In the days before vacuum cleaners and blowers became common for indoor and outdoor work, brooms of all sorts were used to sweep away unwanted debris. Holyoke had its share of manufacturers. The Town Broom Manufacturing Company started after World War II.
The Town Broom Manufacturing Company, with its central plant in Spencer, Massachusetts, was one of the country's largest producers of brooms. The plant had 25 to 30 employees producing 100 dozen brooms weekly. Needing additional manufacturing space, the company leased space from the Holyoke Water Power Company in the Beebe-Holbrook complex. This would become the fifteenth small company to rent space in the industrial center.
The factory space consisted of 11,300 square feet for the manufacture of brooms. Operations began in May of 1948. The plant would concentrate on producing whisk brooms and floor brooms and sell them to the wholesale trade. Distribution would be nationwide.
The plant's Superintendent was Gasper W. Cassio, who lived in Holyoke from 1925 to 1935. He had been taught the finer points of broom manufacturing by Homer Cook of the Cook Broom Manufacturing Co. of North Hadley, one of the nation's first industrial broom producers. Mr. Cassio was later employed by Stewart Young of Young Broom, who also had worked for Mr. Cook.
Mr. Cassio's assistants were his son, Edward Cassio, and Edward Sawyer, the latter of whom had experience with the Holyoke Broom Works and Young Broom, and later joined the Condon Broom Manufacturing Company.
The company continued for about 10 years, last appearing in the Holyoke City Directory in 1959.
Citations:
Newspapers.com (paid subscription): Citations: Holyoke (Massachusetts) Transcript & Transcript-Telegram; publication dates and pages are shown.
Price & Lee Holyoke (Massachusetts) City Directories.
No comments:
Post a Comment