Spring 2025
To paraphrase Senegalese environmentalist Baba Dioum: “we won’t save the places that we don’t love, we can’t love the places we don’t know, and we don’t know the places that we haven’t learned.”1 Learning the stories of a place helps us know where we are from so that we can actually be from a place with unique traditions rather than from somewhere with ubiquitous strip malls and housing developments. This learning quest can show us how to live and move in the present day world, and it can help us love and care for the land we inhabit. Two months before his death in 1940, Judge Ed Walker of Lebanon, TN, lamented in an interview “during the lifetime of one generation husking bees, pulling taffy, folk songs, tall stories and planting signs have become curiosities.”2 Judge Walker had witnessed how easy it is to lose significant cultural observances only just in the span of one generation if they are not retained in collective practice or memory. Cue: Wilson County, Tennessee.
“I wanted my kids to be of here and to know what that meant and to understand why that’s different, and when we get on a plane and go visit somewhere else, why is that place different than where we are from. That sense of identity and place has always been important to me… so whenever these opportunities at Fiddler’s Grove come along to help folks preserve their family’s history and their neighborhood’s history, I jump on it because they don’t have much time. Every volunteer and person I’ve ever met that had a story to tell that is over 90 is now dead. And when those things pass on if you don’t do something about it, it evaporates and then you’re trying to remember it and sometimes memory doesn’t work right. It’s a relay race. If one person doesn’t pass the baton, it doesn’t matter how fast you are… you can’t win.”
Scott Selliers, Fiddler’s Grove Board
Not far from the music of Nashville lies Wilson County, Tennessee, a land made up of hills and hollers, cedar glades and eastern red cedar trees. When Ms. Mary Dicken Morriss-Smith traveled to Lebanon in the fall of 1812, she found large ash, cedar, hickory and “sugar” trees (likely sugar maples). She had never seen a cedar tree before nor had she seen the architecture used at the time, which was a hued log house painted with lime. This is because Wilson Co. had large limestone deposits; in the 1920s, a large deposit was found on Rev. WJ Watson’s land near Hunter’s Point. It was ground, sacked, and used for high grade fertilizer.3
Additionally, sheep thrived on Wilson Co.’s karst, stony terrain, and in the 1940s, Wilson Co. led Tennessee in sheep production.4 Lebanon was widely known for its wool production through the Lebanon Woolen Mills. Another claim-to-fame from Wilson Co. involves the owner of Cloverdale Farm, William Haskell Neal, who is in the TN Hall of Fame. Haskell was a geneticist who bred corn varieties and was the first to breed a variety of corn which had two ears, which immediately doubled a farmer’s corn output. This new and widely popular variety of corn was called Paymaster corn. There are still saw and corn mill sites that can be visited, like a 230 year old site on Cedar Creek.
Wilson County is not just rich in limestone, it has rich foodway traditions. One example is sorghum; there is a deep and long historical tradition in Wilson Co. of using sorghum as a sweetener instead of sugar or molasses. It has a unique flavor that would have influenced recipes that it served to sweeten.5 Still today in Monterey, TN, Mark Guenther and family keep the tradition of sorghum alive. Every year, they travel to the Wilson Co./ TN State Fair to display the old way of making sorghum with the power of a mule.
Another interesting foodway from Wilson Co. is the drinking of “pink tea.” In the 1800s in Wilson Co., folks would make what they called “pink tea” out of boiled bright red sumac berries that appear in the late summer/early fall in order to ingest vitamin C. At the time, it was one of the only viable sources of vitamin C available in the eastern woodlands because not many native fruits grew in the area. This was a curative drink to treat what they would not have known was scurvy, a disease caused by the deficiency of vitamin C; they simply knew that if their eyes turned slightly yellow, and they began languishing with wounds which were not healing, that if they drank “pink tea,” they would feel better. 6
Creative recipes which were sourced from the land covered Wilson Co. tables. As evidenced by Mrs. Reese Lillard of Lebanon in a revised 1922 cookbook (originally written in 1912), Wilson Co. boasted unique recipes like Shad Roe Croquettes, Green Pea soup, Creamed Tripe, Sweetbread Patties, Hog Head Cheese, Pig Feet, Chestnut stuffing, Turnip Greens with Hog Jowl, Soda-biscuits and Hoe-cakes. Tom Hunter who is from the Rice family, a long-time Wilson Co. family, shared about visiting his uncle Ed Rice’s farm in Gladeville when he was a child. The Rice Farm was purchased from a lawyer and land speculator named Andrew Jackson. Coincidentally, this year, the Rice/ Hunter family will celebrate 225 years of owning their farm! When Tom would visit the Rice farm for Sunday lunch after church, they would have a massive spread of Aunt Tardy’s fried chicken, pork chops, country ham, smoked sausage, roast beef, whatever vegetable that was ripe from the garden, as well as cornbread, corn muffins, and baked bread. To top it off, they would have pies, cobblers, and cakes for dessert. Tom reminisces: “it was unbelievable; I was so happy… it was like going to the Waltons, you left with a warm feeling in the stomach and in the heart. It was awesome and it made a big impression on me.”7 The central table seemed to serve more than a holder of food; it functioned as a way for friends and family to share their lives together.
Wilson Co. not only had tasty recipes sourced from the land, but wonderful residents who worked hard and took care of each other through food. Mrs. Ruth Wharton, whose parents AC and Mary Wharton ran the Wharton Grocery Store in Lebanon for many years, described her parents as folks who worked hard growing a garden and raising chickens and hogs to supply the store. AC and Mary were good folks who took care of their family, sold pies for the local band to raise money for band uniforms, and cared for their elderly neighbors like Ma Hester, who they’d make sure had enough kindling for her fire. Any of Ruth’s school friends who did not have much to eat could come by and ask: “Mrs. Mary, what you got cooking in the pot today?" And they were
welcome to it.8 Mary Wharton was an expert cook and kept traditions like hot water cornbread, greens seasoned with fat back, black eyed peas, string beans, boiled custard, and pound cake with caramel frosting alive on her table. Ruth recalled her Sunday lunches after church on Sugar Flat, noting that families would bring picnics to each other in baskets with tablecloths within; each family would bring dishes that they were known to be good at cooking.
