Vintage Thunderbird Eagle Shield Broom Label NOS 1930s 1940s Art Deco Patriotic Native American Americana Litho USA Unused Original 🧹

Size: 6 x 3.5 inches ~ They vary a little one to the next.

🦅 No Name On This One

Only one line of type appears anywhere on this label: "LITHO. IN U.S.A." in the lower corner. No design number, no brand, no maker, no town. It was a stock design sold blank, for a broom company to buy the run and print its own name in the plain blue bands across the top and bottom. This run never got a name, so it's New Old Stock, still in the shape it left the press.

🎨 What's Actually Printed

The eagle's body is shaped like a five-point star, its head turned in sharp profile with a hooked beak. The wings step out in bands of blue, red, and yellow, a striped blue shield sits on the chest, a fanned tail of red, yellow, and blue feathers spreads below, and two olive branches reach out to the sides. The whole bird sits on a near-black purple field that opens into a downward chevron of red, white, and blue, with solid blue bands top and bottom. About four inks did all of this - yellow, a red-orange, a cyan blue, and that dark purple, printed on white paper. It's yellow ink giving the eagle its glow, not gold leaf - there's no metallic ink anywhere on this label.

⚡ Thunderbird or Eagle?

That star-shaped body and fanned tail give the bird the angular, thunderbird look in the title, and the artist blended it with the heraldic eagle's shield and olive branches. Whatever you call it, it's a striking piece of commercial art.

📐 Reading the Style

Nothing on the label gives a year, but the flat Deco geometry and that bold red-white-blue chevron are 1930s-40s commercial style, the kind of patriotic imagery that got extra mileage as the country headed into the war years.

🌾 A Stock Design, Waiting for a Name

Local legend in the smaller broom-producing towns has it that a new season's labels arriving from the lithography house were treated almost like the arrival of new seed stock - looked over, compared to last year's run, argued about at the counter of the general store by whoever ran the broom shop. This one, whichever town it was headed for, never got claimed.

🏭 Broom Country

Labels like this went to broom factories all over the country, and the biggest broom town of all was Amsterdam, New York. A 1925 history of the Mohawk Valley called it "the first American broom-making city," and the city's own seal showed a carpet, a spool of thread and a couple of brooms. Broom corn grew right along the Mohawk River. Julius Wasserman opened his Amsterdam Broom Co. on Brookside Avenue in 1884, his son David joined him in 1889, and by 1907 the firm had 169 men working a 60-hour week. Then the vacuum cleaner came along, and "during the 1930s, the popularity of vacuum cleaners shrank the broom industry," as Amsterdam's local historian put it, just about the time a label like this one was coming off the press.