Follow the Hockaday homemade broom makers family business to learn how they tie folk art and practicality together.
When someone asks Jack Martin, the owner of Hockaday Handmade Brooms in Selmer, Tennessee, how long it takes to make a broom, he strokes his beard, grins, and replies, “Five months and 45 minutes.”
Making brooms is in Martin’s blood. In the 1800s, his great-great-grandfather, Wick Hockaday, moved from the Carolinas to west Tennessee in search of a better place to raise his family. He bought some land there and became a homesteader. But it was Will, his son, who started raising broomcorn (Sorghum bicolor). And Will then took the next step in creating the family business: invention.
Being a creative man, Will saw a newspaper photo of a broom-making machine – the type that attaches the broomcorn to a wooden handle – and then, using discarded farm equipment, he built it and a “broom press” to flatten out the completed product. With that, making brooms became a family tradition, beginning in the early 1900s.
The family farmed in summer and made brooms in winter – thus, money was available throughout the year.
From Farming to Folk Art
Although Martin loved the farm and often watched his grandfather turn the broomcorn into a useful household tool, he never thought of making it his career. “From the age of 6, I wanted to be a farmer,” he says. Martin was also a musician, playing drums in clubs and on Memphis’ Beale Street.
But his life changed when he brought his future wife, Virginia, home to meet his family. Virginia was a singer under the stage name of “Dee Fisk,” nicknamed “Baby Doll” by Martin. “My life took a different turn,” he says. “Virginia, now deceased, saw the broom-making not as part of farming, but as folk art. This was a way of teaching schoolchildren, going to festivals, giving demonstrations, and promoting art as part of broom-making. It was also a way to remember the past and preserve the future.”
Broom-making was nothing new to Martin. He’d watched his grandfather turn the broom straw into a useful product many times. “However, when my grandfather started teaching me to make a broom, it was a challenge,” says Martin, laughing. “I had to make the first one over 13 times.”
Dusting off the 74-year-old equipment his great-grandfather had made meant the family broom business was back. But there was a problem: The broomcorn seed had run out. The seeds had been lost during a period of ill health when his grandfather wasn’t able to make brooms and the equipment had sat idle for several years. After a three-year search, Martin located broomcorn in Mexico.
Now, Martin makes about 12 brooms per day. Social media, word-of-mouth, and newspaper ads help promote his business.
Growing the Broomcorn
Today, Hockaday Handmade Brooms is almost completely self-sufficient in its broom production. “When I first started, I would grow several acres of the straw each year,” Martin says. “Now, as I’m older, I’ve cut back and sometimes have to purchase the broomcorn from other sellers.”
Usually, the farm produces two crops each year, one planted in spring and the other around the Fourth of July. The broomcorn plant looks just like corn, except it doesn’t produce ears but a single, long, coarse straw from the top of the plant. This straw grows from 12 to 30 inches in length.
When it’s time to gather the broomcorn, Martin walks through the field and snaps off the tops of the straw. Then, he lays them out in the sun to dry for about one month. Once the straw is dry, he uses an old-fashioned wooden comb with nails for teeth to remove the seeds from the top of the plant. Since each plant produces only one piece of broomcorn, he needs 200 plants to make a broom. This explains why it takes Martin five months and 45 minutes to create a broom!
“Nothing can compare with the broomcorn bristles,” says Martin. He finds that broomcorn’s fiber sweeps up dirt even better than human-made fibers can.
In winter, Martin goes down to the bottoms and looks for unusual shapes of cedar, oak, and poplar to make broom handles. But why in winter? “Well, I can avoid the snakes when the weather is cold,” he says with a laugh.
Sharing the Past
Martin also takes pleasure in telling the story and history of his brooms. His calendar fills up each year as he travels with his craft on the road to schools, festivals, fairs, and shows. It takes hours to pack up and unload the equipment for each demonstration, but Martin believes he’s transporting part of the past to the present.
Martin’s work has received recognition on small and large scales. Ada’s County Store, a Mennonite store near Bethel Springs, Tennessee, that sells his brooms, has reported customer interest in his products because they last for a long time. On a wider scale, Hockaday Handmade Brooms has appeared in over 50 newspapers and magazines.
One of the business’s highlights was when Martin and his wife were chosen as one of the top 12 folk artists in the nation and they showed off the broom-making process at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia. More recently, in 2015, Martin received the Tennessee Governor’s Folklife Heritage Award.
Martin still lives on the family farm that was homesteaded about the time of the Civil War. In 1995, he and his wife realized their dream by creating an open-to-the-public broom museum on the family farm, and they started an annual broomcorn festival a year later in Selmer, Tennessee. Currently, another festival is planned for the third Saturday in September 2025 at Hockaday Farms. Admission is $5 per car.
But what gives Martin the most pleasure is seeing children’s eyes light up during his demonstrations at elementary and middle schools. Over 700,000 students have seen and heard the story of Hockaday Handmade Brooms. Keeping folk art alive for generations to come is its own reward.
Brooms Martin makes 10 different styles of brooms:
- Ultra-light kitchen broom
- Heavy-duty house broom
- 3-pound warehouse broom
- Old-fashioned round broom
- Whisk broom, or car broom
- Small hearth broom
- Child’s broom
- Handmade kitchen mop
- Beauty-shop broom
- Harry Potter-inspired broom
For more information, call 731-645-4823, visit Hockaday Handmade Brooms online at www.HHBrooms.com, or email Martin at Jack@HHBrooms.com.
Carolyn Tomlin lives in Jackson, Tennessee, and heard Jack Martin talk to students when she was a teacher.
Originally published in the March/ April 2025 issue of Grit magazine and regularly vetted for accuracy.
