McNairy County Brooms: “Better Than Any Brought On” Part 1
By Dr. Shawn Pitts
A Sweeping Revival
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 Boom
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.
