Moonshine Stories from the Mountains

Making moonshine was a way of survival in the mountains, as there were few sources of income. Sure, we had the coal mines, but it was a very hard life and many were not strong enough to do the work. The cash from the moonshine was needed for the food and clothing that could not be grown on the farm.

Most of time there would be a local merchant who would buy or trade for the moonshine, then take it to Hazard and resell it and there was always a market around the community. Some of my earliest memories were running to hide if we saw someone we didn’t know approach our farm. We thought they may be revenuers!

The revenuers did come one day. Dad, Charlie Roberts, had several sacks of ground corn in the house. Mom, my sisters, and I sat on the sacks with our dresses covering them. They did not find anything! I think sometimes they saw so many kids that they just used a blind eye.

A lot of years have passed, and I really don’t remember all the steps into making the moonshine, but Leonard W. Roberts wrote about it in Up Cutshin & Down Greasy-Folkways of a Kentucky Family. I really like the works of Leonard W. Roberts and believe he was kin to me but not sure how his family line comes in.  Mr. Roberts was born 1912 in Floyd County, Kentucky and died in 1983. He was an early folklorist, professor, and publisher. If you haven’t read his books, check him out.

Mr.  Roberts’ book has an entire chapter on making moonshine that I wish I could include (Chapter 4: “Jim and Dave, their Moonshining”) but it is a lot of pages, so I have included just a few from pages 61-64

The man that learnt me to make whiskey he was a professional moonshiner. He was give up to be the best in the mountain parts. That was old Hiram Holbrooks over on Leatherwood.

Now the way you begin making whisky, you carry your old barrels to the place, in some holler where they are plenty of water. A still is a thing you can make. You take and get you a sheet of copper the size you want to make your still, large or small, and you take some brass brads and put that thing in the form of a barrel. Then you take plank and make a head for this still. After they you want a hole in the head, so you take a auger and handsaw and saw a round hole in the head for your cap, whatever cap you want. It’s a kag about twelve inches, I guess.

But start with your mash first in the copper still. Take and heat your water boiling, then you take meal. Pour you meal in the barrel, and then you pour in your water. You stir this meal up until you cook it right into a mush. Well, when you get it cooked to your notion, you take about a quart of flour to ever’ barrel, and put it right down on top of your mash to hold your heat in. ‘Ell, we let that set over to the next day, let it get good and cool.

And then we take an old sausage mill to grind our malt corn. We’d sprout what was called malt corn. Take and put corn in a coffee sack in water until it sprouted good, until good long sprouts come on it. Then we’d take this mill and grind this malt corn up, about a kag to a barrel. And we’d go back and put this malt corn in that barrel. And then you take your hands like making dough, and you bust ever’ lump in there. Stir just like making gravy, to get it all dissolved just like milk. And then you cover your barrel real good, and in about three days this meal will go to working. You’ve seen slop, now, be setting a bucket in hot times, come up in big bubbles and bust. That’s the way mash works. It’ll work in about three or four days sometimes.

Then I’ll clear off, and all that meal will settle back in the bottom. And then we’ll go ahead and get a forked stick, and we’ll get into them barrels, and we’ll stir all that up together. We’ll take and build us a far and heat that until it turns into a simmer, beginning to get ready to boil. Then we take our cap, put a stick with a hole in it down in the cap, and put it in that hole in the still. And then we’ll take clay mud and daub all the steam in there. The steam is coming out the hole in the cap. We have a piece of wood, oh, usually about two feet long, sourwood. Take it and bore me a hole in it. Start in at one end and bare as fer as I can, and then start at the other end and bore the hole out. We use fer an arm.

We put that in that still cap, and we’ll daub it in there. Well, we’ll put a worm in it if we’re making the old-fashioned way-we’ll take our worm then and put in the other end of that arm, and we’ll daub her in there good. And of course if we are making it with a crooked worm, we’ll have a barrel to put that worm in; and if we’re making with a straight worm, we’ll have a trough made and a hole bored in each end of it, and the worm would run through it for our water to pour in on.

