Broomcorn grows a long seed head but doesn’t produce cobs and kernels. The crop might have first been grown in Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1773, but Levi Dickinson claimed to have been the first to grow it there in the 1790s.  The market for brooms made of broomcorn surged in the mid-1820s and by the 1860s, brooms from Hampshire and Franklin counties were being widely distributed.  After the Civil War a better quality of broomcorn from the Midwest cut into the Massachusetts industry and by the 1880s, local production was in a steep decline and had basically disappeared by 1900. The broom shown here is a modern reproduction.