{"product_id":"vintage-lily-flower-broom-label-unique-memorabilia","title":"Vintage 1950s-60s Lily Broom Label 🌸 NOS Litho | Art Deco Floral Advertising Print #21","description":"\u003ch2\u003eWhy Put a Lily on a Broom? 🌸 Vintage 1950s-60s Lily Broom Label, NOS Lithograph #21\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSize:\u003c\/strong\u003e 6\" x 3 1\/2\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv style=\"max-width:315px;margin:0 auto 20px;\"\u003e\u003cdiv style=\"position:relative;padding-bottom:177.78%;height:0;overflow:hidden;\"\u003e\u003ciframe src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/OPg5ZqdV9fY\" style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer;autoplay;clipboard-write;encrypted-media;gyroscope;picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen\u003e\u003c\/iframe\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThe flower of purity, printed for the humblest tool in the house.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA vintage Lily broom label from the 1950s-60s, new old stock and never pasted to a broom. A white lily bursts out of a red disc, framed in a stepped Art Deco frame. It carries no brand, no maker and no town: only a small printed 21 in one corner and PRINTED IN U.S.A. along the bottom. It was stock art, made so a broom maker could put his own name on it and sell his brooms under the sign of the flower that stood for a clean and virtuous home.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003eThe Label Up Close\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe lily is drawn in full bloom, its petals shaded in fine stippled dots, two long buds reaching out from the stem. Behind it a disc sits over a square, and the whole medallion floats between two open panels inside a stepped frame. The geometry of it, a circle laid over a square inside a stepped frame, is pure Art Deco.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe open space above and below the flower is empty. Many stock broom labels left room like that for a broom maker to stamp or overprint his own brand, and the label never received a name.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eSubject: white lily with buds on a red medallion\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003ePrinted marks: 21, lower left; PRINTED IN U.S.A., bottom center\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eBrand, maker or town: none printed\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003ePaper label, lithographed, new old stock, never applied\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eAge: 1950s-60s\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003eOrdered by Number, Printed in the 1950s-60s\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat small \"21\" is how a broom maker ordered it. Numbered stock labels like this were sold by John L. Denning \u0026amp; 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, and this same lily turns up among the loose Denning labels in a collector's lot.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe wording along the foot is what dates the printing. The booklet's pages read \"NN LITHO IN U.S.A.,\" and because the booklet carries a \"Wichita 1\" postal-zone address, it was printed between 1943, when zones began, and 1963, when ZIP codes replaced them. The \"PRINTED IN U.S.A.\" wording on this lily is the later style, the one that turns up on imprints carrying ZIP codes, which puts this printing in the 1950s-60s. The art can't tell you the date: Deco geometry was an older fashion that stock art kept selling, and Denning's booklet put an Edwardian lady and a Victorian-style peacock right beside a cartoon bird in 1950s style.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003eWhy a Broom Wore a Lily\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe lily carried a great deal of meaning. It stood for purity, virtue, innocence, hope and life; Easter lilies have been called the \"white-robed apostles of hope.\" Painters put the lily into scenes of the Annunciation, and it has long been the flower of the Virgin Mary. For a product whose whole job was to make a home clean, no picture said it faster.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThere is older lore behind it too. Legend holds that lilies grew in the Garden of Gethsemane, springing up where drops of Christ's sweat fell to the ground in his final hours.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003eThe Easter Lily Comes to America\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor decades America's Easter lily bulbs came from abroad. In the 1880s lilies were widely cultivated in Bermuda and shipped north as bulbs; around 1900 Japan took over the trade and held it until the Second World War. The American industry began with one man and one suitcase. Louis Houghton, a soldier home from the First World War, brought a suitcase full of hybrid lily bulbs to the south coast of Oregon in 1919 and handed them out freely to friends and neighbors.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor two decades many growers kept them as a hobby. Then Pearl Harbor cut off the Japanese supply in 1941, prices shot up, and growers called the bulbs \"White Gold.\" By 1945 about 1,200 growers were raising lily bulbs up and down the Pacific coast. Today more than 95 percent of the bulbs for potted Easter lilies come from just ten farms on the narrow coast between Smith River, California and Brookings, Oregon, the self-styled Easter Lily Capital of the World.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003eHow the Broom Became American\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe broom this label was meant for is an American invention in two steps. In 1797 Levi Dickinson, a farmer in Hadley, Massachusetts, tied a bundle of broomcorn, a tasselled sorghum grass, onto a stick to make a broom for his wife. It outlasted anything before it, and by 1800 Dickinson and his sons were making several hundred a year to sell across the Northeast. The next year a Shaker, Theodore Bates of the Watervliet community in New York, invented a wooden vise that pressed the round bundle flat so it could be sewn in place. The flat broom swept better, the Shakers made them by the tens of thousands, and around 1850 Massachusetts alone was turning out more than a million brooms a year.