More than Moonshine

MEMOIR More than Moonshine Sidney Saylor Farr When I began working for the Council of the Southern Mountains in 1964, I read articles and books about Appalachia, talked with people working in community action programs in communities over the area, and did research for Mountain Life & Work articles. I learned that Land Grants brought the Scotch-Irish Mountain folk to the hills of Southeastern Kentucky. Marooned in their mountains, they were generally isolated and were parceled out as political minorities among the states that share Appalachia geographically. Grandpa said he and his people hardly felt any loyalty to North Carolina or Virginia and other states when they were settled there. When the Civil War came, a majority of mountain men supported the Union. During the Reconstruction Period, they were considered to be traitors and left mostly to themselves. Their land was almost worthless for tax purposes; their roads were little more than trails along rocky beds of streams; their families were outgrowing the capacity of rugged mountain farms to sustain them at subsistence levels, and the game was mostly gone from the coves and ridges. The mountain people became burdened with terrible poverty at a time when there was inadequate tax support of public education and the construction of roads. The culture turned inward upon itself in an overcrowded land, whose people, old-fashioned when they came, now depended upon the ancient oral culture their ancestors knew to sustain rigorous life on a static frontier. At the time the Appalachian Mountain range held nearly half of the coal the world would need. Coal and virgin timber were discovered in the late nineteenth century. Powerful timber and coal enterprises sent representatives to purchase rights to these resources. "The mineral rights to land given to us as land grants was sold for as little as fifty cents an acre," Grandpa told me. "Fifty cents an acre seemed big money back then—especially when people were told they could still live on the land. They lied to us. They got the coal and timber out, no matter what destruction it caused." Grandpa's face turned red with anger, and his voice got loud Fortunately, the skills possessed by people of pioneer days were 91 taught, father to son, mother to daughter, on down through the generations. There is still knowledge of how to raise gardens, tend small orchards, and plant and raise corn on steep hillsides. Moonshine Whiskey Moonshining in Appalachia has been romanticized in so many books, songs, and motion pictures, that many find it difficult to differentiate between fiction and the true role that the production of illegal alcohol played in the lives of mountain people. First, there were legal whiskey makers in Kentucky, but Appalachian men made illicit whiskey. It was part of my heritage the men brought with them into the mountains. My ancestors made liquor in Scotland and Northern Ireland. In the 1600s they had been forced to hide their small stills in wild inaccessible places to avoid the despised British tax collectors. Making whiskey was considered to be a man's own business. Why should he have to pay tax on a product made on his own land? When the Scotch-Irish poured into America in the 1700s, they brought with them the knowledge of whiskey making and their contempt for government taxation. I learned that the protests about taxation were loud and angry from the Scotch-Irish. This rugged region embraced parts of Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, andNorthCarolina. Herethemoonshinerpracticed his ancient art long after it had died out in other parts of the country. When national prohibition was passed in 1919, the moonshine trade was increased considerably. The fact that the price of alcohol increased dramatically brought criminal elements into the industry, ruining the reputation of the proud old-time mountaineer moonshiner. The newcomers, often lacking the know-how or concern for their customers, sometimes produced poisonous whiskey. Dad always talked with scorn about people who would do that for money. Dad, his brothers and Grandpa all made moonshine whiskey, primarily to sell for cash, but they also drank their own product. The Saylor men all had good reputations as moonshiners. They did well during the years before...