Moonshining as a Fine Art: The Foxfire Americana Library (1) Read online

  ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2011

  Copyright © 1972, 1973 by The Foxfire Fund, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  “Moonshining as a Fine Art” originally appeared in The Foxfire Book, © 1972 by Brooks Eliot Wigginton. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.

  “Jake Waldroop’s Recipe for Blackberry Wine” originally appeared in slightly different form in Foxfire 2, © 1973 by the Southern Highlands Literary Fund, Inc. and Brooks Eliot Wigginton. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-94820-5

  v3.1

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Moonshining as a Fine Art

  In the Beginning

  The Law vs. The Blockader

  Hiding the Still

  Finding the Hidden Still

  A Glossary of Still Parts and Tools

  A Glossary of some of the Expressions and Terms Used in Stilling

  The Construction of the Still

  How the Best of the Best Was Made

  How Good Whiskey Is Being Ruined

  How To Get Rid of the Final Product

  Conclusion

  Recipes

  Apple Wine

  Muscadine Wine

  Jake Waldroop’s Recipe for Blackberry Wine

  A NOTE ABOUT THE FOXFIRE AMERICANA LIBRARY SERIES

  For almost half a century, high school students in the Foxfire program in Rabun County, Georgia, have collected oral histories of their elders from the southern Appalachian region in an attempt to preserve a part of the rapidly vanishing heritage and dialect. The Foxfire Fund, Inc., has brought that philosophy of simple living to millions of readers, starting with the bestselling success of The Foxfire Book in the early 1970s. Their series of fifteen books and counting has taught creative self-sufficiency and has preserved the stories, crafts, and customs of the unique Appalachian culture for future generations.

  Traditionally, books in the Foxfire series have included a little something for everyone in each and every volume. For the first time ever, through the creation of The Foxfire Americana Library, this forty-five-year collection of knowledge has been organized by subject. Whether down-home recipes or simple tips for both your household and garden, each book holds a wealth of tried-and-true information, all passed down by unforgettable people with unforgettable voices.

  MOONSHINING AS A FINE ART

  The manufacture of illicit whiskey in the mountains is not dead. Far from it. As long as the operation of a still remains so financially rewarding, it will never die. There will always be men ready to take their chances against the law for such an attractive profit, and willing to take their punishment when they are caught.

  Moonshining as a fine art, however, effectively disappeared some time ago. There were several reasons. One was the age of aspirin and modern medicine. As home doctoring lost its stature, the demand for pure corn whiskey as an essential ingredient of many home remedies vanished along with those remedies. Increasing affluence was another reason. Young people, rather than follow in their parents’ footsteps, decided that there were easier ways to make money; and they were right.

  Third, and perhaps most influential of all, was the arrival, even in moonshining, of that peculiarly human disease known to most of us as greed. One fateful night, some force whispered in an unsuspecting moonshiner’s ear, “Look. Add this gadget to your still and you’ll double your production. Double your production, and you can double your profits.”

  Soon the small operators were being forced out of business, and moonshining, like most other manufacturing enterprises, was quickly taken over by a breed of men bent on making money—and lots of it. Loss of pride in the product, and loss of time taken with the product increased in direct proportion to the desire for production; and thus moonshining as a fine art was buried in a quiet little ceremony attended only by those mourners who had once been the proud artists, known far and wide across the hills for the excellence of their product. Too old to continue making it themselves, and with no one following behind them, they were reduced to reminiscing about “the good old days when the whiskey that was made was really whiskey, and no questions asked.”

  We got interested in the subject one day when, far back in the hills whose streams build the Little Tennessee, we found the remains of a small stone furnace and a wooden box and barrel. On describing the location to several people, we were amazed to discover that they all knew whose still it had been. They all affirmed that from that still had come some of the “finest home brew these mountains ever saw. Nobody makes it like that any more,” they said.

  Suddenly moonshining fell into the same category as faith healing, planting by the signs, and all the other vanishing customs that were a part of a rugged, self-sufficient culture that is now disappearing. Our job being to record these things before they die, we tackled moonshining too. In the six months that followed, we interviewed close to a hundred people. Sheriffs, federal men, lawyers, retired practitioners of the old art, haulers, distributors, and men who make it today for a living; all became subjects for our questioning. Many were extremely reluctant to talk, but as our information slowly increased we were able to use it as a lever—“Here’s what we know so far. What can you add?”

  Finally we gained their faith, and they opened up. We promised not to print or reveal the names of those who wished to remain anonymous. They knew in advance, however, that we intended to print the information we gathered—all except that which we were specificially asked not to reveal. And here it is.