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBroomcorn grew better farther west, and the trade followed it. Arcola, Illinois, founded in 1855 when the Illinois Central Railroad came through, became a center of broomcorn production in the late nineteenth century and earned the nickname Broomtown. Local history credits Col. John Cofer with planting the town's first field of broomcorn in 1859. Arcola still holds a Broom Corn Festival the weekend after Labor Day, and since 1980 its parade has featured the Lawn Rangers, a precision lawn mower drill team marching in cowboy hats with mowers and brooms. The Libman Company, which makes mops and brooms there, employs some 600 people.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003eThe People Who Made the Brooms\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBroom making was one of the trades open to blind workers. In April 1920 Bertha Hanford, a blind woman from Duluth, founded the Range Broom Factory at 104 S. Central Avenue in Chisholm, Minnesota. Its manager, Ray Alcox, had taught at the Minnesota School for the Blind, and every worker was blind or vision-impaired, among them Tony Stupica, blinded in a 1917 mine explosion. Within months they were making 30 dozen brooms a week, selling heavy mill brooms to the iron mines and brooms to the army. In October 1940 they shipped their biggest order yet, 175 dozen brooms and 168 dozen mops. The factory closed in October 1943, unable to compete with larger plants, and its last assets went to buy radios, typewriters and guide dogs for blind people on the Iron Range.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBrooms made by blind workers were written into federal law. Knowing that blind workers in sheltered workshops made brooms and mops, and that new federal buildings needed cleaning supplies, Senator Robert Wagner and Representative Caroline O'Day proposed that the government buy from them. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Wagner-O'Day Act on June 25, 1938; the bill as first drafted named only brooms and mops. National Industries for the Blind was incorporated that August 10 to share out the orders, and its SKILCRAFT brand followed in 1952.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003eWhat Changed\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe broom's great rival was built partly out of one. In 1908 James Murray Spangler, an asthmatic department store janitor in North Canton, Ohio, mounted a fan motor on a carpet sweeper with a soap box and a broom handle. His cousin's husband, the leather goods maker William Henry Hoover, bought the patent that year for the Electric Suction Sweeper Company, sold 372 machines by the end of 1908, and advertised ten days' free use in The Saturday Evening Post. After synthetic fibers were developed, plastic brooms gave homeowners a new choice, and in 1994 NAFTA made Mexican brooms cheaper and forced many American broom makers to close.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe colorful paper label faded with the old trade. Its legacy is sheets like these, printed for brooms, never used, and kept flat and bright ever since.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003eGood For\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eCollectors of broom labels, advertising ephemera and American commercial printing\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eArt Deco and botanical art lovers\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eFraming for a kitchen, laundry room or garden room wall\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eEaster and spring displays\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eA gift for a florist, gardener or anyone named Lily\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003eQuestions People Ask\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eHow old is this Lily broom label?\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt is a 1950s-60s printing from the numbered stock series that John L. Denning \u0026amp; Company sold by number from Wichita, Kansas. The \"PRINTED IN U.S.A.\" foot line is the later wording in that series.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWas it ever on a broom?\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNo. It is new old stock, never pasted or applied.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWhat brand of broom was it for?\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNone is printed. It is an unbranded stock label, with open panels where a broom maker could add a name.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWhat is printed on it besides the lily?\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA small 21 at the lower left, with the country of printing, the U.S.A., spelled out along the bottom edge.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWhat does a lily mean on a label like this?\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePurity, virtue and renewal. It is the flower of Easter and of the Virgin Mary, a natural emblem for a product that promised a clean home.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"relatedBlock\"\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e🔎 More From The Vintage \u0026amp; Antique Gifts Archive\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/vintage-1940s-rose-broom-label-treasures-gifts-home-gifts\"\u003eVintage 1940s Rose Broom Label 🌹 New Old Stock No. 7 | Yellow \u0026amp; Blue Floral Litho Art\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/vintage-native-american-broom-label\"\u003eVintage 1960s Broom Label 🪶 Native American Chief Art, Unused Store Stock, Southwest Print\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/antique-9xxxx-train-locomotive-broom-label-1940s-treasures\"\u003eAntique 9XXXX Streamliner Train Broom Label 🚂 NOS 1930s 1940s Hamburg PA Railroad Art Deco Locomotive Advertising Paper Ephemera\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Vintage and Antique Gifts","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40769801978021,"sku":"VAG-7034837991589","price":9.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0597\/2718\/4037\/files\/il_fullxfull.3294160687_7ni6.jpg?v=1785354601","url":"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/vintage-lily-flower-broom-label-unique-memorabilia","provider":"Vintage and Antique Gifts","version":"1.0","type":"link"}