From seed to sweep: Fifth graders at Hartsbrook School make brooms from scratch

Fifth grader Hattie Griffin rubs the soft, thin tree trunk with one piece of sandpaper before switching to a different piece with a softer grit, hoping to make her already-velvety broom handle even smoother.

“I had a good idea that the rest of the broom would take a long, long time, but the sanding I didn’t think would take this long,” Hattie said.

A couple weeks prior, she had journeyed with the rest of her class from The Hartsbook School in Hadley to Practical Arts teacher Katharine Payne’s backyard in Hatfield to pick the young tree she’d work with over the next two months. Hattie gravitated towards a tree with several knobs and twists in its trunk; it seemed fun to work with and “just felt right,” she said.

Her classmate Marika Bellis choose a tall beech tree, which now sticks out under her armpit as she shaves off the bark using a variety of knives and files. Every mark Marika makes would need to be sanded out, a procedure that took Hattie five or six classes to finish.

“When I sand, it’s for feel and look,” Marika said. “If it feels nice, great. But if it doesn’t look the best, I still need to take all those marks off.”

Each fifth grade student at Hartsbook, an agricultural private school, creates a kitchen broom with locally-grown broomcorn — a type of sorghum that’s particularly good for sweeping dirt and dust.

It’s a tedious process: it takes patience to debark, sand and oil the wood; strength to bind the broomcorn to their brooms; and precision to stitch and trim the fibers into a flat triangle shape. Yet Payne knows her students can handle the challenge, and they couldn’t be more proud of their creations.

“There is a process that is set up for the purpose of the material and what you're making out of it,” Payne said. “If you try to rush it or skimp out, it’s going to show. It becomes your teacher, as opposed to the human next to you, and to be able to learn from those experiences, those are good lessons.”

The Hartbrook School teaches broom making as both a practical craft and homage to Hadley’s colonial broom makers and factories. Hadley farmer Levi Dickenson created the first broom out of broomcorn in 1797. When his wife told her neighbors about the broom’s ability to trap dust better than most other fibers, broomcorn quickly became the main material for brooms, and Hadley soil was provide the perfect growing conditions for the grass. Hadley remained a broom-making capital into the end of the 19th century.

“The preparing of the broomcorn we do as a class,” Payne said. “We’ll have a whole factory here, there are different stations and it’s really fun and exciting.”

Using their agricultural resources, the Hartbrook students plant the broomcorn for their brooms the previous spring. The grass spouts over summer just in time for a fall harvest and drying period. Each broom contains about 30 stalks of broomcorn, which includes both the red broomcorn grown on campus and yellow broomcorn from local farms. The students sort through the red broomcorn for the straightest pieces, popping off the hard, ripe seeds for next year’s crop. While deseeding, the broomcorn itch may crawl up the back of their necks as the seeds release an irriating dust into the air.

“I love that they have to experience the hardship of the manufacturing side of things,” Payne said. “And just recognize what it would be like in a broom factory where they did this all day.”

Properly binding the broomcorn to the broom ensures the bristles won’t fall out as students sweep, but it’s by far the most strenuous part of broom making. Students feed a spool of twine through a hole in a wooden paddle, and tie the twine to the broom handle. While standing on the paddle to keep the twine tight, students simultaneously wrap a bundle of broomcorn to the handle with the thread, and pull up. Payne said they continue to maintain the tension of the twine while wrapping and pulling over and over, or the binding will be too loose.

“It was hard at first because you have to put the corn at the end of the handle and tie it tight and pull up,” student Ellie Taylor said. “It hurts you back because you’re bending over. It’s hard, but fun.”

Even with the physical strength required to bind, Ella Kermensky-Dizdarevic said stitching was the most difficult step because she needed to undo and redo several of her stitches. The bound brooms are placed in a wooden clamp to fan out the bristles, allowing students to run a needle and thread through the fibers. The key is to keep the stitches tight and evenly spaced, something Hattie cannot wait to try.

“I think it’s going to be kind of tricky, but you’re almost at the end,” Hattie said. “It completes the broom.”

Not only do the Hartsbook students make their brooms, but they also make the paddles, clamps and needles used during the process. Payne structures her lessons around the purpose of tools: everything in the room has a use, and it’s constructed to serve that intention.

“That kind of underlies all of the projects that we make, that it’s not just something random, or for the sake of ‘I like it.’ You're taking the material and transforming it into something that’s going to be serving,” she said.

Each final product is unquie. The knots and twists of the wood are on full display. Students add personal touches by choosing the stitching color, wood oil type and even wood burned designs. Marika wants Hattie to sketch an olive branch to wood burn into her broom. Hattie has already decided to put a sunflower on her handle.

It’s a delight, Payne said, seeing her student’s faces light up the first time they sweep with their broom.

“They follow the process from the seed to the finished broom,” Payne said. “They don't necessarily think about that so much right then and there, probably as much as we do, but brooms last, and for them to have gone through that experience, at some point they’ll recognize that process because it lives in them.”

Emilee Klein can be reached at [email protected].