The auctioneer was holding up a straw broom, describing to us auction-goers its history and other qualities. My mind was wandering until he said it was made by students at Berea College. A black college in Kentucky.
I’d never heard of the college so I started paying attention. It was a short broom, polished wood handle, with green straw held tightly together by four rows of wire. Holes had been bored at the end of the handle for hanging.
I bidded on the broom and got it. It looked like an old broom, round, not flat like the brooms I use at home (I found out later that the Shakers are credited with making the first flat broom in the late 1800s). It had a small silk label: Berea College. Student Craft Industries. Berea, Kentucky. 40404. It was 23” long, and because of its size, it’s likely a whisk.
Later, I found out that Berea was not a black college but it did have a storied and brave history. Located just south of Lexington, KY, it was founded in 1855 by abolitionist John G. Fee as the only racially integrated and coeducational college in the South. Early on, it enrolled an equal number of black and white students from the Appalachian region. Tuition was and still is free, although its students now come from around the world.
The college’s first black teacher (a former student who had graduated around 1873) was a woman named Julia Amanda M. Britton, the grandmother of Benjamin Hooks, the executive director of the NAACP from 1977 to 1993. She later married a man named Hooks and moved to Memphis, where she taught bluesman W.C. Handy at a music school that she opened.
Other black Berea alumni included Carter G. Woodson, a historian and founder of Black History Month (circa 1903), and a former Union Army soldier named Angus A. Burleigh (around 1875), the college’s first adult black student and first black graduate.
When the state of Kentucky outlawed integration in private institutions in 1904, Berea took some of its endowment money to set up Lincoln Institute near Louisville for African Americans. The law was repealed in 1950.
From the beginning, all students at the college had to participate in work-study. Berea began making brooms by hand (and still does) in the 1920s when a benefactor donated a shop with equipment, and Broomcraft was born.
Now broom-making, weaving, woodworking, ceramics and other mountain crafts are done by students for sale at Berea College Crafts on the web and at its craft shop in the town of Berea, known as the folk arts and crafts capital of Kentucky. Even some of the furniture and furnishings at the local hotel, Boone Tavern, owned by the college and staffed by students, are the students’ handiwork.
Since I bought that first Berea broom, I’ve acquired two more. The second one was shorter and had a rustic handle, the maker apparently leaving the wood in its natural state. The straw was more orange-red, and it had been tied with green raffia. There was a loose wire band at the base of the straw. Again, this one had holes at the end of the handle. It was 19” long.
I bought the third one at auction this week. I had missed it among the items on tables outside one of my usual auction houses. Fortunately, I spied it, handed it to the auctioneer and was the sole $5 bidder. This one was longer than the others. It, too, had a rough natural handle, holes at the end, three rows of green raffia and orange-red straw. It was 36” long.
Both the second and third brooms also had the Berea College label. I learned that Berea’s brooms are among its most well-known crafts. I’d love to know when my three were made.
