Fridays at Auction Finds is readers’ questions day. I try to guide readers to resources for them to determine the value of their items. I’m not able to appraise their treasures, but I can do some preliminary research to get them started. So, these are market values based on prices I find on the web, not appraisal for insurance purposes that I suggest for items that have been determined to be of great value.
Today’s question is about a broom made by students at Berea College in Kentucky.
Question:
I have a whisk broom with a label that says Berea College, below that it says student industry, below that it says Berea, Kentucky. The whisk or broom is black. The handle is light brown. I wonder how old it is.
Answer:
The black whisk and light brown handle of your broom sounds like an interesting combination (I would’ve loved to have seen a photo of it). It is definitely different from the three Berea College brooms I have on the mantle over my fireplace. I first wrote about the brooms in a blog post in 2009 after buying one at auction.
I was sitting there at the auction house waiting for an item to come up, paying very little attention to the short-handled broom in the auctioneer’s hand until he mentioned that it had been made by students at a black college in Kentucky. That bit of history made me sit up and take notice.
In my research, I found that Berea was not a black college, but it has a long history of accepting African American students. It was founded in 1855 by abolitionist John G. Fee as the only racially integrated and coeducational college in the South. Tuition for the students, who came from the Appalachian region, was free. Fee named the town Berea after the Biblical town in Greece, and both it and the college are located just south of Lexington in eastern Kentucky.
The college’s first black teacher – Julia Amanda M. Britton, who was also an alumni – was the grandmother of Benjamin Hooks, the executive director of the NAACP from 1977 to 1992. Its alumni include historian Carter G. Woodson, founder of Black History Month, and Angus A. Burleigh, a former Union Army soldier who became its first black graduate. Fee recruited Burleigh and other black Union soldiers at Camp Nelson, KY, to attend the college.
In 1904, the state of Kentucky prohibited integration in private institutions, so Berea trustees opened Lincoln Institute near Louisville for black students. The school was more vocational high school than college. Whitney M. Young Sr. was the principal, and Whitney M. Young Jr., who later became director of the National Urban League, was a student. The law was repealed in 1950.
Students at Berea began making brooms by hand (and still do) starting in the 1920s. The brooms are now sold along with other handmade crafts through the college’s crafts shop on the web and in the town of Berea.
Unfortunately, I can’t offer the reader any help about when his broom was made. I was not able to determine when my brooms were made, either.
My first broom was more a whisk than a full broom, and the wording on its silk label was a little different from the reader’s: Berea College. Student Craft Industries. Berea, Kentucky. 40404.
A reader wrote to me once noting that the zip code on one of my brooms could offer some direction. Zip codes did not come into existence until 1963, so my first broom was obviously made after then. Comparing it with the other two brooms, this one looks more commercial.
The other two brooms may be older, but I’m not sure about that. The wording on their labels is the same as the reader’s and the labels themselves appear to be vintage. The handles on those two brooms look like branches that had been cut right off a tree.
I was so taken with the Berea brooms that when another like them – but without a label – later came up at auction, I bought that one, too. I found one like it on the web that had a Berea label, but it looked newer than mine.
I’d still love to know when these brooms were made.
