Category: Moonshine

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Grindin’ Corn: My Introduction to Moonshining

I recently watched a clip of the TV show Moonshiners online. It made me laugh. Obviously fake, contrived, and completely developed for TV, I thought to myself, if only they could make a “real” moonshining reality show… This thought took me back to my early childhood, when I was involved in the liquor business at around the age of 6 or 7. My family’s involvement with the illicit liquor trade goes back into the 1800’s.

My paternal grandfather, always known to me as “PawPaw”, made liquor his whole life. Unfortunately, he drank about as much as he sold. My great-great uncles and great grandfather were notorious violent criminals who lived in the Warwoman community of Rabun County during the late 1800’s and first years of the twentieth century. While their other exploits will be discussed in a later story, those men also made more than their share of illegal booze. By the time PawPaw came of age, the Hopkins clan had taken their liquor making to a higher level.

Daddy and my uncles began helping PawPaw at the various stills from their earliest years, doing whatever they could to be useful. Still sites were extremely dangerous, especially for kids who were not paying attention. When he was about nine years old, Daddy fell in a box of hot mash and was burned so badly that he missed almost a whole year of school. Despite the dangers of injury and risk of prison, Daddy and a couple of my uncles began making moonshine on a large scale by the mid 1950’s. Many of their stills were near the family farm, which is located in the Bridge Creek community, at the headwaters of Stonewall Creek.

The Stonewall area is still a wild and now largely inaccessible area, but Daddy and I prowled the woods there during his last years looking at the remains of his old stills. I recorded short interviews with him at each old still site and plan to post some essays on this website as time goes on. On one such trip, we found a stash of his Mason jars that had been hidden there since the 1950’s. He had walked up on the still site as the revenuers were destroying, or “cutting” it. They were so noisy and distracted with the destruction of the still that they didn’t hear or see him walking up. He simply sat the case of jars behind a tree and walked away. Fifty years later the unbroken case of jars remained untouched.

Although Daddy pretty much left the moonshining business sometime during the mid-1960’s, for some reason he started dabbling in it again during the mid to late 70’s. We had several years in my rural county when work was slow, so each winter, Daddy ran off a little liquor on an old 28 gallon copper still. We had an old hand-cranked grain mill that had come with their farm when PawPaw bought it back in 1940, and Daddy paid me to grind corn into meal, sprout malt, dry it, and grind it each autumn. To make the malt I would take seed corn, lay each kernel side by side on a wet brown paper towel, fold it over and sit it in front of a south facing window to absorb the sunlight each day. Keeping the towels damp allowed the corn to sprout, and when they got almost an inch long, I removed them from the towels and let them dry out for a while. Then I would come home after school each day, grind the sprouted corn for malt, and grind regular corn for the mash. I had a nice little enterprise going for a couple of years. I had no idea what the corn was being ground for. I can’t remember how much he paid me for each batch I produced, but it kept me in G.I. Joe action figures and Hardy Boys books for some time.

Times are tough right now with all the economic upheaval from the pandemic. The old grinder still sits on the workbench in the basement. As for the still… it might or might not be around somewhere, and a man might have to take drastic measures to survive the next depression…

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Still Hunting with Daddy: Glassy Mountain

As Daddy gets older, I have a sense of urgency to collect as many of his stories and memories as possible. He recently told me a story about one of his old liquor stills that he had never mentioned before. A few weekends ago we went out looking for the site. I enjoy historical outings, as I can turn them into educational experiences on the sly, so I had Brittney tag along.

The still site is located in the Bridge Creek community at the foot of Glassy Mountain. It is only a mile away from Daddy’s old home place. We found it quickly despite the almost sixty years that have passed since Daddy was there.

The first thing that I noticed was that the still site is pretty much right on the side of Bridge Creek Road. Although the road would have been graveled back in 1960-61, it was nevertheless a well-traveled road.

