Commerce and Community: A Case Study of the Rural Broommaking Business in Antebellum Massachusetts

Abstract

In 1797 Levi Dickinson, a farmer in Hadley, Massachusetts, planted a few hills of a strange-looking variety of corn that was virtually useless as food and produced little more than long tassels of brush. Dickinson harvested the brush, dried it, tied it around sticks, and thus made twenty or thirty brooms, most of which he peddled to neighbors in the town. The following year he planted about half an acre of this broom corn, and the year after that a whole acre. By 1800 he and his sons were making several hundred brooms and selling them not just in Hadley but as far west as Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and as far south as New London, Connecticut. Many of Dickinson's neighbors ridiculed