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- Moonshining as a Fine Art: The Foxfire Americana Library by Foxfire Students
- Moonshining as a Fine Art: The Foxfire Americana Library
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. 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. 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.
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. 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.
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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. 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.
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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. According to Horace Kephart in Our Southern Highlanders Macmillan, , the story really begins with the traditional hatred of Britons for excise taxes.
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.
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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 s. Many of the mountaineers today are direct descendants of this stock. These Scotch-Irish frontiersmen would hardly be called dishonorable people. 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 , and over government taxes levied during the Civil War, Prohibition, and so on right to this moment. By Foxfire Fund, Inc. About Moonshining as a Fine Art The history of moonshining is a long one, and no one tells it better than the men who once made a living from it deep in the heart of Appalachia. Also in The Foxfire Americana Library. Also by Foxfire Fund, Inc.
Moonshining as a Fine Art: The Foxfire Americana Library by Foxfire Students
See all books by Foxfire Fund, Inc. About Foxfire Fund, Inc. Inspired by Your Browsing History. Also in 20th Century U. Dearborn and Mary Dearborn. On the Courthouse Lawn, Revised Edition. The Trials of Nina McCall.
Moonshining as a Fine Art: The Foxfire Americana Library
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