There are few things more strongly associated with Halloween than witches flying across the night sky on broomsticks. And across the country, stores sell brooms for seasonal decoration or as part of witch costumes. But for many in the region, brooms aren’t just for Halloween or sweeping the floor: they can be works of art worthy of hanging on the wall year-round.
Curt Cable is a broom maker who runs Hollow Hand Crafts out of his log cabin workshop in southeast Ohio. For him, broom making is a family tradition: he remembers his parents growing broomcorn on their homestead. They would take it to a local shop for production.
“They would make up a couple dozen brooms,” Cable said. “They might keep six or eight for pay for making the brooms, and you got the rest.”
Before modern machinery and mass-production, brooms were made by hand by weaving and stitching broomcorn together, layer by layer around a handle. Broomcorn isn’t sweet corn, it’s a type of grain called sorghum which was brought to North America from Africa during the slave trade.
As a child, Cable didn’t think much of the process — brooms were just for sweeping the floor. He instead focused on woodworking as a teenager, but he says it wasn’t quite the right fit for him as a young adult.
“I was doing a few craft fairs, just with wood crafts and selling a little bit, but I felt like there was something more,” Cable said. “I met a broom maker at the Backwoods Fest in Thornville one fall — just using real simple tools — and the art really intrigued me.”
Cable says it’s tradition among broom makers to never turn down someone who is interested in learning the craft. It’s how the tradition continues. The broom maker taught Cable, who has now taught many others.
A living tradition
Aaron Beale is the associate vice president of student craft at Berea College in Kentucky. The college has a thriving broom making shop, which was started around 100 years ago as a way to employ students when the farming season was over. The college has become known for brooms made from vividly dyed broomcorn. Beale says finding beauty in the mundane is part of why people still choose hand-crafted brooms when they could easily buy a mass-produced one for cheap.
“Sometimes it comes from a desire to fill one's home with art because of the way that that nourishes someone's soul or just emotional wellbeing,” Beale said.
Quality is also a factor.
“Factory brooms are made to do a job as cheaply as they can for a short period of time and then you go and buy another one the next year when yours starts to lose bristles, fall apart and degrade,” Beale said. “That's not the artisanal approach to making anything.”
Artists like Cable and the broom makers at Berea College took the humble broom and turned it into a piece to be displayed and used. And Cable says the artform is still evolving.
“The history of the broom in the United States is still being written as we go forward,” Cable said.
Cable’s style of broom making has grown more artistic, with intricate weaves and handles made from unusual materials like antlers or an animal’s jaw bone. His favorite are what he calls “twisty sticks”: sticks he finds in the forest that have deep grooves from where vines have twisted around the branches.
The spiritual side of brooms
The artistic expression in his work is thanks in part to training under other broom makers. But he is also a pastor, and believes there is a spiritual reason for his artistic evolution.
“When I go to the studio I'm getting more and more serious about inviting the creativity of God to work through me,” Cable said.
Brooms of course have a long history with another form of spiritual practice.
James Dillard owns a metaphysical supply shop in Columbus. He sells brooms for people to use in rituals associated with different pagan practices: Dillard is a Druid and says brooms clean a space spiritually, the same way they clean floors.
“You're cleansing that space and preparing that space to get ready to do more work or heavier lifting work,” Dillard said. “What you'll find in most things is if it does it in the mundane world it probably does it in the spiritual world.”
Dillard said that the idea of witches riding brooms could come from an old ritual for a bountiful growing season.
“In some traditions women would ride the broom,” Dillard said. “They would jump through the fields on their broom because there's a lot of associations with brooms and fertility and by jumping, the higher they jump the higher the crops would grow.”
Curt Cable says he’s sold brooms to people for rituals, but as a pastor it’s not something he markets his product towards. For him, brooms are still about the meeting of practical use and art. That’s especially true in the Appalachian region where the generations preceding Cable lived simply.
“But they could go out in the woods and find a beautiful twisty stick and make a broom out of it,” Cable said. “And it would bring them joy every time they looked at it. I think it's an example of the purest art ever.”
