AMERICAN SCENE: Making Moonshine in Kentucky

Moonshining is as much a part of the national folklore as the covered wagon Although “moonshiner” originally meant Englishmen who ran brandy and gin along the North Sea coast toward the end of the 18th century, it came to have special application in America to the men who made illegal whisky—quite literally by the light of the moon. While their ranks have been decimated, a few moonshiners still ply their illicit trade in the deep recesses of Appalachia. Feeling rather like David Livingstone in search of the Nile’s source. Correspondent William Friedman was blindfolded and led through the labyrinthine Eastern Kentucky hills to meet one of the last of those who brew “white lightning” in hidden caves. His report:

THE battered old sedan wound its way along a narrow ribbon of dirt road in Clay County’s back country. On the way, the former sheriff who had agreed to produce an authentic moonshiner spoke with real pride of the man’s wares. “His whisky’s good stuff—crystal clear,” he said. “Stinks to high heaven, but if you can get past the smell, it’ll set you on your head or butt faster ‘n he’d blow your innards out for smiling courtin’-like at his daughters. When I was high sheriff, I put the ax to at least 300 stills, but I never did his, he bein’ my kin. One time he and his old woman had a fallin’ out, and she come down to get a warrant. See, he gets to drinkin’ his own likker and comes home and beats on her, and she gets all hot and comes down and tells the law where he’s got his still hid. So I said I’d go get him, but I never did.”

In the moonshiner’s community, coal smoke rises in thin gray wisps from stovepipes that jut through corrugated roofs. The houses are mostly unpainted clapboard decorated with weathered old Camel and Chesterfield signs; many are on stilts. The yards are strewn with empty cans, bottles, cartons, boxes. Chickens peck around them and in the meager patches of corn and tobacco plants. At the moonshiner’s cabin, the approaching car sent two barefoot girls scurrying to their mother, who in turn summoned her husband. His face was a study in seams and his hands were encrusted with years of grit. He wore a green plaid coat, bib overalls tucked into high rubber boots and a John Deere cap. He was immediately suspicious, but loosened up when the sheriff told him, with a perfectly straight face, that the visitor was a distant relative from Chicago.

“I’m 68 years old now,” the moonshiner said as he scratched a hound’s ear. “Lived on this knob all my life.” His mother still lives there too, but his father died a heroic moonshiner’s death in 1951. “My daddy made his own likker,” he explained, “and died at 64 on a big drunk. Stayed drunk for 13 days on his own bottles; stuff was so strong must’ve burned his insides out.”

The old mountaineer learned to make whisky when he was twelve, drifted into moonshining for profit by an economic process of elimination. “I always figured I’d get away from this here place just like my brothers did,” he said. “Reason why I never did is every time I went somewhere I’d drink up what I worked for in beer joints.” He used to cut timber and work in the coal mines as a loader, and even went to Baltimore toward the end of World War 11 to work in the shipyards (“That was in ’45, I think. That’s when that war was in Germany, ain’t it?”). After the war a harrowing experience in the mines taught him to stay away from coal. “A big eight-ton hunk fell right on five of us. They had to blow it off with dynee-mite. I came back up here that night and never went back.”

He tried farming and cutting timber, but acid from strip mining had all but ruined the land. So he began selling his corn liquor to the whisky runners. He now has two basic markets: those counties in Kentucky that have elected to remain dry, and the Kentucky-bred laborers in Cincinnati, Louisville and even Chicago who have never lost their taste for homemade corn. He no longer tries to run his whisky. “Back in ’47,” he recalled, “I was driving this Army truck and I smacked broadside into a state cop with three gallons under my seat. He took my license, but he never found the stuff. Since that day, I never went back to get my license.” All he knows is that every so often a man in an old Chrysler pulls up, wraps the jars in brown paper and places them in the trunk, which has been refitted to carry more than 200 half-gallons. The moonshiner receives $5 a jar from the runner, who resells it for $8 and up.

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Making moonshine is hard work.

The man and his two sons (both of whom have served short jail sentences for making illegal whisky) begin with a 25-lb. sack of corn meal, which they scald and pour into a large wooden box. When the mash cools, they add a peck of ground sprouted malt corn and fill the box half full with water. Then they add 50 Ibs. of granulated sugar, fill the box to the top with water, cover it with a pan to keep prowling animals out, and let it sit for six days. By then the mixture, known as “still beer,” is ready to run. Says the old moonshiner proudly: “My whisky’s got a mighty good taste. If it’s made right, it’s better than any Government whisky you drunk in your life.” With a savor somewhere between kerosene and old overshoe, it is definitely an acquired taste.

The same cannot always be said of the product brewed by his competitors. Says Fred Murrell of the Treasury Department’s Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Division: “We’ve found them making it in hog pens—harder for an agent to sniff it out that way. Sometimes there are rotted varmints in the shine. Why, the basic commodity is so raunchy, the public hasn’t the foggiest idea how bad the stuff really is.” However, moonshining is becoming less and less of a problem. In 1959 Government agents “cut” (smashed up) 9,225 stills; the number smashed dwindled to 3,327 in 1971. As the old man quietly notes: “All the old generation has just about died out, and the young pull out. Maybe they work timber for a time, or maybe they mine. But them that can, goes.” When they go, they leave behind the last of the silent, durable old men who make corn likker by the light of the moon.