Vintage Miss Priscilla Broom Label 🧹 – Hamburg Broom Works, Hamburg, PA Advertising Ephemera

Who Was Miss Priscilla? Miss Priscilla of the Hamburg Broom Works: A Broom Brand Worth Going to Court Over

Size: 2 3/4" x 3 3/4"

In 1919 a salesman, a longtime foreman and the office manager walked out of the Hamburg Broom Works in Hamburg, Pennsylvania, set up a rival called West Reading Broom Works, and began turning out brooms that copied their old employer's in every detail except the brand names. The owner, Wilson E. Schmick, sued. On July 13, 1922, Pennsylvania's Superior Court reversed the dismissal of his case and ordered an injunction. That is how much a broom brand was worth in Berks County, and this label carries one of the Hamburg Broom Works names: MISS PRISCILLA.

This is a new old stock broom label, never applied, printed for the Hamburg Broom Works of Hamburg, Pa. The company's old building has since been torn down. The label survives.

What the Label Shows

The label reads MISS PRISCILLA across the top and HAMBURG BROOM WORKS, Hamburg, Pa. across the bottom, with Miss Priscilla herself in a plumed hat holding her broom high, and a plain circle at the lower right left blank.

The back is plain paper with the whole design showing through faintly in reverse. No printer's imprint and no date appear anywhere on the sheet.

That blank yellow circle is a small open space on an old printed label, just right for a name, initials or a date if the label is going to someone as a personal gift.

Wilson E. Schmick and the Hamburg Broom Works

Schmick traded under the name Hamburg Broom Works from 1894. The business outgrew its first place in West Hamburg, just south of the Pennsylvania and Reading railroad station, and in 1911 he put up a new plant at Second and Pine Streets at a cost of $25,000. In 1909 he had built himself a house in Hamburg, and that house is now The Bismarck bed and breakfast.

In 1921, ready to downsize, Schmick sold the big building to the Burkey Underwear and Hosiery Company and kept the building across the street, on the south side of Pine, for the broom works. Burkey's expanded the old plant in 1927 and 1931, and Wright's bought the buildings in 1974. The Hamburg Broom Works building was eventually torn down.

Miss Priscilla wasn't the only lady on a Hamburg Broom Works label, either. The company's Indian Queen label shows a Native American woman in front of a camp of tepees.

Brooms were an old trade in Berks County long before Schmick hung out his sign. Down the Schuylkill in Reading, Henry H. Krouse was making brooms by 1840, Shanaman Brothers started in 1873, and S. E. Nies & Co. came along in 1899. And Hamburg itself had more than one broom maker: the Windsor Broom Co. put out its own brands in town, Auto and Winner among them, on labels reading Windsor Broom Co., Hamburg, Pa. I love that the Auto label sports an old-time race car.

The Broom Lawsuit of 1922

The court record shows how Hamburg brooms were dressed. From 1917 Schmick made three distinctive brands. His Puritan broom had a highly polished or enameled natural-color wood handle, white velvet bands and white sewing cord. The Eclipse was made the same way with blue velvet bands, blue cord and a yellow silk label. Each carried a white silk or satin label with the manufacturer's name woven into it, set between the velvet bands. The company's own 1912 catalog, BROOMS: The Most Modern Broom Manufacturing Plant in the World, billed the Eclipse as "The Finest of the 'Silk Ribbon Brooms'" and also offered a Model Garage broom made for all kinds of cement floors, plus whisks and toy brooms.

In 1919 three of his people left to form West Reading Broom Works and sold brooms called American Beauty, Blue Bird and Black Beauty, copying all of those details except the names. The trial court dismissed Schmick's complaint. The Superior Court of Pennsylvania reversed it on July 13, 1922, in Schmick v. West Reading Broom Works, and enjoined the new company from making brooms in that combination of features.

A Name With a Homemaking Ring

Priscilla was a name American homemakers knew well. The Modern Priscilla, a women's magazine of sewing patterns, crochet, embroidery, millinery and homemaking advice, was published in Lynn and then Boston, Massachusetts, from 1887 to 1930, and reached roughly 600,000 readers by 1922. Its name drew on the Priscilla of the New Testament, a tentmaker, which tied the name to women sewing and weaving goods for the home.

Broomcorn, Legends and the American Broom

A popular story, printed in an 1899 newspaper, says Benjamin Franklin found a single seed on a whisk broom brought over from England, planted it, and raised the plant from which all American broomcorn descends. Franklin's own letters tell it differently. He brought the seed back from a visit to Virginia in 1756, and on February 21, 1757, he sent "some whisk-seed" to his sister Jane Mecom; a month later he sent more to Samuel Ward.

The broomcorn broom as Americans came to know it began in 1797, when Levi Dickenson, a farmer in Hadley, Massachusetts, made a broom for his wife from the tassels of the sorghum he was growing. In 1798 the Shaker Theodore Bates invented the flat broom, and in 1810 the foot-treadle broom machine arrived. The number of American broom factories peaked at 1,039 in 1919 and fell to 320 by 1939; most had closed by the 1960s, undercut by imported brooms and synthetic bristles. The vacuum cleaner did its share, too. In 1908 W. H. Hoover bought Murray Spangler's patent for an electric suction sweeper, the first to use both a cloth filter bag and cleaning attachments, and the vacuum ended up right alongside synthetics and foreign competition on the list of what wore the old corn-broom trade down.

Brooms in Pennsylvania German Belief

In the Pennsylvania German country around Hamburg, the broom was more than a cleaning tool. Edwin Miller Fogel's 1915 collection, Beliefs and Superstitions of the Pennsylvania Germans, records that while witches were said to ride through the air on brooms, the broom was also used as a charm against them. It was used to thrash bewitched milk and to discover witches, "as no witch will step over a broom." House and barn were swept on Good Friday to rid them of lice and ensure the health of everyone in them.

Hamburg, Berks County

Hamburg sits on the east bank of the Schuylkill River in Berks County. A patent for 250 acres went to Martin Kaercher in 1772, and in 1779 his son divided the land into building lots and called the place Kaercher Stadt. The name Hamburg is usually said to come from Hamburg, Germany, though scholars point instead to Bad Homburg, given the founder's roots in Hesse. A canal along the river opened in 1824, and for about four decades Hamburg was a great boat-building borough. The railroad from Philadelphia and Pottsville arrived in 1842, and the town became a borough in 1837.

Early Hamburg distilled whiskey, brewed beer, built boats, tanned leather and made chains, nails, tools and hats. Its historic district, with 435 contributing buildings, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2010, and each year on the last Saturday of October the town turns out for its King Frost Parade.

For the Collector and the Wall

At 2 3/4" x 3 3/4", Miss Priscilla is small enough to frame on her own in a little shadow box, or to hang beside other Berks County and Pennsylvania trade labels. She suits a laundry room, a kitchen or a farmhouse entry, and she makes a thoughtful gift for anyone with Hamburg or Berks County roots. The Hamburg Broom Works building is gone. Plenty of other Hamburg broom labels still turn up, but Miss Priscilla isn't one of them: she's a rare one today, and once the unused ones are gone into collections, she'll be very hard to find.

🧹 About these

The supply is finite - nobody's printing Miss Priscilla labels for the Hamburg Broom Works again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.