In a beautiful move to connect the past with the future, in the “BeHealthy” kids camp that occurs each summer at Fiddler’s Grove, children were given purple hull pea seeds to grow from Mary Wharton’s freezer that were 40+ years old. This camp is run by Alex and Shené Scott who started Vine Branch Fellowship (VBF) which offers programming and healthy food access for low-income groups in Wilson Co. This amazing couple has started several school and community gardens in Lebanon, teaching children how to grow healthy food, while meanwhile also providing nutrition and cooking classes. In speaking about why he started VBF, Alex shared: “VBF grew out of our love for kids and gardening… the easiest way to affect change is kids!” Shené, who is a teacher by profession, loves showing children how to grow food: “you can grow in a bucket, in a container, in a trashcan— just put holes in the bottom of it… no matter where you live, you can still grow.”9 Alex and Shené are carrying on a vital tradition that was beginning to dwindle in Wilson Co. — how to grow your own food.
Teaching children how to grow their own food in the village of historic buildings at Fiddler’s Grove is not all that different from the first home demonstration clubs which came to Wilson Co. in 1913 in the Oakland community. In 1917, Mrs. Ilah Polhill who was the home demonstration agent worked with school-aged girls in forming “tomato clubs” where they would learn to grow tomatoes and how to can them together. In a powerful way, the Scotts are continuing a 110-year-old tradition in Wilson Co.
Connecting yesteryear Wilson Co. with present day practices is necessary and good because it carries over decades-even-centuries-old well-proven traditions that benefit the health of the community and individuals within. The Wilson Co. Cast Iron Community is one group who does this work, standing in the gap between past food traditions and those of 2025, keeping the traditions of cast iron cooking alive in Wilson Co. More than cooking, they invite folks around a large kettle formerly used to render pig lard for delicious cooking demonstrations. People flock around the kettle to share their stories of beloved ancestors who they remember using cast iron to cook for them. Scott Selliers, one of the four leaders of the group said it best: “The cast iron isn’t really about cast iron, it’s really about people around a fire talking and getting to know each other and telling the stories about what their grandma cooked, and what their uncle used to say. Those little details are that sense of place I am talking about. And I have found someone of them that I haven’t seen anywhere else.”10 The sense of place and host of stories that the group is helping Wilson Co. remember is so vital.
When creating the Wilson Co. Cast Iron Community on Facebook, group founder, Dave Stout shared:
“We found out that this really is a fantastic way to keep a culture alive that was going too quickly— it’s already disappearing…I’m sold on the idea that deep down in somebody’s heart, they know that they are keeping something alive that would disappear and that’s the culture of cooking with a fantastic cookware that your Granny and aunt used. So that was my main reason for starting the group and we’ve got over 1000 members now…That’s why cast iron is so important. Just like the Sunset Restaurant that used to be here…it’s another car wash. Those places will never ever be around again. There is power in the subject. What in the world can anybody talk about cast iron? You’d be surprised at how many people come up and say the same story…everybody is really connected. Once it’s brought up, they start listening to the stories that they’re still tied to in their minds and their hearts, but they just don’t think about this anymore. That’s just power in being able to connect with others. It’s kinda fun!”11
In a time when folks are very divided, this group centered around the yesteryear traditions of cast iron is fostering a beautiful present-day community around food in Wilson Co. Wilson Co. is a place to be from. It has stories of weddings celebrated and loved ones grieved at funerals. It holds recipes which are stories of a long agricultural history. It holds the successes and mistakes of its foremothers and forefathers. It holds stories of the community coming together around a table for Sunday dinner. It holds memories of loved ones who are now ancestors. The invitation is extended to all of us to get to know these stories of where we are from, to carry the baton in keeping them alive whether it is teaching kids how to plant purple hull peas or cooking potato soup in a large cast iron kettle while remembering our grannies. In all these efforts, we will discover the beauty and good fortune of being from Wilson Co., Tennessee.
1 https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6430296-in-the-end-we-will-conserve-only-what-we-love
2 Lebanon Democrat, 15 February 1951.
3 The Lebanon Democrat, 7 June 1923.
4 The Lebanon Democrat, 11 July 1948.
5 Interview with Scott Selliers, 24 February 2025.
6 Interview with Scott Selliers, 24 February 2025.
7 Interview with Tom Hunter, 27 March 2025.
8 Interview with Ruth Wharton, 3 March 2025.
9 Interview with Alex and Shené Scott, 7 April 2025.
10 Interview with Scott Selliers, 24 February 2025.
11 Interview with Dave Stout, 12 April 2025.
Southwest Tennessee is currently experiencing a third wave of appreciation for handmade brooms. The first happened at the turn of the 20th century as Will Hockaday and other craftsmen began making brooms in the region’s do-it-yourself version of an industrial revolution. The second came about 70 years later when Jack Martin, Will Hockaday’s great-grandson, waged a surprisingly effective campaign to preserve that family’s broom making tradition. And now, Martin is at it again, reviving McNairy County’s Broomcorn Festival after a hiatus of 10 years.
The Hockaday/Martin story secured McNairy County’s reputation as the Tennessee’s premier broom making community, but the Hockadays were just one of many farm families in the region independently producing handmade brooms through much of the 20th Century. McNairy County is at the geographic center of the tradition, but families from neighboring counties were also known to engage in broom making as a primary vocation or sideline to subsistence farming. At one time, a dozen or more small broom operations flourished in Southwest Tennessee counties, many with connections to the McNairy County craftsmen.
Unfortunately, very little of that legacy now survives. Jack Martins are hard to come by.
The broom numbers among humanity’s oldest tools. Prior to the Industrial Revolution brooms were made with materials and methods dating to antiquity. A variety of natural fibers including sedge, grasses, grain stalk, twig— whatever was at hand really—were bound or woven to form a primitive broom. A more refined version, sometimes called a “turkey wing” broom, is often associated with Appalachian culture, but the craft really came into its own with the introduction of commercially available broom making equipment.
The U.S. patent office recorded dozens of applications for various broom making machines from the mid to late 19th Century. Many of these were practical, affordable, and intuitive to use, making them popular with individual craftsmen as well as larger broom making operations. Most were adapted from Shaker innovations like the afoot-treadle winding benches to wire broomcorn to a handle, and vise-like broom presses to hold it in place while stitching. These simple machines dramatically improved the broom maker’s efficiency. A number of mass-produced threshing machines to comb and deseed broomcorn, and sheers to cut the sweeping edge also came into widespread use.
