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3 Appalachian Spring The people of my adopted section of Virginia . . . came out into this fine sweet western hill country to live, and were joined out here by solid Germans from Pennsylvania. . . . The stock did not like the older colonial Virginians much in an earlier day. They felt themselves neglected, left out in the cold. They still feel that at times. —Sherwood Anderson, “Virginia” the ancestors of those who packed into the Roanoke courthouse had moved into the western Virginia hill country generations before, seeking farms they could settle on and call their own. Finding mountain farms was a godsend for them, a fulfillment of their search for independence and a way to raise their children with the hope for a better future. Yet as the nation’s economy and infrastructure began to develop during the industrial boom of the late 1800s, the people of the mountains were “left out in the cold,” as Sherwood Anderson put it. But these were resourceful people, and they figured out ways of surviving despite their neglect, even as their farms paid them less than they needed. One way, of course, was through expanding what they called blockading: mountain whiskey making and bootlegging. As the conspiracy trial showed, it was not that the Virginia mountains lacked economic activity, but that in the absence of roads, schools, and jobs, people had used their skills to invent an economy from scratch, without outside help. The problem with this strategy was that when the U.S. federal government passed liquor laws making any moonshining illegal, mountain whiskey production had to be put under wraps, and thus it became wide open to corruption. Instead of eradicating it, local government officials ended up in the middle of the corruption. So as demand rose for moonshine, all sanctioned by local government officials, kingpins took advantage of the situation and to enrich themselves at the expense of those producing whiskey for survival. When their whole pyramid threatened to come crashing down with Col. Thomas Bailey’s investigation, the people who had done most of the work and made the least from it were destined to suffer most again. In appalachian spring 59 other words, the ones already out in the cold were about to lose their most reliable source of heat. As headlines emblazoned the papers in 1935 with tales of the conspiracy trial, readers became fascinated with those who made a living by distilling and hauling whiskey. But the newspaper articles stopped short of answering why hundreds, even thousands, of people in one county were involved in this trade to begin with or what history and economics had to do with it. Prevalent stereotypes and myths associated whiskey production with mountain immorality, depravity of mind, backwardness, or even a general mountain disdain for law. Thus, when the trial revealed a major moonshine scheme in Franklin County, many who followed the news jumped to the conclusion that the producers were all criminals. Federal reports accusing 99 percent of the county of being involved only worsened the reputation of mountaineers. Sherwood Anderson was an exception. His treatment of the mountain whiskey producers, in Kit Brandon and elsewhere, linked moonshine with the broad national picture of business and agriculture at the time. He also sought to explore the history of mountain settlement chronologically in order to put to rest some of those wrongheaded notions of mountain inferiority. In an article in Vanity Fair, he linked the story of the mountains to immigration and harkened back to the arrival of whites in the Appalachians. He pointed out that those who traveled to the mountains heading down the Shenandoah River from Pennsylvania started out already quite behind eastern Virginia planters who had first received land grants. They traveled by horse and Conestoga wagon “one by one and settling there,” without the assurance of land titles recorded in courthouses. He also hinted at a deeper history in Europe when he wrote that a “surprising number” of the settlers were “Scotch-Irish—so called.”1 He got much of this history right. The settlers of the steepest mountains had trekked down the Great Wagon Road along with Germans in search of unclaimed land on the frontier. Many of them ended up on the steepest land in places like Endicott, where they picked “a place with a bit of creek or river bottom,” Anderson said. “Hundreds and even thousands of cold mountain streams flowed down out of the hills. They were alive with trout. The forests were full...

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