New Appalachian Moments Blog Post!
By Scott Ballard
When the early scotch-irish pioneers came up into these rugged mountains, they brought with them sturdy individualism, their own brand of religion and music, AND the art and mystery of distilling!
People would actually be pretty shocked to find out how much alcohol folks used and consumed from the 1700s on…
Alcohol, in the form of apple brandy and whiskey, was to the pioneer what disinfectants, cold and flu remedies (hello hot toddies!), tranquilizers and anesthetics are to us today…and in the words of historian Don Long…alcohol lubricated life.
The early settlers mainly used barley and wheat to make their brew. Corn was relatively new to them, but you know what, they caught on quick.
Most homesteads in Appalachia were mainly subsistence farms. The average farmer could grow 30-50 bushels of corn a year…but transportation was a huge issue as a horse could only carry 4 bushels at a time…these folks might not have been formally educated, but they could do math…a farmer could get 16 gallons of moonshine…or the equivalent of 24 bushels of corn on that same horse and he could also quadruple his profit per bushel!
So…making white lightning became the best crop, if you will, for generating cash money…money to pay taxes or for items a farmer couldn’t grow on the farm or make at home. As Ashe County’s Poodle Miller told us…you can’t pay the light bill with a bucket of beans.
It was said that up in these hills there was at least one fiddle player and one moonshine still up every holler…
Folks didn’t consider making what they called Mountain Dew illegal, it was just a way to survive for those who chose to stay around here instead of heading up north for jobs.
And it was hard work…as the saying went, lazy people don’t make whiskey. And that’s because once you found a good source of water, you had to carry everything else (boilers, copper tubing, ingredients) up to the site.
Then…it ALL changed…the temperance movement and the anti-saloon league created the push for Prohibition in 1920…forbidding the manufacture or sale of intoxicating spirits…
But, just because there is a law against something doesn’t change the demand…and folks in the mountains were more than obliged to create the supply…and thus, making moonshine took on a legend of its own…
And because the stills and batches got bigger, the transportation of all that bootleg contraband gave rise to what we know today as Nascar, but that’s a subject for another podcast! Cheers y’all…
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