Broom Corn: The Sorghum Variety That Built an American Industry, Now on Everyone's Mantel
Benjamin Franklin is the reason broom corn grows in American fields at all, or so the story goes: a whisk broom imported from India supposedly had a single stray seed caught in its bristles, and Franklin planted it in his Philadelphia garden out of curiosity. Whether or not that particular seed is real, broom corn — which isn't corn at all, but a variety of sorghum grown for its long, wiry seed head rather than its grain — was a genuine American cash crop by the early 1800s, and it built an entire cottage industry around it.
From Utility Crop to Design Object
Shaker communities in New England are usually credited with inventing the flat broom as we know it, clamping the sorghum bristles under tension so they'd sweep a floor instead of just pushing dust around it. By the 1850s, broom corn was a serious commodity, with entire towns in Illinois and Oklahoma built around broom factories that bought a farmer's whole crop at harvest. The plant itself is almost absurdly decorative once you stop thinking of it as raw material: each stalk ends in a burst of fine, curling seed branches that dry to a warm amber-to-chestnut color and hold their shape for years without shattering.
That durability is exactly why it's turned up again, not in a broom closet but standing in a tall crock by a fireplace or gathered into a loose bundle on a farmhouse table. Its texture reads as wild and a little unruly next to the stiffer geometry of dried wheat, which is part of the appeal — a bundle of broom corn softens a room the way a good, slightly overgrown houseplant does.
How to Actually Use It
A single bundle, unwrapped and fanned out at the base, makes a full urn arrangement on its own — no filler flowers required, though it pairs easily with bearded wheat for more textural contrast, the wheat's stiff, bristled heads playing against broom corn's looser curl. It also works split into smaller clusters tucked into a wreath form, or laid flat along a mantel with a few stems of dried yarrow woven through for color. Because the seed heads are genuinely sturdy — they were bred for a job, after all — a bundle bought this month will likely still be holding its shape when broom corn comes back around next fall, one more small, useful thing this particular plant has always been good at.