That goes to boiling in the still, and steam comes out into that worm and evaporates in the worm, and when it comes out to the end, we catch it and call it singlings. It’s an alkiehol, but not high-powered alkiehol. It runs a stream about the size of a number-eight nail. Well, we’ll run these singlings off, about eight or ten gallons, sometimes twelve.

I’ll have this still full of singlings and go back and pour ‘em in a barrel. I’ll go right back and repeat it over and over till I’ll get me a barrel of this what I call singlings. Well, now I’ll take my old still apart and wash and scrub it. Have to wash ever’thing thoroughly clean-worm, arm, still, cap, and ever’thing. Take you about three hours or three hours and a half to get it cleaned up ready for your second run.

Then I’ll put these singlings back in the still. Get’em on the far now and get’em to boiling, just up in the center, like you was a-making sorghum, you know, when they go to foaming up in the pan. I’ll cap’em up like I did in the first place. Well, I’ll pull my far down to a very small far-you wouldn’t want to overheat it. Just heat it enough to get it started to boil good enough, and then just keep a small steady far under it. Keep about one temperature all the time. About an hour after you capped your still up again, your first shots of alkiehol begin to run. Two hundred proof. You’d catch that in a jar or jug, whatever you wanted to catch ‘em in. Set it around. I always mark mine-number one, two, three, four, like that. Catch it in a gallon fruit jar or gallon jug. Sometimes I’d catch it in a gallon jug.

When I’d get this run off down to where it gets so weak it wouldn’t bead-you see, it is to strong to head when it first comes out of a run like we’re speaking of: sometimes you can catch ten or twelve gallons too strong to bead-well, then you catch you so much and this is good beading whiskey, about ninety to a hundred to hundred and ten proof. Then it runs down until it won’t bead a-tall. And we call that backings. Then I’ll catch a bushel of these backings and then I’ll cut it all of and get ready to make my whiskey.

Take my first shots, my middle batch, and my weak batch, and I’ll get me two old washtubs. I’ll put me so much of one kind in there and so much of another. Take me a stick and keep it stirred up good. I’ll keep a-tasting, you know, clear down in the bottom, and shaking it. I’d put some in a bottle and give it three shakes and turn it back upright. Get the bead of the whisky till it would be the size of a squirrel’s eye-that’s the way I allas judged it. I’d have a hundred and ten proof whisky. And I’d keep on that way till I got my whole batch o’ whisky just the way I wanted it. Jar it up and go to selling it then.”

 “The Day the Revenue Men Came to the Middlefork” from Ronnie Begley, February 21, 1995:

I remember well, when the revenue men came to our house. At the time, we lived on the Garrett Burns home place. This was on the Middlefork River just below the mouth of Elkhorn. The house was back from the road and near the river. There was a huge rock on the other side of the road, a small drain ran down the mountain and water dripped off the rock. There was a small spring by the rock. This is where we got our water and where the moonshine still was set up.

Uncle Bert Begley and Dad, Herbert Begley, were just completing a run of moonshine. They needed just five more pounds of sugar. They sent my sister, Shelby, who was just a little girl, up to Scott Hacker’s grocery store to get the sugar. While Shelby was at the store, she heard that the revenue men had just raided the home of Claude Bowling, a neighbor, and cut up his moonshine still. She came running down the road, yelling the revenue men are coming!

Dad had some moonshine that he had run off. He ran down to the river bank and hid some in the sand and every place they could find.

Mother, Maude, was down at the river doing the washing. She had a big black pot of clothes on the fire, getting ready to boil them. Dad had already hidden all the moonshine except one jar. He saw the revenue men come walking down the hill from the road just then. He picked up the clothes with the battling stick and put the jug underneath. The men could not find anything. They questioned all of us but we had been warned not to talk.

I shall never forget that day even though I was just a little boy. I was wearing only a neck-tie, nothing else. I had taken off my clothes for mother to wash. Someone asked me why I wore the tie. I told them that I wore it to keep warm. My uncle Bert was just back from World War II and he had given me the United States Army tie. It was black and came down to my knees.