By 1960, the traditional copper pot still had been largely replaced with more modern and efficient stills. The still Daddy took us to was a type known as a steamer. More efficient than a copper pot still, the alcohol could be distilled at a faster rate, and the boiler for Daddy’s still was fired with coke. Coke is essentially refined coal. To heat a steamer, Daddy and his brother Poke initially built a wood fire which in turn ignited and heated the coke. Once the coke was burning, the furnace gave off zero smoke, which made it more difficult for the revenuers to spot.

Daddy and Poke bought their coke in bulk from Toccoa Coal Company and hauled it into this particular site on their backs in sacks weighing fifty to one hundred-pounds. They carried all the materials on their backs, including parts for the boilers and the sixty-pound sacks, or bales as they were known, of sugar. When initially constructed, the still had five mash boxes, but they planned to add at least another three.

By their standards, it was a small operation. Daddy had been cut down several times just prior to setting up the still at the foot of Glassy Mountain and the brothers were short of cash. The revenuers had been particularly hot on them, and an informer in the area wasn’t making things easier. The brothers hoped to get by for just a couple of months at the site to build up funds for a larger outfit.

Daddy and Poke finished one run of liquor at the still and forty cases of liquor were stacked nearby. They carried in a second load of sugar and jars during the following night. Unfortunately for them, an unrelated forest fire broke out on Glassy during the night. The next morning the still was found by wildland firefighters from the U.S. Forest Service searching for hot spots. They called the revenuers, who quickly came to the still site.

Rather than haul the still and materials out of the woods for destruction, the revenuers simply dynamited the entire site, right down to the cases of new jars and sacks of sugar. As we searched the site we found remnants of the boiler blown almost one hundred feet from the original location.

Undeterred by the loss of the still, Daddy and Poke quickly relocated to a new location on Seed Lake. When the law got hot on them at the new site, Daddy “left the country,” as he called it, and made liquor over in Fannin and Gilmer Counties for a couple of years, but that’s a story for another day.

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Paul Posey: Legendary Moonshine Hauler

Today marks the 60th anniversary of the fatal car crash of infamous North Georgia liquor transporter Paul Posey. I began hearing stories of Posey’s exploits many, many years ago when interviewing old liquor men about their time making illegal alcohol. Almost every one of them brought up Posey during their interviews.

Paul Eugene Posey was born in 1930 and might have grown up in the Defiance, Ohio area. He somehow made his way to Georgia around or before 1950. He had two sisters living in Athens, Georgia at the time of his death. He married Lucy Whitmire of Rabun County, Georgia. By the mid-1950s he had gained notoriety as a liquor transporter. It appears that he did not work at any stills manufacturing liquor, but contracted as a moonshine hauler, tripper, or transporter, as the terms were used, to haul loads around the Southeast for Rabun County moonshiners.

He was known to be fearless, or crazy depending on whom you asked, as a driver, running wide open all the time, regardless of whether the law was chasing him. One article in The Clayton Tribune had local law enforcement officers chasing him for miles as he outran them with multiple tires shot down.

John Dixon, of Rabun Gap, Georgia, is Posey’s nephew by marriage. The lead photograph for this article is of Posey and Dixon shortly before Posey’s 1958 death. I interviewed him for this story at his home. He and Posey were especially close. Dixon remembers being around Posey as a boy, and has many recollections about him, along with some photographs and memorabilia that he shared for this post.  He recounted being in the car with Posey for a Sunday drive. Posey was unable to go around a slow driver and passed the car in the dirt on the shoulder while never slowing down.

I grew up riding down Highway 441 from Baldwin south through Homer and on down to Commerce. There was one right-hand hairpin curve along the road just north  of Homer, Georgia. Every time we went through it, Daddy would comment that it was the curve where Posey died. The story as told by other old-timers varied. Sometimes the stories had him unloaded and crashing while just acting afool. When told by others, he was loaded with liquor and running from the law.

