McNairy County Brooms: “Better Than Any Brought On” part 2
By Dr. Shawn Pitts
The McNairy Makers
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.
Robbins—
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.
McIntyre–
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.
Robertson–
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.
Tull—
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—
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.
Signs of Life
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.
