Hockaday Handmade Brooms sits on a low rise at the edge of the expansive Oxford Creek bottom, just outside Selmer, Tennessee. The drive out from town is a surreal experience, taking the motorist past the largest solar installation east of the Mississippi River, right into the heart of Southwest Tennessee’s Amish country. The juxtaposition of rolling hillsides crowded with gleaming solar panels and acre upon acre of farmland worked by man and mule is jarring.

This farm and broom business Martin inherited from his maternal ancestors seems to mark the boundary line between past and future.

More than 100 years before the Amish and solar technology arrived in Tennessee, the Hockaday family began making brooms to supplement the meager income derived from subsistence farming. The sturdy and reliable suite of broom machines Martin employs was ingeniously cobbled together by his great-grandfather, Wick Hockaday, with spare parts and discarded farm implements. It might have been McNairy County’s jerry-rigged version of the industrial revolution, but those machines still get the job done. Every broom that comes out of the shop — or “the broom shed,” as Martin calls it — is guaranteed to last. You will wear it to a nub before a bristle falls out, or Martin will replace it. Since 1916, Hockaday Handmade Brooms has had to make good on that promise less than 10 times, and Martin swears that several of those brooms were damaged by hogs.

“We make a good broom at a fair price,” he says with a wry grin, “but they’re not hog-proof.”