Vintage Santa Fe Brand Brooms Label 🪶 NOS Native American Southwestern Desert Art | Arkansas City, Kansas 1960s

Why Would a Kansas Grocer Sell Brooms With a Desert on Them? 🪶 A 1960s Santa Fe Brand Brooms Label, Arkansas City, Kansas

Size: 6" x 3 1/2"

Here's a man leaning on a big Santa Fe BRAND medallion, with a clay pot at his feet and mesas out behind him. Under all that desert, in heavy block letters, it says BROOMS. I get a kick out of that. It's a whole Southwest postcard to sell you the thing you sweep the kitchen with. SUPERIOR QUALITY AND WORKMANSHIP comes next, and the foot of the label reads DISTRIBUTED BY SANTA FE FOODS, ARKANSAS CITY, KANSAS 67005. This is a broom label, printed by lithography in four colors or more, with the paper going through the press once for each color. Nobody ever put one on a broom. They're new old stock, or NOS.

📅 When was it printed?

That 67005 is a ZIP code, and the Post Office didn't start ZIP codes until July 1, 1963. So the label is 1963 or later. The 1960s is the decade it sits in.

🛒 Santa Fe, Ranney-Davis and Sweet Clover

The Kansas Historical Society keeps the papers of the Ranney-Davis Mercantile Company, the big wholesale grocers of Arkansas City. Its records say a Santa Fe brand logo was approved in 1908 and started replacing the company's older Sweet Clover brand. Santa Fe was the mid-priced line, between Ranney's Finest and PanTree. This label says Santa Fe Brand and names Santa Fe Foods of Arkansas City as the distributor. Ranney-Davis isn't printed anywhere on it.

The man who built that company was Joseph Addison Ranney, J.A. to his friends. He was born in Illinois and raised in Michigan, and at 22 he opened a grocery in Three Rivers, Michigan, with about $500. In 1879 he came out to Wellington, Kansas, and went into the retail grocery business with his brother, Albert Barnes Ranney, as Ranney Bros. By 1881 he had a big store in North Topeka. In 1884 he switched to wholesale by buying into Parkhurst, Davis & Co. of Topeka, and he later became its vice president.

In 1888 he and a fellow grocer, Sam Alton, started a Parkhurst-Davis branch in Arkansas City called the Ranney-Alton Mercantile Company. Their brand was Sweet Clover, and I love this detail: the label had a four-leaf clover with one letter on each leaf, R, A, M and C. When the Cherokee Strip opened in 1893, the pioneers heading into the new land bought their supplies from Ranney-Alton, and that gave the business a huge boost. In 1899 W. H. Davis bought Alton's shares. Alton kept an interest and moved to Oklahoma City to be the main owner of the branch there. J.A. moved his family down from Topeka to run Arkansas City himself, with his son Walter Roy Ranney helping manage, and the firm became Ranney-Davis Mercantile. Davis sold out in 1901, so Ranney owned it all, but he kept Davis's name on the sign. He figured customers liked buying from two owners better than one. Warehouses came later in Enid, Woodward and Ponca City, Oklahoma, in Anthony and Wichita, Kansas, and in Borger, Texas.

The company ran close to ninety years. In 1976 J.A.'s great-grandson joined after working for Southland, the 7-Eleven company, and within a year the family decided to liquidate. The building and the leftover stock were auctioned in 1978. The warehouses in Enid, Woodward and Arkansas City were sold in the 1980s, and in 1986 the home office in Arkansas City was torn down. The company's papers from 1888 to 1978 are at the Kansas Historical Society. They include a company history, the product labels, a 1930 company newsletter called the Bulletin, booklets from a 1939 sales convention, market information booklets from 1967 and 1971, and a photograph of the office and warehouse from about 1910 to 1915.

🏜️ Ark City, on the Oklahoma line

Arkansas City sits in Cowley County where the Walnut River meets the Arkansas, right on the state line along the northern edge of the old Cherokee Strip. It began as a border town on the edge of Indian Territory, and it was a trading center for the Indian agencies across the line. People stocked up there before heading south by wagon or train toward Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.

It was a staging ground for the Oklahoma land runs, too. In April 1889 the largest crowds waiting to rush the Unassigned Lands gathered around Hunnewell, Arkansas City and Caldwell. On September 16, 1893, Ark City was the biggest jumping-off point for the Cherokee Strip run. Somewhere between 75,000 and 100,000 people registered to run from there, and when the gun went off at noon the town's population dropped to about 5,000. After that it settled in as a working town for southern Kansas.

The story among collectors is that the Santa Fe brand's Southwestern pictures were aimed partly at shoppers coming up from across that line, a Kansas company showing it knew the country it sold into. Old-timers in Ark City say it was simpler than that. For a lot of families in the old Oklahoma Territory, the border town was the nearest big place to shop.

🚂 The Santa Fe in the name

Here's a funny thing. The Santa Fe Trail never came near Arkansas City. It crossed Kansas far to the north, through Council Grove, Lyons, Great Bend, Larned and Dodge City. The Santa Fe that came through town was the railroad, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe. It leased the line that ran up the Walnut Valley to Arkansas City in the 1870s, and the Kansas Historical Society has a record of the Fred Harvey House the railroad kept there.

The railroad sold the Southwest to travelers with Native American art. The Fred Harvey Company, which ran the eating houses along the line, started an Indian Department in 1901, and in 1902 it opened a building at the Alvarado Hotel in Albuquerque where Native artists demonstrated their crafts to the passengers. Its posters showed Navajo and Hopi craftspeople at work, and Harvey published books on Pueblo pottery, Navajo textiles and jewelry. So a pot in the sand beside a man on a Santa Fe label comes straight out of that world. Then look at the medallion. Four cut-outs in a dark disc leave a cross standing, with Santa Fe lettered across it, and that echoes the railway's own circle-and-cross emblem.

Collectors who've handled the Santa Fe line say the same medallion turns up on its peanut butter and canned goods, not just the brooms. The lore in the label trade is that the artists who drew figures like this were hardly ever named or credited. They were staff artists at printing houses turning out dozens of brand designs a year, and their work survives almost entirely on the labels.

🧹 About these labels

Every one I have is unused, 6 by 3 1/2 inches. The man is drawn with some care, calm and dignified, and not as a cartoon. It fits a small standard frame with room for a mat, and it's at home in a kitchen, a mudroom, next to some Fred Harvey postcards, or on the wall of anybody with family in Ark City or Cowley County. The supply is finite. Nobody is printing broom labels for a Kansas grocery house anymore, and once these last unused ones are framed and hanging on walls, they'll be very difficult to acquire.