Even though these machines were the product of the Industrial Revolution, the methods still bore the indelible stamp of time-honored folk practices. The innovations made it possible for a single maker to quickly produce sturdy, reliable brooms in quantities sufficient for sale or trade. The result was an explosion in U.S. broomcorn and broom production from the immediate postbellum period well into the 20th Century.
Why McNairy County was a hub of broom making is less clear, but a number of individual craftsmen and families (and at least one light industrial operation) were producing brooms on various scales in that period. These were mostly farm families who made brooms on the side, but some fared better with the broom trade than conventional agriculture. The need for broomcorn, however, assured operations were never far removed from the fields.
Locally made brooms were being wholesaled in bulk—typically by the dozen—at the turn of the century and likely earlier. In Selmer, the McNairy County seat, brooms were touted in local advertisements for superior quality and value tied to local tradition. One 1903 Independent Appeal ad read, “Made in McNairy and of McNairy corn; better and cheaper than any brought on.”
The brooms in question were likely produced by a single family or locally owned factory, but an informal co-op of individual craftsmen is not out of the question. Whatever the case, it is the earliest written documentation of McNairy County’s reputation for quality broom making. Oral history is another matter.
Some have speculated that the local broom tradition is, quite literally, rooted in the soil. Hilly terrain and compacted red clay render large swaths of McNairy County capable of producing good timber and not much else. Certain types of broomcorn—taxonomically, a variety of sorghum—can, however, thrive in poor, well-drained soil, and McNairy County traditionally harvested a fair amount of it.
Most broom crafters in the region grew their own broomcorn but they were hardly unique in that regard. At the height of a turn of the century surge in broomcorn culture, Tennessee was one of the nation’s top ten producers, and the only Southern state growing it in significant quantity. Even so, the state’s larger commercial operations were importing broomcorn to meet demand. The Midwest and Plains States were the largest domestic producers, but by midcentury the boom was mostly over. As the century wore on, changing climate and shifting labor markets made U.S. makers increasingly reliant on broomcorn from Mexico.
Simple geography may have been as important as anything in the development of the cottage broom industry in McNairy County. A mill in neighboring Alcorn County, Mississippi, produced broom and mop handles on a relatively large scale through most of the 20th Century, and mop yarn (many broom makers offered a line of mops) could be acquired in Gibson County, Tennessee. These were essential vendors, and McNairy County was centrally located with good road and rail access to both locations.
Earlier makers harvested and milled handles from their own timber, but that soon became impractical for those who were dependent on broom making for their livelihood. At least two of the traditional broom making families cited proximity to handle and yarn suppliers as a major factor in the proliferation of local broom and mop making.
Others in the region made liberal use of the Gulf, Mobile & Ohio (GM&O) Railroad to import broomcorn, lithograph labels, broom making equipment, and other essential supplies. The GM&O also offered a connection to out of state markets, and it’s probably no coincidence that Finger, McNairy, Selmer, Henderson, Jackson and Humboldt—several of West Tennessee’s broom making communities—were conveniently situated on the GM&O line.
Like many enterprises of the period, broom making graduated from a traditional handcraft to mass production almost overnight. At the same time, skilled broom makers enticed by larger markets were moving from rural farms to urban areas. Broom factories sprang up in almost every state. In Tennessee, Memphis, Jackson, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Nashville and several smaller cities boasted factories, but the growers and broom makers in the state’s rural communities were undeterred. Dozens of family operations could be found producing brooms for local sale in counties across the state. It was by no means unique, but the McNairy County broom tradition was, perhaps, among the earliest and certainly one of the most durable.
Tennessee School for the Blind in Nashville (TSB) also played a role in the spread of broom making in the state. Though none of the McNairy County makers claim a direct connection to TSB, that institution’s influence was widespread.
Well into the 20th Century, every male student entering TSB was required to learn chair caning, mattress and pillow construction, or broom making. A portion of each school day was devoted to teaching these skills, “not only to make the hands dexterous, but that he may have something to fall back upon, if better things fail,” read TSB literature. The practice of training visually impaired students in various handcrafts was relatively common in the period, and several other states supported similar vocational programs.
Broom making was apparently the craft of choice at TSB. In the 1898 session, the school’s workshop turned out a total of 959 items, 899 of which were brooms. Follow up with TSB alumni a few years later showed that a number of former students had been or were actively engaged in making brooms across the state.
After graduation TSB alumni, Henry M. Forrest, returned to his Henry County home where he made and sold brooms between odd jobs. He and former TSB classmate, Ed C. Wamble, took on a partner and started a successful broom company in Trenton, Tennessee—yet another GM&O Railroad community. Jess Qualls of Hardin County learned broom making at TSB in the mid 1930s, opening a family shop that operated in Savannah for more than 40 years. His wife and 4 sons learned the trade and recalled friendly, professional relationships with several of the McNairy County makers.
Decreasing margins, foreign competition, and new technologies conspired to bring an end to the broom boom. By the 1940s the number of U.S. broom makers had reverted to near antebellum numbers, but a strong tradition of broom crafting continued as a part of farm and community life for many McNairy County families, especially in Selmer and Finger.
Jack Martin and Hockaday Handmade Brooms are all that remain of a once thriving local industry driven by master craftsmen, family tradition, and local demand.
It’s hard to say who made and sold the first brooms in McNairy County; each broom making family has their own story. Though it is tempting to assume a common origin, a connecting thread between local makers remains obscure. Beyond the casual, neighborly contact familiar to rural communities, and the occasional exchange of ideas expected of artisans in the same trade, there is no formal relationship between McNairy County’s traditional broom making families.
As early as the 19th Century, the Hockaday, Robbins, McIntyre, Robertson, Phillips and a handful of lesser known families were actively engaged in broom making for local trade or sale. The consensus among the families is that most first generation makers were self-taught or learned their skills through observation and short apprenticeships.
It is probably not a coincidence that the tradition evolved primarily in large families where men and older boys were able to operate labor intensive winding and threshing machines, while women and smaller children learned to stitch, trim and label brooms. The demands of manually harvesting broomcorn also required more than a few hands, so these were family businesses in the truest sense of the word.