  IN THE BEGINNING

  According to Horace Kephart in Our Southern Highlanders (Macmillan, 1914), the story really begins with the traditional hatred of Britons for excise taxes. As an example, he quotes the poet Burns’ response to an impost levied by the town of Edinburgh.

                           Thae curst horse-leeches o’ the Excise

                           Wha mak the whiskey stills their prize!

                 Haud up thy han’, Deil! ance, twice, thrice!

                                There, sieze the blinkers!

                 An’ bake them up in brunstane pies

                                For poor d—n’d drinkers.

  Especially hated were those laws which struck at the national drink which families had made in their own small stills for hundreds of years. Kephart explains that one of the reasons for the hatred of the excise officers was the fact that they were empowered by law to enter private houses and search at their own discretion.

  As the laws got harsher, so too the amount of rebellion and the amount of under-the-table cooperation between local officials and the moonshiners. Kephart quotes a historian of that time:

  Not infrequently the gauger could have laid his hands upon a dozen stills within as many hours; but he had cogent reasons for avoiding discoveries unless absolutely forced to make them. [This over two hundred years ago.]

  A hatred of the excise collectors was especially pronounced in Ireland where tiny stills dotted rocky mountain coves in true moonshining tradition. Kephart quotes the same
historian:

  The very name [gauger, or government official] invariably aroused the worst passions. To kill a gauger was considered anything but a crime; wherever it could be done with comparative safety, he was hunted to death.

  Scotchmen (now known as Scotch-Irish) exported to the three northern counties of Ireland quickly learned from the Irish how to make and defend stills. When they fell out with the British government, great numbers of them emigrated to western Pennsylvania and into the Appalachian Mountains which they opened up for our civilization. They brought with them, of course, their hatred of excise and their knowledge of moonshining, in effect transplanting it to America by the mid 1700s. Many of the mountaineers today are direct descendants of this stock.

  These Scotch-Irish frontiersmen would hardly be called dishonorable people. In fact, they were Washington’s favorite troops as the First Regiment of Foot of the Continental Army. Trouble began after Independence, however, with Hamilton’s first excise tax in 1791. Whiskey was one of the few sources of cash income the mountaineers had for buying such goods as sugar, calico, and gunpowder from the pack trains which came through periodically. Excise taxes wiped out most of the cash profit. Kephart quotes Albert Gallatin:

  We have no means of bringing the produce of our lands to sale either in grain or meal. We are therefore distillers through necessity, not choice, that we may comprehend the greatest value in the smallest size and weight.

  The same argument persists even today—battles raged around it through the Whiskey Insurrection of 1794, and over government taxes levied during the Civil War, Prohibition, and so on right to this moment.

  THE LAW vs. THE BLOCKADER

  The reasons for the continuous feud implied in this heading should be obvious by now. The government is losing money that it feels rightfully belongs to it. This has always been the case. In the report from the Commissioner of Internal Revenue for 1877–78, the following appeared:

  The illicit manufacture of spirits has been carried on for a number of years, and I am satisfied that the annual loss to the Government from this source has been very nearly, if not quite, equal to the annual appropriation for the collection of the internal revenue tax throughout the whole country. In [the southern Appalachian states from West Virginia through Georgia and including Alabama] there are known to exist 5,000 copper stills.

  It’s different now? Clearly not, as seen in an article in the May 3, 1968 Atlanta Constitution on the interim report of the Governor’s Crime Commission. In October, 1967, there were around 750 illicit stills in Georgia, operating at a mash capacity of over 750,000 gallons. This amounts to approximately $52 million in annual federal excise tax fraud, and almost $19 million in state fraud. The article quotes the Commission, placing the blame for Georgia’s ranking as the leading producer of moonshine in the United States on “corrupt officials, a misinformed and sometimes uninterested public, and the climate created by Georgia’s 129 dry counties.”

  Originally arrests had been made by government officials (“Feds” or “Revenuers”), but during Prohibition much of the enforcement was left up to the local sheriffs. This put many of them in a peculiar position, for the moonshiners they were being told to arrest were, in many cases, people they had known all their lives. As it turned out, however, most of the lawbreakers were reserving their hostility for the federal agents and the volunteers (called “Revenue Dogs”) who helped them. They had nothing against their sheriff friends who, they understood, were simply doing their jobs. The sheriffs, for their part, understood the economic plight of the moonshiners. For many of these people, making moonshine was the only way they had at the time of feeding their families. As one told us, “I felt like I was making an honest dollar, and if it hadn’t’a been for that stuff, we’d a had an empty table around here.”

  The situation resulted in a strange, friendly rivalry in most cases. As one moonshiner said, “I never gave an officer trouble except catchin’ me. After I’uz caught, I’uz his pickaninny.”