My late husband, Bert Begley, told this story many times. I wrote it down March 19, 1983.

“Moonshine and the Terrapin”

Sim Bowling was one of the greatest preachers in Southeastern Kentucky.  He lived on Elkhorn. I was friends with his children and would visit often.

One evening at the schoolhouse I drank some moonshine, well, maybe a lot of moonshine. Going home I fell in the frog grass and couldn’t get up. I was lying on a terrapin. I could feel it move but just couldn’t get off it. Rev. Bowling come by on his mule. I asked him to come help me get off that terrapin. He said he wouldn’t, but he would pray for me when he got home.

This is one of my favorites stories told by Judge George Wooton of Leslie County:

My dad, Kurt, and I were driving the mountain road at Elkhorn one day. All at once we saw a big white dog then a barrel came bouncing down the mountain and landed right in front of us, well, I didn’t know what to think. In a little while Bert Begley and Pat Clark came strolling down the mountain. We got out of the Jeep and sat and talked for a long time, then went on our way.

George would tell this story every time he saw me or any of the girls. The dog was Buddy, a well-known coon dog of Bert’s. Coon hunting was often used as a blind for mountaineers to make moonshine at night.

When my dad was just a boy, his father sent him to Elkhorn to teach the people there to make moonshine. He stayed with the Wilse Burton family one summer. They paid him with a calf and sheep. He said that he had a time getting those animals back to Chandler Branch.

In the early 1950’s I went to Elkhorn to teach school. The parents told me, we knew your dad. He is the one that taught us to make moonshine. I thought, oh my, but everyone was very nice to me. Sim Morris was a deputy sheriff on the Middlefork. He swore that no one would be making moonshine on the river. Bert’s dad decided that he would make his moonshine. He got everything ready for a run off, on the day of the run off, he had cleared some land. He started burning brush piles to clear the land. Mr. Morris came down the road. So, John C. went down and talked to him about getting some new land cleared. Mr. Morris didn’t suspect that John C. was making moonshine at the same time!

Not long before my husband, Bert, passed away he and I were walking the boundary of his farm on the Middlefork. We were walking down a creek bed. All at once he let out a loud exclamation. I thought he had seen a snake. He said, “Oh, there’s my worm.” I thought “What?” He dug this copper pipe out of the sand, cleaned it off and carried it to Laurel County around his neck. Daughter Linda has it now. I asked him how they got that back in the mountains. He said they would get a straight copper pipe, then saw off a tree leaving the stump and twist the pipe around the stump to make a coil, which they called a worm.

Moonshine was about the only medicine that we used when I was growing up. The mountain people would put some in a teaspoon and heat it to give to the babies. For a bad cough or cold Dad would mix the moonshine with some honey, including comb and all. We sure coughed a lot when dad fixed up the cough medicine.

It was used to break out the measles. Mother would put the moonshine in a sauce pan, with butter and sugar, and simmer on the stove. We would be given a small cup of the mixture. We sure liked this remedy better than my grandmother’s, Malvery Sizemore Roberts, remedy. She would pick up some sheep droppings, boil, and make a tea. It will sure break the measles out, but it was terrible to drink.

We would call the moonshine medicine a stew. Some years ago, Linda came up to visit and had a terrible cough. I told her I would make her a stew. I used about a ¼ cup of moonshine, equal amount of honey, and 1 tablespoon of lemon. Then I stirred it good and heated over the stove. Linda didn’t want to try it; however, I told her that it would cure her or make her feel so good she wouldn’t care one way or the other. She drank it and even though I wasn’t sick, I decided to partake.

It is hard to get good moonshine now. In fact, I just don’t know if I would buy from anyone any more, but it sure would be nice to have some from when I was young. It sure will cure you from what ails you.

Malvery Roberts Begley is a former resident of Clay County and the mother of Judge Linda Roberts Sibley, a frequent contributor to the CCAN. This is Ms. Begley’s first article for the magazine.