Local broom makers rarely, if ever, made use of outside labor. A number of current McNairy County residents and other southwest Tennesseans fondly recall learning to make brooms and mops in family workshops. The close-knit family and community structure has proven essential in the preservation of local broom making. Equipment, skills, and oral tradition have been handed down through three and four generations, engendering pride in many of the broom making families, as well as a considerable amount of identity for the county.
Nathan Madison Robbins relocated his family to West Tennessee from Paducah, Kentucky sometime around the turn of the 20th Century. He brought skills already familiar to many Southwest Tennesseans. Robbins tradition holds that Nathan learned broom making from the Mennonite and Amish communities of Western Kentucky. He first settled in Madison County and later relocated to Chester County, where his lifelong vocation was broom making. The family would leave an indelible stamp on the broom making tradition of Southwest Tennessee.
Nathan Robbins’s 4 sons followed him into the broom making trade. The eldest, Willie, operated a successful midsized broom factory near downtown Jackson, Tennessee. Twin brothers, James Arthur and Louis Austin, also became broom makers in the Bemis community. But it was Jay Pan, “J.P.” who linked the Robbins family to the McNairy County tradition.
J.P. Robbins was born in 1905, and with the exception of a brief stint in a Bemis cotton mill, he was a professional broom maker his entire adult life. Like most second and third generation makers, J.P. learned broom craft in his father’s shop alongside his 3 brothers J.P. worked for a time helping Willie Robbins in his Jackson-based operation where he developed the, “Lucille Broom,” a functional but decorative corn broom with a candy-striped handle and velvet accents in the windings. He also worked with the twin brothers near Bemis, where they peddled brooms in the community or supplied small retailers in nearby Jackson.
By the early 1950s, J.P. had settled his family in the Finger community of north McNairy County, within ten miles of his father’s old broom shop at Henderson, Tennessee. In 1952, he launched his own broom making venture with the opening of Finger Broom and Mop Manufacturing Company. With the help of his wife Mable and their 3 sons, Robbins began farming as much as fifty acres of broomcorn and turning out 3 or 4 dozen brooms a day— an astounding number given that Mable was still manually pressing and sewing brooms by hand.
Robbins introduced an electric winding bench, but the real increase in efficiency came with the addition of an automatic stitching machine. That innovation allowed Finger Broom and Mop to turn out as many as 20 dozen brooms a day at the height of production. Even so, J.P. and Mable often relied on the older, more reliable, methods when the new technology failed. Nathan Robbins foot-treadle machines and broom press sat in the corner of the shop, always on standby. When the finicky electric machines broke down, the couple would revert to the manual equipment until one of their industrious sons could put them back in service.
James Robbins, like his father J.P., was virtually raised in the broom shop. As a teenager, he made mops on Saturday for a quarter a dozen to earn extra spending money. He apprenticed to his father, learning the intricate skills involved with winding and stitching brooms. He harvested broomcorn, swept up around the shop, and learned the rhythms of the trade along with his brothers. Little did James know he was acquiring skills that would come in handy, time and again, over the course of the next 50 years.
James took a good production job in Jackson, Tennessee where he would remain for almost 20 years. During that time his father suffered a stroke and long recovery period which could have foreshadowed the end of Finger Broom and Mop. James and brother Jack stepped in making brooms and servicing the family’s longstanding accounts. J.P. eventually went back to work for a short time, but the brothers received valuable experience, this time in the business end of broom making.
When the plant closed in the mid 1980s, James and Jack Robbins found themselves unemployed and with no strong prospects. James’s suggestion that they try their hand at making brooms initially met with skepticism, but when nothing better turned up, brooms began to look more appealing.
The brothers refurbished the equipment and slowly worked their way back into the broom business under the family banner, Finger Broom and Mop. They purchased—among other equipment—an automatic stitcher which had once belonged to their uncle Willie and put it back into service. The years of experience repairing their father’s equipment, servicing customers, and making brooms for extra cash paid off. When Jack passed away in 1986, James took over Finger Broom and Mop, making and selling brooms from a small shop behind his Selmer home until his passing in 2024.
What may have been most unusual about James Robbins was his way of doing business. Like an old-time peddler, James filled the bed of his truck with a load of brooms every few weeks, setting out on a circuitous route to replenish stock at mom-and-pop hardware stores, farmer’s co-ops, and small town groceries in three states. His travels took him as far north as Dyersburg, Tennessee, and as far south as New Albany, Mississippi and Red Bay, Alabama. Some days would find him near Middle Tennessee, and others within a few miles of the Mississippi River.
It was a business model James inherited along with the Robbins broom making tradition. He serviced accounts his father developed while James was still a kid puttering around the broom shop for extra pocket change. That kind of long-term relationship between craftsman and vendor is something from a bygone era, but then again, so is the corn broom.
The McIntyre’s, one of McNairy County’s oldest families, began making brooms in Finger in the 1920s and continued until approximately 1970. They joined a hotbed of broom crafting activity in Northern McNairy and Chester Counties.
Finger’s industrious John R. McIntyre was an unusually inventive farmer and broom crafter who was born in1893 and orphaned during a 1907 Typhoid fever outbreak that took his mother. Having already lost his father, McIntyre found little to hold him in Finger. He sought work in a Corinth, Mississippi machine shop where his creativity and armchair engineering gave him an edge on competitors. Those traits distinguished him as a member of the McNairy County broom making community.
McIntyre returned to Finger in 1911 where he married his childhood sweetheart and began farming the ancestral land. The farm supported the family but provided little in the way of extras. By the early 1920s the ambitious McIntyre was actively looking around for something to supplement his income when he stumbled on a potential solution not far from home.
The Phillips family at nearby McNairy Station had been engaged in broom making for a number of years. McIntyre arranged a visit and liked what he saw. Drawing on the skill and creativity he had learned as a machinist, he went to work on his own designs and soon had a complete suite of broom making machines. His immediate grasp of the process and equipment required was evidenced in the efficient thresher, winding table, and broom press he made and used for the rest of his life.
Though his homemade machines were more than adequate, McIntyre—always a thinker and tinkerer—was never completely satisfied, and the equipment continued to evolve over the years. He would later purchase a few machines and tools to meet production demands, but he always preferred his own designs, even outfitting the homemade thresher and winder with electric washing machine motors when electricity came to Finger.
