The General Assembly of Tennessee formed McNairy County in 1823 when it cut 560 square miles out of Hardin County to create it. They named the new jurisdiction on the border of Mississippi after Federal Judge John McNairy, appointed to the bench by President George Washington. In 1838, history marked the county with pain, sorrow and national disgrace as one route of the Cherokee Trail of Tears.
When the Civil War ripped the nation apart, McNairy County was marked for disaster. Shiloh, where Union and Confederate soldiers clashed in the second largest battle of the war, was just miles away. Lieutenant Colonel Fielding Hurst, Tennessee-born and McNairy County–raised, led the Union forces on a path of destruction through western Tennessee. In the town of Purdy, he sang songs and prayed while his troops burned down all of the churches and most of the homes. Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest wrote: “From Tupelo to Purdy, the country has been laid waste.”
The residents of the town struggled to recover, but the final blow brought an end to their dreams—their fifty-year-old brick courthouse was burned to the ground in 1881. By 1897, Purdy lay in ruins. The county seat moved by the railroad tracks in the recently incorporated town of New South, later renamed “Selma.” However, when the documents were submitted, the applicant spelled the name phonetically, according to the local pronunciation, and the town of Selmer was born.
With its new county seat, McNairy County grew into a thriving area of industrial development dominated by textile plants. But in the 1970s, the factories began closing their doors—either going out of business or moving operations to foreign countries. The economic downturn placed it on the national list of impoverished counties. Its 22,000 predominantly white citizens remained in that condition until 2003 when an upsurge began in the area’s fiscal health.
The annals of crime in McNairy County include the death of United States Post Office Inspector Elbert Lamberth in Stantonville on August 17, 1917. Long before “going postal” crept into the common vernacular, a postal carrier gunned down the inspector in front of the Elam Hotel.
It was another law enforcement official, though, who gained the greater prominence in crime lore for the county. His name was Sheriff Buford Pusser. His exploits inspired a cinematic depiction in the Walking Tall series of movies and a short-lived television show.
The 6'6", 250-pound man attended morticians’ school in Chicago and earned a living wrestling as Buford the Bull—once defeating a grizzly bear.
In 1962, when his father Carl’s health took a turn for the worse, Buford, his new wife and her children from a previous marriage moved back to McNairy County. He entered law enforcement working for his father. When Carl’s medical problems forced him to resign as the town’s police chief, the town council hired Buford to take his place.
It was a wild and wooly era in McNairy County and the adjoining Alcorn County across the Mississippi line. The Dixie Mafia and the State Line Mob ran successful bordellos, gambling dens and bootlegging operations on both sides of the border between the two states. Buford wanted to bring all of that to an end.
To accomplish that goal, he ran for sheriff in 1964. Two weeks after his predecessor, James Dickey, died in an automobile accident, Buford Pusser, at the age of 26, became the youngest sheriff in the history of Tennessee.
He got busy making enemies out of all the vice merchants in the area. In 1965 alone, he destroyed eighty-seven whiskey stills. A lot of people wanted him dead.
At 4:30 A.M. on August 12, 1967, he responded to a disturbance call on the state line. His wife, Pauline, rode with him in what was expected to be a routine call. But a black Cadillac pulled up beside them and a shot rang out. It hit Pauline in the head.
Buford raced away from the vehicle and came to a stop two miles down the road to care for his wife. The black car returned. He came under fire once again—one bullet lodged in Pauline’s head, another hit Buford in the face, literally knocking off the left side of his jaw. Buford fell to the floorboard. Eleven additional bullets riddled his car.
Pauline died that night. But Buford, although disfigured, survived, and stepped into the national consciousness as a great American hero. By the time term limits pushed him out of office in 1970, he’d been shot eight times; knifed seven times; single-handedly fought off six men at once, sending three to jail and three to the hospital; and killed two people in self-defense. The Walking Tall legend was born.
On August 20, 1974, a year after the first movie hit theaters, Buford Pusser faced the media in Memphis at a press conference called to announce that he would play the lead in a new movie titled Buford. He then drove a hundred miles to Adamsville, where he changed clothes and got into his maroon Corvette to drive to the McNairy County Fair. There, he signed autographs and spoke to his 13-year-old daughter, Dawna, who arrived earlier with a family member. He left the fair around midnight.
He raced home alone up Highway 64. Six miles down the road, he lost control of his car and smashed into an embankment and was thrown from the vehicle. Dawna was in the first car on the scene after the accident. She knelt in the dirt by her father’s side, begging him not to die.
The funeral cortege numbered in the thousands, including luminaries Joe Don Baker, Tammy Wynette and George Jones. Even Elvis Presley showed up to pay his respects, but he did not want to steal Buford’s moment of glory, so he waited in the Pusser home during the funeral and sat in his limousine and viewed the interment from a distance. Buford was laid to rest beside his wife Pauline at the Adamsville Cemetery.
As often happens with larger-than-life figures, Buford’s death gave birth to a cottage industry of rumors, conspiracy theories and innuendo.
Many, including Buford’s mother and daughter, believed he was murdered, even though officials ruled his death an accident caused by excessive speed. There were those who claimed he was a player in the vice operations in the county and his crime-fighting was only a thinly disguised attack on his rivals in criminal enterprise. No one, though, has offered any proof of this accusation.
A little more than a year after Matthew Winkler’s arrival in McNairy County, his death would draw the country’s attention back to this quiet, rural area. The rumors spawned would again tarnish the reputation of a victim of a violent death. Lines would be drawn, and life in McNairy County would not be the same.