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1. Conspiracy Trial in the Moonshine Capital of the World
- University of Illinois Press
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1 Conspiracy Trial in the Moonshine Capital of the World Government had long been to them a thing far off. They got no benefit from it. Roads were poor and there were always government men interfering. They sent men in to stop their liquor making. They wanted to collect taxes. For what? —Sherwood Anderson, Kit Brandon in 1934, the road up Thompson Ridge was red dirt or mud, depending on the weather. No road grader or state gravel had ever touched it. After a rain or snow, people parked their roadsters or trucks, the few who had them, that is, at the foot of the hill and walked home. Sometimes they used their teams of horses or mules to pull the stuck vehicles up the hill to their farms. Sometimes they just left them at the bottom of the hill by the store until the road dried out. Pete Thompson’s store sat at the foot of that hill on level ground where two different roads intersected, one that wound back out to Long Branch Church and the other that wended toward Ferrum the back way. It was a good location for conducting local commerce. There were other stores in the broader community of Endicott then, including the Bryant and James store that housed the post office and was the center of the community a few miles away, but Thompson’s was that hollow’s store, and people went to it in part because it was too hard to go anywhere else. For some it was also a decent place to get the essential ingredients they needed for making whiskey without having to let too many know their business. Old Man Thompson didn’t keep written records, at least ones just anybody could access, and he didn’t talk about others’ dealings. Keeping quiet was part of surviving, economically and otherwise, particularly for store owners, who couldn’t help but hear or overhear news and gossip. In good weather, the store’s front porch was a gathering place. In winter, people moved in around the stove. Little stores like Thompson’s were places to buy maybe a strawberry soda or a can of potted meat and some crackers and sit and talk about the weather and maybe intimate just a little of their Conspiracy Trial in the Moonshine Capital 1 2 chapter 1 predicaments to a neighbor struggling in the economic bottom we now call the Great Depression. Few would reveal much, particularly about the businesses that kept Pete Thompson’s store in the black. More than a few barns had been burned down after someone said too much to the wrong man. But people who knew each other well did hint around and gave each other clues. Sometimes people have to talk—at least among people they think they can trust. A boiling pot, even of the best copper, has to give off steam or it will explode. Indeed, sometimes there had been explosions and there would be more. If we squint, we can see the men sitting at the store in their patched overalls , cracked brogan shoes, hats with salt lines dried on their crowns, maybe one of the men whittling an oak stick, making curled shavings that fall at his feet, maybe another spitting tobacco juice every so often, each of them knowing the folds of the hills surrounding them nearly as well as the lines of their own hands, but none of them having a firm hold on their livelihoods. At least they found some solace, and pleasure, in sitting together for a spell. They farmed the same crops: corn, potatoes, beans, apples, and tomatoes, to name the most common. Almost every one of them raised hogs and milked a cow or two and shared the same weather as their neighbors, and this common work and experience would start and end most conversations. But every so often, talk turned more serious, to themes of their common plight: too little income and too little land and what they were trying to do about it. But few let on much about their pain. Even when they did speak a few details about their worries or plans, it was often in the form of a joke or in hushed talk or with encoded words we might not understand at first. This was especially true for men engaged in the illegal business they called blockading. Though there is no store there today, and not one business anywhere near now, dozens...