  The same man told us of a time when he was caught by a local official who was as friendly a man as he had ever met. He wasn’t treated like a criminal or an animal, but treated with respect as another man making a living for a large family—which he was. After it was all over, the local official had made a friend instead of an enemy, and the two are still fast friends today.

  During the same period of time, there was another sheriff whom he often encountered on the streets of a little town in North Carolina. The sheriff would always come up to him, greet him, and ask him what he was up to down in Georgia. The other would usually reply, “Oh, not much goin’ on down there.” If, however, the sheriff had gotten a report about one of his stills, he would follow that reply with, “I hear you’re farmin’ in th’ woods.” The moonshiner would know that that was a warning for him to watch his step. Despite the warnings, the sheriff was able to catch him and cut down his stills on three separate occasions, but they remained fast friends.

  We talked to several retired sheriffs (one of whom, Luther Rickman, was the first sheriff to raid a still in Rabun County), and they agreed completely. Most of the blockaders that they had encountered ran small operations, and the whiskey they made was in the best traditions of cleanliness. Besides, times were hard, and a man had to eat. Despite the fact that the sheriffs at that time were paid on the “fee system,” and thus their entire salary depended on the number of arrests they made, they did not go out looking for stills. They made arrests only after reports had been turned in voluntarily by informers who, as we shall see later, usually had personal reasons for reporting the stills. They were never hired to do so.

  Operating on the fee system, the local officials got $10 just for a still. If they were able to catch the operator also, they received between $40 and $60. Extra money was given them if they brought in witnesses who could help convict. For the blockader’s car, they received approximately half the price the blockader had to pay to get it back which was usually the cash value of the car. And they were allowed to keep any money they could get from selling the copper out of which the still had been made.

  Confiscated moonshine, beer, and the like were poured out. The sugar was often donated to an institution like a school or hospital.

  The number of stills actually uncovered varied drastically from month to month. Some months, twenty or thirty would be caught and “cut down,” but other months, none at all would be discovered. Hardest of all was catching the men actually making a run. In almost all cases they had lookouts who were armed with bells, horns, or rifles, and who invariably sounded the alarm at the first sign of danger. By the time the sheriff could get to the still, the men would have all fled into the surrounding hills. We were told about one man who was paid a hundred dollars a week just as a sentry. Another still was guarded by the operator’s wife who simply sat in her home with a walkie-talkie that connected her with her husband while he was working. The still, which sat against a cliff behind the house, could only be reached by one route, and that route passed directly in front of the house. The operator was never caught at work. On those occasions when the sheriffs did manage to catch the men red-handed, they usually resigned themselves to the fact that they had been caught by a better man, and wound up laughing about it. On one raid, a sheriff caught four men single-handedly. There was no struggle. They helped the official cut their still apart; and when the job was done, everyone sat down and had lunch together. When they had finished, the sheriff told the men to come down to the courthouse within the next few days and post bond, and then he left.

  The same sheriff told us that only rarely did he bring a man in. He almost always told them to show up at their convenience, and they always did. To run would simply have shown their lack of honor and integrity, and they would have ultimately lost face with their community and their customers. They simply paid their fines like men, and went on about their business.

  It was a rivalry that often led to friendships that are maintained today. One of the sheriffs, for e
xample, spent two evenings introducing us to retired moonshiners, some of whom he had arrested himself. It was obvious that they bore no grudges, and we spent some of the most entertaining evenings listening to a blockader tell a sheriff about the times he got away, and how; and naturally, about the times when he was not so lucky.

  Today federal agents have largely taken over again, and so the character of the struggle has changed. The agents actively stalk their quarry, sometimes even resorting to light planes in which they fly over the hills, always watching. In the opinion of some people, this is just as it should be. One said, “The operations are so much bigger now, and sloppier. If the Feds can’t get’em, the Pure Food and Drugs ought to try. That stuff they’re makin’ now’ll kill a man.” And another said, “People used to take great pride in their work, but the pride has left and the dollar’s come in, by th’ way.”

  We was stillin’ one day away up on a side of a hill away from everything, mindin’ our own business, just gettin’ ready t’make a run when my partner all of a sudden sees somethin’ move in a pasture one hill over. Couldn’t tell who he was. Too far away. I couldn’t see him at all, stuck away behind a fence post like that. We went on workin’, keepin’ one eye out, and after we was through, and whatever that was over yonder had gone on, we went over to see. It was somebody there all right. I seed that checkedy sole print in th’ soft ground and we moved her out that night. It was a revenuer all right. I know because I ran into him again later and he asked me about it. But know how I knew before that? Because of that boot print, and because he didn’t come down and say hello. A friend of ours would have.

  HIDING THE STILL

  Since the days of excise, moonshiners have been forced to hide their stills. Here are some of the ways they have used.