McIntyre began cultivating a small crop of broomcorn on his hundred acre farm, and likely paid several visits to the Phillips home to observe the finer points of the broom making art. Agribusiness continued as usual with all 6 McIntyre children pitching in, but broomcorn cultivation became increasingly important as time went by. He still considered himself a farmer, but John McIntyre began trading brooms for groceries in the Finger area and word spread that his brooms were the best around.
McIntyre reportedly had a unique way of binding broomcorn on his homemade winder that made his brooms more durable. As one family member put it, “you couldn’t beat a straw out of them.” The McIntyre name soon became synonymous with quality brooms in northern McNairy County. It would remain so for almost 50 years. The small country stores who had once accepted his brooms on trade now sought them out for resale.
When John’s youngest daughter married L.E. Talbott, a successful Finger merchant, McIntyre brooms were added to the products line at the mercantile and sent out on the Talbott peddling truck, creating even greater demand. People began showing up, unannounced, at the McIntyre home to buy brooms. Two generations of Finger residents vividly recall ranks of inverted brooms standing outside McIntyre’s Finger workshop in the early morning hours. He soaked unfinished brooms in water overnight to make the broomcorn more pliable for stitching.
Though John McIntyre taught several of his children broom making, none of them embraced it as a vocation. By the 1940s, as the McIntyre children began marrying or leaving home for outside employment, it seemed the broom business might suffer in their absence. Demand was not shrinking, and John was having a hard time keeping up. Ollie McIntyre appears to have stepped in to fill the void.
Ollie may have assisted in the broom shop prior to this time, but a photo from the 1950s clearly depicts her working, alongside John, stitching brooms in a manual press. The stitching cuffs (sometimes called sewing mittens) secured to her wrists and muscular forearms, and the confident posture at the machine are ample evidence that the photo is not posed. Like most rural women, Ollie would have been familiar with all aspects of farm life. She was certainly no stranger to the broom shop but the demands of raising and feeding 6 children while attending to her other duties would have occupied most of her time. With the children pursuing their own interests, stitching brooms was a productive use of her time, as well as a way to help John keep up production.
The McIntyres continued to make brooms through 1960s, largely without the benefit of automation. Ollie’s presence in the broom shop likely helped John prolong the tradition for 20 years or more.
By the time the McIntyre broom shop was demolished in 2007, it hadn’t turned out a broom in years. Both John and Ollie had passed away in the 1980s. Before demolition began, family members rummaged around the dilapidated structure one last time, making an interesting discovery. Several broom making tools, including the homemade thresher built by John, had been left behind. An example of a hearth broom with a dropped stitch still hung on the weatherbeaten wall.
Though the imperfection would never have affected the broom’s utility or longevity, it was a reminder that even the slightest blemish rendered a McIntyre broom unfit for sale. After all, they were more than brooms to John and Ollie McIntyre, they bore the family name.
By the late 19th Century, Selmer, Tennessee, was a boomtown. McNairy County officials had just concluded a lengthy and contentious debate that culminated in the removal of the county seat from the more populous and prosperous town of Purdy to a small settlement known as New South. The reason for the move was twofold.
First New South, which would later be named Selmer, was at the geographic center of the county. Second, and more importantly, county leaders sought to take advantage of the commercial opportunities associated with the site’s location on the Mobile & Ohio Railroad. Before the dust settled on 20 years of legal wrangling, Selmer was transformed from a sleepy hamlet into a bustling commercial center and transportation hub. Broom making played a role in Selmer’s newfound prosperity.
As early at the mid 1890’s The Selmer Broom Factory was operating in the new county seat. Since brooms were being offered wholesale at the warehouses of the local newspaper, it is possible that the publisher of the McNairy County Independent Appeal might have been a partner. Following the lead of county officials, J.W. Purviance had moved The Independent from Purdy to Selmer where he pursued various business endeavors that might have included investment in broom making.
Even with a small factory operating in the area, individual artisans continued to thrive in Selmer. Along with the Hockadays south of town, Lee Robertson was one such craftsman operating in the heart of Selmer. Born in 1852 near Tupelo, Mississippi, Robertson’s family moved to McNairy County in his youth where he spent the remainder of his life pursuing full-time broom making.
Robertson worked from a small shop at least two different homes in Selmer, first in the Oakhill area, and later northeast of town on Purdy Road. Robertson crafted brooms, possibly as early as the 1870s or 80s, but it’s not clear where he learned the trade. By the turn of the 20th Century, just as Selmer was coming into its own as a place of commerce, he had moved his family to the well-traveled road between the old and new county seats. It was the Purdy Road location where, Robertson’s grandson, Marvin Wilkes, first recalled seeing the craftsman at work.
Family members occasionally helped out in the shop combing broomcorn, but broom crafting was left to Robertson. Wilkes remembered using a homemade threshing devise, studded with nails, to deseed broomcorn for his grandfather, but the brooms were always meticulously wound and sewed by Robertson; the master craftsman apparently preferred to work alone. Extant lithograph labels announcing that each broom was proudly “manufactured by L.M. Robertson,” seem to support that claim.
Working in the days prior to rural electrification, Robertson’s brooms were completely handmade with manual machinery, and constructed of broomcorn, grown on a small patch of ground adjacent to his home. Wilkes recalled that he made two models: a small broom for light household sweeping; and a heavier one for industrial or farm use. Robertson’s brooms sold for 30 to 50 cents each.
Robertson’s shop locations—both in walking distance from downtown Selmer—allowed him to peddle brooms to residents, passengers on the GM&O Railroad, and a number of local merchants in the growing commercial district. On one such mission an oil truck backed into the 82-year-old craftsman fracturing his hip, marking the end of his broom making career.
After Robertson passed away in 1936 his broom machines were sold to help pay for his headstone and funeral expenses. His family retains a curry comb, homemade tack hammer, and a handful of lithograph broom labels that bear Robertson’s name. Fittingly, Mr. Robertson is buried at Oakhill cemetery, just across the street from his first Selmer broom shop.
By the time broom craftsman Frank Tull was born in 1878, his family had been farming a large section of northwest McNairy County, near the Rose Creek community, for at least two generations. The number of county roads bearing the Tull name speaks to the family’s longstanding influence in the vicinity of their ancestral home place.
As with others in the region, broom making was a sideline to farming for the Tulls. J.R. Tull recalled his grandfather, Frank, and uncle, Thurman Tull, crafting brooms in a dedicated workshop between his grandparent’s home and barn. One childhood memory involved accidentally setting fire to a pile of dry broomcorn trimmings outside the broom shop. The shop survived, but “the second blaze” when his father set his “britches on fire,” was the most vivid part of J.R.’s recollection.
