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Size: 6" x 3 1/2"
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Size: 6" x 3 1/2"
She was printed to help sell somebody's broom, and the name of that broom never went on. The green band above her head is empty. The red band at her feet is empty. The only words anywhere on the sheet are tiny ones along the bottom edge: 43 LITHO IN U.S.A. Those two bare panels were left open for a broom maker's name, and they are still open, which makes this label something more than a picture. It is a small piece of vintage commercial art with room left for a family name, a date, or a few words of your own.
This is a vintage 1940s broom label, never applied, measuring 6 x 3.5 inches. The maid stands under a yellow arch whose ends curl into scrolls, drawn in the Art Nouveau manner, with a corn broom, a red rose, white daisies and tall grass rising around her skirt. Look closely and the soft blues and pinks are built from fine printed tint patterns, wavy lines and stippled dots, which is ordinary commercial lithography. The back is blank, and the design shows through faintly from the front.
The little "43" is how a broom maker ordered her. Stock labels in this numbered series 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 said "Order by Number Only" on the cover and wouldn't take an order for fewer than 1,000 of any design. The "NN LITHO IN U.S.A." line, number first and then LITHO, is the style on the pages of that booklet, and the booklet's "Wichita 1" postal-zone address means it was printed between 1943, when zones began, and 1963, when ZIP codes replaced them. That puts this printing in the 1940s, whatever the costume in the drawing suggests.
Labels like it were printed with their panels left open, so a broom maker could have its own name added. This sheet never reached that step, and that is what makes it such a good gift now. A family name hand-lettered into the green panel, a wedding or housewarming date in the red one, "Cleaning Crew" or "The Laundry" for a utility room, or a line from the old proverb below: the label was designed to carry a name, and the choice of name is yours. Practice on scrap paper first and use an archival pen, then frame it.
The curling arch, the whiplash scrolls at its ends and the long, flowing stems around the maid all come from Art Nouveau, the style that flourished between about 1890 and 1910. Art Nouveau took its lines from the curves of plants and flowers, spread through graphic arts, textiles and furniture, and turned the advertising poster into an art form in the hands of artists like Alphonse Mucha. By 1914 it was fading. A broom label with a flower-framed woman under a scrolled arch is that same style carried down to the most everyday product on the store shelf. The drawing looks older than the printing, and that was normal: Denning's booklet sold an Edwardian lady and a Victorian-style peacock right beside a cartoon bird in 1950s style, all by number, all in the same years.
Every broom this label was meant for started as broomcorn, the tall sorghum grown for its long, stiff brush. American broom history even comes with its own legend. In 1899 the Idaho Statesman told what it called "a very pleasant little fairy story": Benjamin Franklin, examining a whisk broom brought over from England, found a single seed on it, planted it, and raised the plant from which all the broomcorn in the United States descended. The seed story is legend, but Franklin's own letters put him in the tale: on February 21, 1757, writing from Philadelphia, he sent his sister Jane Mecom "some whisk-seed" he had brought from Virginia.
The broom as a business began on a Massachusetts farm. In 1797 Levi Dickinson of Hadley made a broom of broomcorn for his wife, and a few extra to sell to his neighbors. The Shakers made it flat: Theodore Bates of the Watervliet Shaker community is credited with the flat broom in 1798, pressing the round bundle in a wooden vise and sewing it through with heavy twine so it held its shape. Broom machines with vises, clamps and a foot treadle followed, and by around 1850 more than a million brooms a year were being made in Massachusetts alone.
The crop moved west. Oklahoma led the nation in broomcorn between 1915 and 1946. The Lindsay district planted its first crop in 1906 and grew twenty to thirty thousand acres a year, and Lindsay became known as "the Broomcorn Capital of the World." In 1939 the nation's broom factories turned out 7,188,947 dozen brooms. A broom sewn by hand took about fifteen minutes; with machinery a factory could finish two dozen an hour. Oklahoma had thirty-one broom factories in 1930 and twenty in 1945, and most of them had shut down by the 1960s as new floor technology and imported brooms took the market.
Lindsay was not the only town to claim the crown. Arcola, Illinois, still celebrates its broomcorn heritage under the very same boast, and broom companies such as Libman and Thomas Monahan still keep the town tied to the trade.
Few household tools carry as much folklore as the broom. "A new broom sweeps clean" was already an old saying when John Heywood gathered it into his proverb collection of 1546 as "the green new broom sweepeth clean." Old wives' tales about brooms are still passed around:
And the rose she holds up has its own old language. In the nineteenth-century language of flowers, the red rose stood for romantic love.
No name appears. Both panels are blank, and the only printing is a small printer's line on the lower border.
It is a 1940s printing from the numbered stock-label series that John L. Denning & Company sold by number from Wichita, Kansas. Its arch and flowing stems follow the Art Nouveau style, which is older than the printing.
6 inches by 3.5 inches.
No. It was never applied to a broom; the back is clean and blank.
Yes. Many people hand-letter a name, date or saying into the green or red panel before framing. Test your pen on scrap paper first.
A corn broom in one hand and a red rose raised in the other, with a second rose at her neckline and daisies around her.
A sorghum raised for the brush at the top of its stalk rather than for grain; that brush is what a traditional corn broom is made of.
The saying was already an old one when it appeared in John Heywood's 1546 book of English proverbs.
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