As the years and interviews piled up, I heard other completely different stories about the crash. In an interview with Harold Dixon, a former moonshiner, he stated that the crash happened in Richland, South Carolina, roughly 70 miles from the other reputed crash site. In 1999, it finally dawned on me to contact Lloyd Hunter for information about Posey’s death. Hunter owns a funeral home in Rabun County and was the county coroner for decades. Now around 90 years old, he remains a kind, quick-witted gentleman with a great memory. Hunter laughed when I told him of the discrepancies as to the location of the crash. As the county coroner and funeral home operator, he had been summoned to retrieve the body after the crash. He stated that the wreck had actually occurred six miles west of Elberton, Georgia, on the Athens Highway at a place already known as the “Death Curve” at the time of Posey’s crash. This location is roughly forty miles from the alleged Homer site, and sixty miles from the Richland site.

More years passed by, and I voiced my frustration about the conflicting stories to Daddy. He looked at me for a second, threw down a tool and said, “Hell, go ask your Uncle Rip about it if you want the real story.” I asked him why he thought Rip would know anything. His reply was simple… “He was in the car with him when it happened.” Seriously. I had obsessed about the subject for over twenty years at that point, had talked to Daddy about it at least a dozen times, and he finally mentioned this to me. I immediately got ahold of Uncle Rip and sat down with him one afternoon in his wife’s restaurant. The lunch crowd made it too noisy to tape record the interview, but I was able to make voluminous notes and got the story…

Autumn 1958 had been a hard time for Rabun County moonshiners. The revenuers were hot on them in the woods, and the roads were crawling with the law. Posey had been particularly hard, hit losing two or three cars in less than three months. When there was no escape from pursuing law enforcement, liquor transporters were sometimes forced to jump out of the cars, abandon them, and flee on foot. Many liquor transporters were driving specially prepped, souped-up transport cars. Daddy told me of how much money he had in one of his cars around 1960. I ran the amount through some inflation formulas. That car would have cost almost seventy thousand dollars in 2018 dollars. It wouldn’t take many captured cars to put a transporter out of business. Posey and many other transporters including Daddy, started going up North and buying good running, but rusty cars for cheap. On the night of October 6, 1958, Posey was running such a car. He was known for some hot rod 1940 Ford coupes, but that night he was driving a 1951 Ford four door. It was so rusty that the middle door pillars were held together with wire and a log binder running across the width of the car.

At around midnight, Posey and Uncle Rip loaded their cars with liquor. They were hauling for Corbitt Dixon and another man. As was Posey’s habit, once out of sight of the stash house, he pulled over, got his own empty jar from the car, walked to the trunk and skimmed a bit of liquor from each jar until he filled his  jar. Then he would begin his trip while drinking the liquor as he went.  The two cars headed into South Carolina and made their way south along the Georgia-South Carolina border, switch from side to side to avoid the likely spots for traps laid by the revenuers. At some point during the trip they picked up another passenger, James Sewell of Athens. After unloading Posey’s load, but before unloading Uncle Rip’s car, Rip ran out of gas near Elberton. The three men pushed the car behind a barn, piled into Posey’s car and drove back toward Athens looking for gas. They procured a can of gas, sat it in the floor behind the front seat and headed back towards Elberton. According to Uncle Rip, Posey was driving wide open as always, throwing the car through the curves. At 6:30 in the morning at a location about seven miles west of Elberton, near where the highway crossed Dove Creek, the gas can started to turn over and Posey reached back to steady it. The crash made the headline of the October 7, 1958 issue of The Elberton Star. According to the Star, the car skidded 300 feet before it left the roadway, then traveled over 117 feet once off the pavement. Posey was thrown from the car, his face was crushed, and he received fatal internal injuries. The other two men only received minor injuries. They left the scene before the investigating officer could question them too closely.

It only took three decades of research, but I finally managed to get the real story of Posey’s death. It was a good thing, as now Uncle Rip has passed on, and without his interview the story would have been lost with him.

Special thanks to John Dixon and his family for sharing their stories and memorabilia, as well as letting me use the above photo.