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.