A century, and even as late as half a century ago, many a farmer’s son (and daughter too) throughout New England earned his or her first spending-money by making birch brooms for the country stores, from whence they were sent to the large cities, especially Boston, where there was a constant demand for them. In Northampton, about 1790, one shopkeeper kept as many as seven or eight hundred of these brooms on hand at one time. The boys and girls did not grow rich very fast at broom-making. Throughout Vermont, fifty years ago, the uniform price paid to the maker for these brooms was but six cents apiece, and as he had to work at least three evenings to make one broom,--to say nothing of the time spent in selecting and cutting the birch-tree,--it was not so profitable an industry as gathering beech-nuts at a dollar a bushel. Major Robert Randolph told in fashionable London circles, that about the year 1750, he carried many a load of these birch brooms on his back ten miles to Concord, that he might thus earn a few shillings. Such brooms were known by different names in different localities: birch brooms, splinter brooms, and Indian brooms. The Indians were very proficient in making them, and it is said invented them. This can readily be believed, for like birch-bark canoes and snowshoes, they are examples of perfection in utility and in the employment of native materials. Squaws wandered over certain portions of the country bearing brooms on their backs, peddling them from house to house for ninepence apiece and a drink of cider. In 1806, one minister of Haverhill, New Hampshire, had two of these brooms given to him as a marriage fee. When a Hadley man planted broom corn in 1797, and made corn brooms to sell, he was scornfully met with the remark that broom-making was work for Indians and boys. It was long ere his industry crowded out the sturdy birch brooms.