Boyish antics aside, J.R. Tull recalled his grandparent’s generation routinely farming rows of broomcorn alongside cash crops, making a few dozen brooms through the lean winter months, and trading or selling them to local merchants. This was typical of small broom makers, as well as other agriculturally dependent folk craft. There is no record of when the practice began in the Tull family, but older family members believed it originated with Frank Tull and never recalled a time when broom craft wasn’t a rhythm of normal farm life in the Rose Creek community.
Frank and Thurman Tull were typical of McNairy County broom makers in the first half of 20th Century. They made brooms with manual equipment, likely acquired through widely available mail-order catalogues and newspaper advertisements. They took pride in the craftsmanship, and Tull brooms were made in only one model, specifically sized for household use. Frank was considered the master craftsman while Thurman apprenticed to his father in the workshop and acted as one-man salesforce.
While northeastern, south, and central portions of McNairy County boasted a number of quality makers, the Tulls form the westernmost piece of an overlapping broom map. They sold brooms in their own community, of course, but Thurman Tull branched out into Woodville in southern Chester County, Middleton and Hornsby in eastern Hardeman County, and likely parts of Tippah County Mississippi.
Frank Tull gave up broom making in the postwar period, selling his equipment to concentrate on other aspects of farming. J.R. remembered him as a doting grandfather who defended him in the flaming broomcorn incident, retaining sentimental fondness for broom crafting until he passed in 1963.
Hockaday/Martin tradition suggests that Will Hockaday fashioned functional replicas of broom making machinery out of spare and discarded farm implements, sometime around the turn of the century. That included a foot-treadle winding bench (colloquially referred to by the Hockadays as a “kicker table”) and manual broom press that Jack Martin still uses today.
Born on the family farm in 1877, Hockaday was a jack of all trades. He ran a small sawmill on the his property, and was skilled as a carpenter and blacksmith. The sturdy broom equipment he built bears a strong resemblance to commercially made machines of the era, but with subtle variations of design and functionality adapted by trial and error. It is a testament to his ingenuity and resourcefulness that these were cobbled together using only crude, newsprint renderings as a guide.
The family’s best guess is that Will Hockaday began experimenting with his machines and growing broomcorn sometime before 1910. The Hockaday Handmade Brooms slogan, “One broom at a time since 1916,” is a conservative estimate of the date the family first perfected the craft and began making brooms for sale or trade in significant quantity. Subsequent generations secured the Hockaday reputation as the county’s preeminent broom making family.
Consistent with local tradition, Will Hockaday raised a small crop of broomcorn, dried it on field racks through the fall, and made brooms in the offseason. Only a small portion of the family’s two hundred acres, southeast of Selmer, Tennessee was dedicated to growing broomcorn. Until Jack Martin revived the tradition, broom making was a side hustle for the Hockaday family.
Martin had been around farming and broom making his entire life before economic conditions forced him to seek employment outside the county in the late 1970s and early 80s. But with his grandfather’s health in decline, and the future of the family farm in question, Martin began spending as much time as he could manage back in McNairy County. He revered his grandfather and spent countless hours with him in the fields and workshop, but he never envisioned himself in a broom making career. As far as he was concerned, Jack Hockaday was the tradition bearer—he was Hockaday Brooms.
The elder Jack made brooms—primarily to trade for farm and home staples—for almost 60 years, but he didn’t necessarily identify as a broom craftsman himself. He was a simple farmer who had learned the practice of supplementing his income with brooms from his father. It so happened that the quality of his product created a local demand. The brooms just seemed to sell themselves, so he began supplying a few family-owned stores around Selmer and southern McNairy County. Though it might not have been his primary vocation, pride in the craftsmanship is evidenced by Hockaday’s practice of making wedding and housewarming gifts of his brooms.
When Hockaday’s health began to fail, he was considered selling the family broom equipment. Jack Martin stepped in to purchase the machines, partly out of nostalgia, but mainly as a means of offering finical assistance for his beloved grandfather. Soon thereafter, Martin cleared away the cobwebs and went to work in his spare time, turning out his first brooms in 1983. His apprenticeship consisted of taking apart and reconstructing a handful of brooms under his grandfather’s watchful eye. It didn’t take him long to get the hang of it.
Martin spent the next few years replenishing seed stock that had long since been depleted, producing his first crop of broomcorn in 1987. For the first time in a generation someone could say local brooms were, “made in McNairy and of McNairy corn” just as the 1903 advertisement boasted. It is a stunning achievement in light of the meager financial rewards at the time.
Martin has been known to quip that it only takes 5 months and 45 minutes to make a good broom; that is 4 months to plant and harvest the broomcorn, and 45 minutes to make each broom by hand. At a few dollars per broom, it doesn’t take a financial wizard to understand that’s not a winning formula for material gain. Martin credits his late wife, Virginia “Dee,” with recognizing the inherent value of broom making as a folk art form; one worthy of preservation.
When the couple met, Jack was working a corporate oil job in the Gulf of Mexico. On short visit home he would make a few brooms, and spend time with Dee and his family. He viewed broom making as a useful skill for which he retained a certain wistful fondness, but it was hardly a smart career choice. Jack still thought of himself as a farmer, and Dee’s growing influence was drawing him back to Tennessee, but it took bringing his future bride into the broom shop for the light to finally go on.
Dee, an accomplished blues singer with her own recording and performing career, saw the artistry in broom making where Jack had only recognized its utility. Admiring the aesthetic qualities of the broomcorn growing in the field, she coaxed Jack into the shop to show her how the raw materials could be fashioned into a broom. Reluctant at first, Martin finally got into the spirit of the exercise, and by the time the broom was finished, Dee began to see a potential solution to Jack’s employment dilemma.
Fascinated by the deftness of Jack’s skilled hands, the quality of the end product, and Jacks’s ease with the antique equipment, Dee suggested that pursuing broom making as a full-time career might not be so farfetched after all. She encouraged Jack to explore the more artistic aspects of the craft and nurtured his interest in preserving the family tradition. The couple eventually married, moved to Martin’s ancestral home-place, and worked to build the reputation of Hockaday brooms until Dee’s untimely passing in 2015.
