My sister visited recently from Oklahoma. Sometime during the course of her visit, the term “Broomcorn Johnny” came up. When I was growing up, every year Maysville had an influx of “Broomcorn Johnnies.” They set up camp just outside town and of course were a boon to the Maysville merchants. They bought groceries, clothing, and other stuff and went to the movies. (Yea, Maysville, at one time, had two movie theaters.)
I’m sure both my faithful readers don’t even know what broomcorn is…. first of all let’s get some facts straight — broomcorn isn’t corn at all, although if you saw it growing in a field, you’d think it was corn. It very much resembles regular corn, except it doesn’t have — well, ears of corn. “Broomcorn” is actually a type of sorghum — knowing that, it sort of looks like cane sorghum, or sugar cane, but to the un-initiated, it looks like corn. I was well into adulthood before I knew that broomcorn wasn’t really corn.
Anyhow, before the “broom” was invented, people used bundles of twigs, corn husks and things like that to clean. There is at least one reference to some sort of a broom in the Bible….”Either what woman having ten pieces of silver, if she lose one piece, doth not light a candle, and sweep the house, and seek diligently till she find it?” Well, ok, maybe this doesn’t actually reference a broom, but it might….
Early brooms were usually made at home from whatever materials were at hand — they basically bundled together whatever they were using to sweep with to a wooden stick with rope or twine. Of course these devices didn’t do a good job or last very long and had to be replaced fairly often.
So — eventually someone (possibly Levi Dickinson in Hadley, Mass.) got the bright idea to make a broom from a species of tasseled grass (sorghum vulggare) that resembled sweet corn. Turns out that the plant’s fibers made an excellent broom. Previously, the sorghum plant’s seeds and fibers had been used as animal feed and not much else. Dickinson’s broom was a round bundle of broomcorn tied to a stick with some weaving around the top and proved to be very effective and durable. As word spread, demand for the brooms increased and Dickinson and his sons went into business making and selling their brooms.
But back to today — a lot of people don’t remember when brooms were made of straw since most are now plastic or some other synthetic fiber. Back when I was a kid, growing broomcorn was a major business. A town about 10 miles from where I grew up christened itself “the broomcorn capital of the world.” I’m sure it wasn’t, but try telling that to the Lindsay, Oklahoma Chamber of Commerce.
The downside of broomcorn production was that harvesting it was hot, dreary work. Like so many undesirable jobs, this task was mostly accomplished with migrant labor. These migrant workers that worked the broomcorn fields around Maysville were called “Broomcorn Johnnies.” Like probably most migrant workers, Broomcorn Johnnies got a bed rap. They often looked raggedy, not well dressed and a lot of people considered them “dirty.” They probably looked “dirty” because they worked in the fields in the hot sun all day and didn’t have ready access to showers, as most lived in tents. I remember the women, most of whom worked in the broomcorn fields along side the men, were sometimes referred to as Broomcorn Sallies. Probably in most places, these people would have been referred to as Gypsies, but in Maysville, they were Broomcorn Johnnies.
Today, most people use vacuum cleaners or the new-fangled “swiffer” thing that looks kind of like a dirty napkin attached to the end of a stick. I’m not sure most households still have brooms around, but I’d bet that a lot do. Of course most of these brooms came about without the help of Broomcorn Johnnies.
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