Shaker Broom Vise

The Shaker broom vise is a wooden tool invented in 1798 by Theodore Bates, a Shaker living from 1762 to 1846 at the Watervliet Shaker community, to press the traditionally round bundle of broom corn at the head of a broom into a flat shape, a change that made the broom noticeably more effective at sweeping into corners and along floors. The device is built from two vertical wooden planks, one fixed permanently to its base and the other hinged to swing toward it, and it carries two sets of jaws, a lower pair shaped to grip the round broom head as it is loaded and an upper pair of flat jaws that compress the broom corn once a long wooden handled toggle mechanism is used to clamp the assembly shut; after flattening, heavy twine was sewn through the broom corn to hold its new flat shape permanently. This flat broom design and the vise used to make it are described as the only major change to the broom since the invention of the broom making machine, and the innovation helped Shaker communities dominate American broom production through the first half of the nineteenth century, with Massachusetts alone reported to be producing more than one million brooms a year by 1850, some of them exported as far as South America.