Dee lived to see Jack Martin honored with the 2015 Tennessee Governor’s Folklife Heritage Award. The honor recognized something more than the revival of a fading craft. Hockaday Handmade Brooms and Farm has long been an agritourism draw for Southwest Tennessee and a significant source of identity for McNairy County. Jack Martin is not only a master craftsman, he is a faithful tradition bearer and skillful interpreter of his family’s legacy. By conservative estimates, he has demonstrated traditional broom making for a million school children and taken on students in the Tennessee Arts Commission’s Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program. His brooms are in the collections of prestigious cultural institutions; he has pushed utilitarian craft into the realm of folk art; and taken broom crafting in innovated new directions with the invention of Broomsticks, a popular percussion accessory made of broomcorn.
It is a smart, contemporary approach to tradition and preservation that has made Jack Martin a Tennessee treasure.
Broom making may not be the booming industry it once was in Southwest Tennessee, but no one is ready to recite the elegy just yet. The recent resurrection of the Broomcorn Festival is a sign of life. If community buzz can be trusted, it looks like the event has picked up right were it left off a decade ago.
When it was last held, the Broomcorn Festival took place at Selmer City Park to accommodate ever-increasing attendance. The enthusiastic crowds were an affirmation of Jack and Dee Martin’s vision, of course, but the location always felt a little detached from the festival’s roots. The shady park along Crooked Creek is lovely spot on a September afternoon, but there is no broomcorn swaying in the autumn breeze, no broom shop with a generational story to tell, no meaningful sense of place. So, in 2025 the Broomcorn Festival returned to the Hockaday farm where it all began.
There’s something special about being in a spot where something has been made for more than a century; something magical in knowing that the object you hold in your hand was planted, harvested, and fashioned into it’s final form in sight of where you stand. There is a palpable difference between a perfectly adequate municipal park and a farm steeped in tradition. Even if you can’t put your finger on it, you can feel it.
There is a rich vein of broom making in McNairy County, but the Broomcorn Festival does not pay homage to bygone days as much as it celebrates a living art form, one that survived and thrived against all odds. As far as Jack Martin is concerned, he is simply making good on a hundred year old promise: McNairy County brooms are still better than any brought on.
The significance that music, and the arts as a whole, have in McNairy County is common knowledge within the community and across West Tennessee. Countless tourists from around the state, country, and globe have declared McNairy County a must-see stop during their adventures; whether for the three murals reflecting the rockabilly roots in the county’s history, or stopping by Pat’s Cafe for a slug burger.
The music history in McNairy County is vast and expansive, impacting countless generations of its citizens. The County’s most significant claim to fame is rockabilly. McNairy County sits comfortably on the Tennessee-Mississippi State Line and is the key intersection on Rockabilly Highway; connecting Nashville, Jackson, Memphis, and Tupelo. McNairy was ground zero for the cultural rift that brought about rock ‘n’ roll music.
Countless rockabilly giants honed their skills and performed in and around the county. Carl Perkins frequented community jams at the Latta building in downtown Selmer. Perkins first met Elvis Presley during a performance at Bethel Springs High School in the fall of 1954, this being the King’s earliest performance outside of Memphis. Perkins even made his first known recordings in Eastview with Stanton Littlejohn. The man who gave Presley, Perkins, Cash, Lewis, and others their start, Dewey Phillips, hailed from Adamsville. The history isn’t in doubt, McNairy County has had a significant impact on music history.
However, the musical impact within the county doesn’t stop at rock ‘n’ roll. Countless genres, instruments, and voices are represented within the folds of music history in the county. A less-talked-about, but assumed common fact, is the significance of wind bands, brass bands, and other instrumental ensembles woven throughout the county’s history; and the educators surrounding it.
Wind and brass ensembles have been performing in and around McNairy County for over one hundred and fifty years. While these ensembles have been standard fixtures of events, gatherings, and community efforts, it is important that the history is preserved for future citizens, instrumentalists, and educators.
Following its founding in 1823, McNairy County began to expand. The original seat, Purdy, was a hotbed of culture and knowledge in the early days of the county's history. The town boasted a college, numerous shops, hotels, a jail, churches, and a courthouse. The city also had a brass band as early as 1871. This is the earliest known wind ensemble located in McNairy County. Following the Civil War, citizens of the county began rapidly mentioning relocating the county seat, and in 1896, citizens voted and relocated to Selmer, the current seat. During this time period, communities around the county began forming numerous ensembles, performing, and even traveling together.
By 1920, almost every community within the county’s borders was home to some sort of wind ensemble. These ensembles were mostly brass bands, better known then as cornet bands.
Adamsville had a brass band as early as 1891 and frequently performed across the river in Savannah. Savannah, a part of Hardin County, even had its own ensemble by 1871, but was defunct by 1889.
The Montezuma community in northern McNairy boasted its own cornet band as early as 1871 and performed at fairs and community gatherings well into the 1910s. One notable gathering where musical entertainment was a staple, was the annual Barbeque Festival in Finger. This festival was, and is, a staple among McNairy Countians and has been for over one hundred and fifty years.
The county seat, Selmer, also featured many ensembles and events for performances. The McNairy County Fair gave a stage to numerous ensembles in the county. Selmer was home to the Town of Selmer Band as early as 1920 and featured various ages among its performers. In the African American communities of Selmer and Falcon, numerous performances were given by brass bands. In Selmer, John Erwin led an all-black wind ensemble that frequently performed at prominent community gatherings throughout the 1910s and 1920s. In 1918, Selmer was a stop on a tour by the Great Lakes Naval Station Band, led by John Phillip Sousa. Selmer’s location as a key intersection between Memphis, Nashville, and Tupelo made it prime for touring acts and ensembles.
A little south of Selmer in Ramer, Professor Mac Hollis was leading two very successful ensembles.
Professor Hollis, a prominent educator in the area, led the Ramer Concert Band, an all-male group; and the Queen Crescent Band, an all-female group. Known members of the female group were Ila McAlpin Hamm and Mattie Robinson Lawson, both baritone players.
Both groups frequently performed at festivals, parades, and gatherings in McNairy County, Bolivar, and Corinth, Mississippi. The boy’s band once performed for a campaign stop of Senator Kenneth McKellar, who would eventually become President Pro Tempore in the Senate. Both ensembles were prominent throughout the early twentieth century.
