

While a sorghum-made, mass-produced, reliable broom was nice and all, it still wasn’t particularly efficient. By the 1830s, broom factories popped up across the northeast.

By 1810, Levi Dickenson had also invented a foot-treadle broom machine, which helped mass produce brooms. He quickly grew more sorghum to keep up with the broom demand. Levi’s wife loved it and so did neighbors, family, and friends. These stalks are tough, resilient, and quick to dry – in other words, perfect for a broom. In fact, sugar cane is a type of sorghum. So, Levi, being a farmer in Hadley, Massachusetts and all, made a broom for her out of his toughest grains, a variety of sorghum, a stalk of grain used to feed livestock and used in the production of alcohol. The story goes that Levi’s wife complained often about the brittleness and inefficiency of her handmade broom. However, it actually wasn’t until Levi Dickenson’s 1797 advancement of the broom that it began to become mass produced. Brooms, in their most rudimentary and handmade form, were the common tool of choice for accomplishing this. People have been cleaning the floors of their domiciles for thousands of years. Here, now, is that history – how the vacuum cleaner came to be. This fascinating museum takes visitors through the rather unknown history of America’s favorite cleaning machine. Tom Gasko is the curator there and will delightfully show off his massive collection of cleaners, ranging from ones from the 1910s all the way to a vacuum cleaner that joined George W. Sitting on the bottom level of this massive factory is something even more unique, a museum dedicated solely to vacuum cleaners. Despite this town having only about four thousand people, it is proudly the location for the Tacony Corporation’s vacuum cleaner factory, a giant facility that produces cleaners for 13 different lines and brands, including for Maytag, Riccar, and Simplicity. Louis and right off of Route 66, sits the small town of St. In central Missouri, about hundred miles from St.
