Tuscola: Broom Corn Capital

Tuscola, Illinois, was platted in eighteen fifty-seven by surveyor Henry Clay Niles along the Illinois Central Railroad in Douglas County and incorporated in eighteen fifty-nine. What made it distinctive was broom corn, a tall sorghum relative whose stiff fibers were cut, dried, and bundled into brooms. By the late eighteen hundreds, the fields around Tuscola were among the most productive broom corn districts in the state, and the town became a processing and shipping hub for the crop.

The Libman Company, a cleaning-tool maker founded in Chicago in eighteen ninety-six, has its headquarters in nearby Arcola today and employs about seven hundred people there. The brooms are different now but the supply chain connecting central Illinois fields to American closets runs through much the same ground it always did.