Brooms to Sweep Away Troubles

     A new broom brings good luck and harmony to a home. A traditional welcome gift includes: bread, that this house may never know hunger; salt, that life may always have flavor; and a broom, to sweep away troubles.

     In colonial American times, women cooked outside or in huge kitchen fireplaces. They needed a good broom to sweep away all the ashes. The brooms they called beson (pronounced bee-zum) consisted of bundled twigs, reeds, grasses, branches, and cornhusks tied together with hemp or flax and attached to a handle, usually a straight branch. In the mid-1700s, people began to fashion brooms from broomcorn, a plant from the sorghum family.
     Benjamin Franklin is said to have found a broomcorn seed on a broom a friend brought him from France for dusting his beaver hat. He obtained broomcorn seeds in Hungary, which he planted and which grew into tall corn-like plants with a flowering brush of stiff fibers.

Broomcorn, which had been cultivated in Asia and Africa since ancient times, became a novelty for gardens in Philadelphia.
     The first recorded broom in America, comprised of sorghum fibers, was made in 1797 by a man in Massachusetts, Levi Dickenson. Brooms came in many sizes and for various purposes--floor brooms, outdoor brooms, whisk brooms, brushes, and pot brooms used in the kitchens to clean away dust, debris, and ashes from fireplaces.

     For crafters: Step-by-step instructions for a broomcorn broom are in a post “How to Make a Broom,” by Little John Holzwart at: http://www.motherearthnews.com/diy/how-to-make-a-broom.aspx#axzz2bsOJfKK3
     Sample instructions: To make a hearth broom, 28 heads of broomcorn are used for the inside layers of bristles and 17 heads for the outside layer. Each head is measured with a cubit (the distance between your elbow to your longest finger). Put the knuckle of the corn, the place where the head meets the stalk, at your elbow. If the bristles, or brush, are past the tip of your fingers, that stalk is a keeper. If the material is too short, it will be used for a whisk broom later.
     If you want to make your own broomcorn broom, there’s a great supplier: R.E. Caddy Co. in Greensboro, NC, that sells broomcorn for crafters, a 10-pound box is around $35. http://www.recaddy.com/ec/index.php?cPath=21&osCsid=3e296863797aa55eabcf601caaef3774
     A good resource for mixed colors broomcorn seeds is https://www.lehmans.com/p-4588-mixed-colors-broomcorn-seeds.aspx

Susan F. Craft is the author of The Chamomile, an inspirational Revolutionary War romantic suspense set in South Carolina.