‘A Dying Tradition’ : To Modern Moonshiners, There’s a Certain Stillness in the Air

Clayton McKinney made no effort to hide the .38-caliber revolver on his hip as he examined a friend’s still tucked into a laurel thicket high in a mountain hollow.

“I got one of my eyes knocked out four months ago. It’s giving me all kinds of trouble,” the night watchman said. “I don’t know if I could see the law coming or not.”

McKinney, like his father before him, once used the pistol to ward off snooping revenuers over a lifetime of illegal liquor making.

‘Didn’t Want to Kill Them’

“The law runs the same as you and I do for a damn bullet,” McKinney said. “I’ve shot at them a few times to make their fur fly, but I just wanted to scare them. I’d always pull off. I didn’t want to kill them.”

Although McKinney says he quit commercial liquor-making a decade ago, moonshine money helped raise a houseful of kids--two girls and five boys. Some are eager to learn the craft passed down from father to son for generations in the Appalachian Mountains.

“I’ve got boys begging me to show them how to make it. I’ve got some it wouldn’t do to show them. They’d get in bad trouble.”

McKinney, 64, says he ended 40 years of backwoods liquor-making when a brush with the law cost him more than $2,500 in fines and taxes.

‘Liquor’s Good Medicine’

“You can ask anybody around here about Clayton McKinney and they’ll say, ‘Boy, I’d like to have some of his liquor,’ ” McKinney said, “and I’d like to have some of it myself. Liquor’s good medicine if it’s made right.”

But authorities say the art of making and running moonshine--glorified in the Robert Mitchum movie “Thunder Road”--is threatened by expensive sugar, cheap legal booze and a new generation that found easier ways to make a living.

“It’s not a dead practice but it has been for the past several years a dying practice,” said Tom Parker of the state’s Alcohol Law Enforcement division. “It’s a practice that is handed down from generation to generation, and I’d say later generations didn’t have the interest in it. They’re a little better off economically and didn’t see the need for it.

“There was also a decline a few years back when the price of sugar went up,” said Parker, explaining that some old-time moonshiners have turned to another illicit income-producer.

3 Stills a Month Nabbed

“It’s a lot easier to grow marijuana than it is to make liquor,” he said. Parker’s division--which in North Carolina has surpassed the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms as the chief enforcer of laws against moonshine--uncovers an average of three stills a month across the state.

That compares to the 50 to 60 stills retired ATF supervising agent Robert Powell and his eight co-workers could smash up in less than a week in a single sweep through four mountain counties a few years back.

“We used to go through with an airplane” to spot the stills, Powell said. “You might go through and cut up 60 stills in three days if you didn’t care about finding the owner.”

Arresting a still owner generally required a stakeout that would tie up three or four agents for several days with no guarantee of a payoff.

Tax Avoidance Key Issue

Agents tried to scare people away from moonshine with warnings about the health effects, but the real issue was tax avoidance, Powell said.

“A 3,000-gallon still left undetected for about a year would defraud the government of over $1 million in taxes,” he said.

Moonshining’s heyday was in the mid-1950s when Wilkes County gained its reputation as the moonshining capital of the world.

“In some way, somehow, about all the people around here were connected with it,” said retired race car driver Junior Johnson, who recently was given a presidential pardon for a 1956 moonshining conviction.

“It was a way of life nobody looked down on,” Johnson said. “Nobody denied it was against the law, but it was sort of like speeding the way they looked at it.”

Served 9 Months in Prison

Johnson, 54, said he hauled thousands of carloads of “white lightning” between the ages of 13 and 24, when he was caught firing up a still and served a nine-month prison term.

He gave up the illegal liquor business for stock car racing. Now, he oversees a stable of 14 cars at a garage and offices in the rolling Wilkes County foothills--about a quarter of a mile down the road from where his daddy taught him to make liquor.

“I could make more money racing, and that’s legal,” he said.

But Johnson said white liquor proved golden for many Wilkes County residents.

“I would say several fortunes have been made moonshining in Wilkes County,” he said.

Charlie Swaim, 80, is a retired exterminator who collects stills and is full of lore about the old days in Wilkes County, when “every stream had a still on it.”

Swaim admits he even made a little white liquor himself.

“Back in them days, years ago, we had a lot of fun making liquor. But there was a lot of hard work about it too,” Swaim said. “Sometimes you had to go through the woods a half a mile with a 100-pound sack of cornmeal or sugar on your back. I made a lot of money, but personally I wouldn’t want to tell you exactly how much.”

Number Dwindles

Swaim and several others said the number of illegal distilleries has dropped dramatically. But all agreed that a few dollars will still buy a Mason jar full of moonshine in the Appalachian high country.

“My strong suspicions are there are still some distilleries here,” said Powell, the retired ATF agent. “I don’t have anything to base that on. It’s just my suspicion.”

“As long as time lasts, some old farmer down here will make a little whiskey for himself and his friend to drink,” said Willard Watson, 81, mountain craftsman and reformed moonshiner.

And there are still young people eager to learn the craft.

Lloyd McKinney, 21, has been hounding his father Clayton for years to get the family recipe, so far without success. “It’s something that’s dying,” said Lloyd, giving his twin brother Floyd a playful punch in the ribs. “By the time me and him has kids, we’ll never have it again. It’s a dying tradition.”