This fifth-generation family business in rural Pa. is making 4,500 brooms for Salem

LOPEZ, Pa. — It’s the witching season, and witches are busy.

They’re too swept up with casting spells and sourcing newt eyes to bind their own artisanal brooms. That’s why, last winter, a store owner in Salem, Mass., the world’s witchiest city, traveled to Sullivan County, one of Pennsylvania’s most rural counties, to order 4,500 handmade brooms from the Meckley family.

The Meckleys have been crafting brooms for over a century, and what started as a hobby to make barter currency back in Lancaster County has become a booming, full-time broom business here in the tiny town of Lopez. On a mid-September afternoon, a skeleton crew of two — Briana Meckley and her husband, Brett — were still shipping brooms off to Salem.

It’s an order they’d been working on since the winter.

“It is going well, other than the fact that we don’t sleep a lot,” Briana Meckley said. “This is definitely the broom makers’ season.”

It was Randy Meckley, Brett’s father, who inspired Briana to turn the family hobby into a business around 2017. She said the family’s “old men” usually made the brooms, something to do after retirement. Sometimes, the broom-making equipment went dormant for a few years, she said, collecting dust in family barns until someone decided to take it up again.

“It was a barter/trade side hustle, something that helped get the family through the years of the Great Depression,” she added.

Randy took up broom making again after retiring from delivering mail for the U.S. Postal Service, Briana said. He was making so many brooms in retirement that he began giving them away to family and taking them to craft shows.

Briana learned the skill by watching him and caught on quickly.

“I was a bookkeeper by trade,” she said, laughing.

Briana, 51, and Brett, 52, took the brooms online and to more craft shows and fall festivals. They expanded the offerings and added color, just a hint of orange at first. Randy was skeptical: the Meckleys had only made natural-looking brooms for decades.

The public loved them, and soon, a whole rainbow of colors was offered.

“I brought the color into the family,” Briana said. “Things just exploded with the color.”

The business grew so quickly that Briana and Brett, an electrician, retired and moved from Lancaster County to their vacation cabin in Lopez full-time, where they had room to expand.

The Meckleys sell the brooms on their website. A standard sweeping broom in almost any color — rust, kelly green, purple — starts at $80. Smaller whisks start at $37. They also make cobweb brooms, dustpans, cake testers, and “besoms,” the traditional word for a witch’s broom.

On Etsy, the Meckleys have made close to 20,000 sales.

“No one possibly thought we could sell this many brooms,” Brett said.

In Lopez, cauldrons of black dye bubbled in the yard last month, waiting to color the Mexican broom corn the Meckleys import in bulk. Shelves of the colored bristles line an entire wall in a new warehouse.

The Meckleys mostly use antique equipment, like the foot-powered kickwinder, and keep their eyes out for any that pop up in auctions or stores. They recently bought a newer broom-stitching machine from the early 1900s, but they haven’t gotten around to using it yet.

It sat in a corner, looking a bit scary.

“You can see it was made before OSHA,” Brett said, referring to the U.S. Department of Labor’s regulatory agency that ensures safe working conditions for employees.

Box after box of brooms sat nearby, ready to ship to Salem, but Witch City Broom Co., the store that ordered them, didn’t have room yet.

“The basement of my house is filled with them,” said store owner Beth Crowley in early October. “But they’re flying off the shelves.”

The Meckleys enlist their relatives and two children who live hours away from Lopez to help if they’re “panicked.”

“I will take them boxes of handles and say ‘make brooms,’” Briana said of her children.

Down in Lancaster County, Randy, 77, has made more than 10,000 brooms with a kickwinder that’s been in the family for 150 years.

The Meckleys also sell broom parts, so people can craft their own, and wholesale dyed broom corn for stores. That’s how Beth Crowley of Witch City Broom Co. came to learn about the Meckleys’ process.

“We realized, when we came to Lopez and watched them in action, that they could make brooms five times faster than we could,” Crowley said. “The next day, our store manager came up with a genius idea: let them make the brooms for us.”

Despite being in the middle of nowhere, the Meckleys opened a small storefront and workshop on their property in 2024. They’re just down the road from Ricketts Glen State Park, a popular destination all summer, and they see plenty of customers and students.

Brooms sell for roughly half the price in-store, if you’re willing to drive the 150 miles from the Philadelphia region.

The Meckleys would like that.

“You don’t see a lot of people up here,” she said. “It’s not a convenience store, obviously, but people see the sign on the road and come in.”

That sign makes it plain: “We really do just make brooms!”

One family pulled in before Briana finished her sentence.

Shoppers are instantly curious, and Briana explains it all. She tells them where the various pieces come from, how Brett scarifies the sticks, creating a cracked, lightning pattern with dangerous electric currents. She also discussed the proper way to store a broom when you’re not using it so the bristles don’t stretch out and lose their lifting power.

“Always hang a broom,” Briana told the family.

The Skovronski family, from Boyertown, were visiting their hunting cabin nearby, and one of their guests was from Australia. They spent about $40.

“Thanks for the history lesson,” Betty Jean Skovronski said as the family left.

Briana, her hands and arms sore from making thousands of brooms, got back to work. The Meckleys shipped 2,000 brooms to Salem last year, and doubling that order was tough.

But what if Salem wanted to double the order next year?

Brett said it would take more automation, an employee or two, and maybe that scary machine in the warehouse.

Briana couldn’t conjure the thought.

“I … uh … no,” she said. “Not 8,000.”