Vintage Lay Broom Label 🧹 No. 426, Joseph Lay Company, Portland Indiana

Did a Portland, Indiana Broom Maker Really Build a Car? 🧹 A Vintage Lay Broom No. 426 Label, The Joseph Lay Company, Portland, Indiana

Size: 5" x 3 1/2"

A broom label was made to be wrapped around a handle, sent out the door and swept away with the dust. This one never was. It's printed in red, navy, yellow, light blue and cream: The in white script, LAY in big white block letters with a blue drop shadow across red-and-black stripes on blue, Broom in script below, and a yellow panel down the side reading NO. 426 - the style number. Along the bottom: MANUFACTURED BY THE JOSEPH LAY COMPANY, ESTABLISHED IN 1876, PORTLAND, INDIANA. The back is blank. Every one I have is unused.

🧹 From Olmsted Falls to Indiana

Joseph Lay was born in 1830 in Seneca County, New York, taught school for a couple of years, and in 1853 moved to Olmsted Falls, Ohio, just southwest of Cleveland, where he and his brother John made bentwood. In 1875 he started making brooms and brushes - the label says 1876 - and in 1877 he patented a broom whose fibers were held together by a metal band, a broom-corn center with hickory splint on the outside. He fought off two lawsuits over that patent and in 1879 incorporated the company with his sons Samuel C. and Frank R. Lay. A flood on the Rocky River damaged the Olmsted Falls plant in 1883, and three years later the Lays moved to Ridgeville, in Randolph County, Indiana, setting up shop in an abandoned brewery - one that looked something like an Eastern Orthodox church - and the buildings of a defunct college.

The business boomed on a good broom and hard selling, by mail and by traveling salesmen, to manufacturers, street commissioners, hardware stores and railroad purchasing agents. Branch factories followed in Columbus, in Mattoon, Illinois, and in Saratoga, Indiana, and around 1910 the Lays were leading the push for a national association of broom makers. After a fight with a former employee who started the Indianapolis Brush and Broom Manufacturing Company, they made a point of registering trademarks for their distinctive labels - which is how a label like this one came to carry the family name so proudly.

🚗 The Ridgeville Senator

Here's my favorite part. In 1906 the Lays decided to get into the automobile business like half of Indiana, set up the Victor Automobile Company, and built the Ridgeville Senator - a wooden frame armored with metal and a four-cylinder air-cooled Carrico engine. Two buyers in Mattoon found the hills made it overheat, and the lawsuit that followed turned on whether the Senator was as good as a Buick. The Victor company quit in 1912 after building seven cars.

👨‍👦 A family business

In 1912 Frank Lay talked old Joseph, then past eighty, into starting a rival Joseph Lay Broom and Brush Company, which led to orders going to the wrong company and, naturally, another lawsuit, until the rival company was dissolved in 1914, probably because Joseph had died. Samuel C. Lay ran the original company until he died, spending summers in Petoskey, Michigan while his son Arthur managed things, and his sons kept it going into at least the mid-1920s. The family's papers, 1843 to 1925, are at the Indiana Historical Society. This label comes from the years the company gave its address as Portland, the Jay County seat just up the road from Ridgeville. By 1936 the Joseph Lay Company of Portland was making the Kitchenette broom, a design Quinn Broom Works took over in 1948 and one that's still being made today, and a 1945 letter on Joseph Lay Company, Inc. letterhead from Portland, signed with a rubber stamp for H. J. Lay, still billed the firm as "Originators of the Metal Case Broom."

🧹 About these

They're about 5 by 3 1/2 inches. Frame one for a laundry room, a farmhouse kitchen, or an Indiana wall. The supply is finite - nobody's printing Lay Broom labels again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire. Like everything I sell, they're kept in the dark at a steady 72°F and under 40% humidity, climate controlled.