These independent ensembles were not alone. Throughout the county, schools formed their own bands and performed as well.
Schools in Bethel Springs, Stantonville, and Ramer sponsored band programs in the early twentieth century, but the most prominent school band was in the county seat.
Selmer High School opened its doors following the relocation of the county seat in 1893. The high school went through various changes in location and staff during its time in use. The building was destroyed by fire for the first time in 1898, then again during the 1939 school year. Throughout the history of the school, several music teachers garnered respectable reputations for their leadership. Miss Rebecca Branch and Miss Joethel Powers taught music at the school throughout the 1910s.
By the 1930s, Selmer High School had a good reputation as a Science and Arts school in West Tennessee. The band frequently marched in parades in Selmer, Savannah, and Jackson.
As early as 1930, Selmer High School sponsored a Kiddie Band in the county. This band of children would march alongside the big kids and was a staple in the community.
Following the closing of Selmer High School in 1969, two other high schools within the county began developing wildly successful programs. Led by wildly successful educators.
After Selmer High School closed its doors in 1969, a new high school emerged in the county. McNairy Central High School opened as a revolutionary and groundbreaking learning center. The school boasted a planetarium, library, nature trails, two lakes, one-hundred-forty-acre campus, and the building was air-conditioned. Many teachers from the previous high school were moved to the new one. The band director at Selmer High School, Frank Congiardo, was one of these teachers.
Mr. Congiardo was born into a musical household in Illinois. Everybody within the Congiardo family played something and Frank played the mandolin by the age of five with the family band. Frank’s father worked for Brown Shoe Company and the family relocated to McNairy County when the company opened a new factory in Ramer. Mr. Congiardo finished school at Selmer High and continued his education at Union University: studying clarinet and earning a Bachelor's in Music Education.
Following his work at Union, Mr. Congiardo took the band director job at Selmer High School, his alma mater. His tenure there began in the fall of 1965. While working at Selmer High, Mr. Congiardo was also working as a full-time parent. Frank raised his children surrounded by music, playing songs from every genre, background, and culture. In an interview with his son, Frank “Frankie” III, he recalled the musical influence throughout his childhood: “I can remember blues bands, I can remember classical music country music, ya know we were surrounded by every style of music.”
Once at McNairy Central, Mr. Congiardo helped the band program immediately to flourish. Ken Goforth, another prominent educator directed the choir and assisted in the band. Under their leadership, the program grew in size and quickly made an impact on the band world in and around West Tennessee.
Frank Congiardo worked at McNairy Central until leaving in 1979, following his son, Frankie’s graduation. Beginning in the fall of 1979, Frank would begin a new chapter in his career and revive the band program at Adamsville.
When Mr. Congiardo arrived at Adamsville, the band program consisted of four members in total. During his tenure at Adamsville, he significantly altered the trajectory of the band’s future. He regularly sent countless instrumentalists to division and state-level band conferences and led the band in countless parades and festivals across the midsouth.
Following his retirement, his son, Frankie, accepted the band director position at Adamsville in 1985. Frankie led the band to numerous state championships and sent countless students to band conferences across the country. Frank’s second son, Mike, also entered the band world and would become a prominent educator and leader in the midsouth; teaching in Jackson and Dyer, in Tennessee, and Kentucky.
The Congiardo name is synonymous with musical excellence in and around McNairy County and their impacts will forever be felt by many.
Following Frank Congiardo’s departure from McNairy Central, new leadership emerged over the years in the band program there.
In the years following Congiardo’s exit, a few directors held short stints in the program at McNairy Central. Throughout the eighties, Greg Stover, David Hurst, and Ronnie Books would all have successful tenures leading the band. The band frequently competed in marching contests and festivals across the midsouth and in 1983, hosted the McNairy County Marching Invitational.
During this period, many county middle and elementary schools began to flourish. Programs at Selmer Middle, Bethel Springs Elementary, and Ramer Elementary all saw significant growth.
In 1998, a new director took the role at McNairy Central. Ryan Foret, a Louisiana native, met his wife, Gina, at Louisiana State University. Gina has significant musical roots in McNairy County. Her parents, Dwight and Freda Locke are prominent pickers in the county and are members of the McNairy County Music Hall of Fame, Class of 2016.
Gina, a saxophonist, attended McNairy Central and was taught by Ronnie Brooks. She consistently placed in regional festivals and conferences and continued her music education into college. Ryan was a standout trumpeter in his small bayou town in Louisiana. He decided to leave the family shrimping company after high school and pursue music education.
The two met and after marrying in 1997, found job openings in Gina’s home county. Both since have developed standout reputations in the county and beyond as magnificent educators. Ryan has led the Bobcat Band to countless victories in numerous competitions across the midsouth, but what most remember him for is his impact on students.
Mr. Foret has been known to create a sense of community among his students. When asked about his experience under him, former student Mario Puentes said: “He is a really understanding person, and you can tell every decision he makes is for the betterment [of the group]”
The Foret’s impact on music education in McNairy County has defined an era of band kids and they are continuing to change lives daily.
Several other music educators have passed through McNairy County and taught music in some way since the 1910s; this list is being updated and altered as more educators are discovered:
This section of history in McNairy County is only part of a grander, greater trend throughout America. Millions of citizens across the country have experienced the impacts that playing an instrument has. Whether it be lessons learned from an outstanding educator, playing a life-changing piece, or just making a new family; Band creates families and changes lives forever.
This report and its contents are compiled from primary sources, including interviews, historical newspapers, and other reliable media and personal sources. Interviews were conducted by Jacob York and consisted of questions relevant to the subject matter. All interviews were transcribed and saved for future use and citation. All photos and articles used as historical evidence to draw conclusions were collected through various sources and media.
Thank you to John Talbott for your assistance in drawing conclusions presented in this report.
Thank you Frankie Congiardo, Mario Puentes, and Odalys Arredondo for consenting to interviews to help preserve the information and history provided in this report.
Thank you Jacque Hamm May and Ryan Foret for providing photos and documentation presented in this report.
Thank you to Bradley Hanson, Evangeline Mee Principe, and the Tennessee Folklife Institute for providing assistance, guidance, and reassurance throughout the entire process.
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The mission of the Tennessee Folklore Society is to document, educate, and advance the folklore and traditional culture of Tennessee.
The diverse customs and traditions passed down through generations
