firms, including a maker in New Athens, Illinois. The buyer's own name went in at the print shop, struck in letterpress type after the picture was finished. That is how "Manufactured for" works on a label like this: a broom factory made the brooms, and the supply house had its own name put on them. The factory stays out of sight, and the name that goes out the door is Paper and Chemical Supply, Sheffield, Alabama.
Read the first line of that imprint again. It says MANAFACTURED, with an "a" where the "u" belongs. Whoever set that line of type dropped the wrong letter in, and it stayed that way when the sheets were run. I know it came from the type and not from wear or a smear, because a second copy of this exact label carries the identical misspelling. I love a flaw like that. It is baked into the printing itself, it comes straight out of a print job from the middle of the last century, and it reminds you that every one of these labels was made by people.
Putting the Statue of Liberty on an ordinary product was about the quickest way a label maker had to say "American." She was shorthand for homegrown and proud of it, and she turned up on goods of every kind. On a broom label she makes a plain household tool look like it came with a flag.
Alabama and Tennessee Valley history collectors want a piece that names Sheffield and carries a story this good. Broom-label and household-advertising collectors will know the stock-design game. Statue of Liberty fans get a patriotic classic on an unlikely product, and misprint hunters get a genuine typo set into the type. It also makes a fine gift for anyone with Shoals roots.
A broom factory made the brooms and put the supply house's name on them. Here the supply house is Paper and Chemical Supply Co. of Sheffield, Alabama.
Yes. The line reads "Manafactured," and a second copy of the same label shows the identical error, so the type was set that way.
No. It is new old stock, a label that never made it onto a broom.
The company on it was founded in 1949, so it can't be earlier than that, and the 1950s fit it best.
Yes. It is a stock design, and it turns up blank and with other firms' names printed into the panel.
The firm was sold to American Paper & Twine of Nashville in January 2015, when it had about 35 employees.
Items from Vetted Pro Collectors
Shipping for items offered by vetted Pro Collectors is determined at checkout. All Pro Collector listings are reviewed to ensure fair, reasonable shipping practices.
For full details, please refer to our Shipping Policy.
Take your time — you've got a full six months. If a piece isn't right for you, send it back the way it reached you and we're good.
In the first 30 days your money goes straight back the way you paid. After that it's store credit, so you can put it toward something you'd rather have.
Return shipping we sort out between us, case by case. I don't make this difficult.
If something arrives damaged, or it isn't what I said it was, send me a photo within 48 hours and I'll make it right.
Email info@vintageantiquesgifts.com or call 802-356-9872 — that's me answering, not a call center.
The only things I can't take back are custom or special-order pieces and gift cards.
Preserving History: Authentic Objects Across Eras
