Appalachian History

Daddy got caught the first time in about 1916 or ’17. The law was paying informers to tell on people. They put his bail bond at fifty dollars. That was on a Friday, and we didn’t have any money, so the next morning Mama gets me to hitch up the mule and we loaded up the wagon with what whiskey we had left. Back then, Saturday was the big trade day downtown and the streets would be so busy you could hardly walk.

"We tied the wagon in front of the courthouse and just sat there all day, selling whiskey. Everybody knew what Mama was doing, so a lot of people who didn’t even drink would stop and buy some. "For medicine," they would say.

"On up in the morning a deputy came by and asked her what she thought she was doing.

"I’m gettin’ my man out of jail," she replied. Back then no one messed with Mama. "Anything else you want to know?" she asked the deputy.

"No ma’am," the deputy replied sheepishly, "but I reckon I’ll take a gallon if you got any left, my croup has been acting up lately."

They got their dad out of jail that day, but he didn’t stay free long. When his trial came up, he was sentenced to 12 months on the county farm. "Pickin’ peas," he called it.

"I was a pretty good size boy by then and with Daddy in jail it was up to me to run the business," the younger Brasemore recalls. "Before he got caught, Daddy had hid the worm (copper condensation coil) and I got a neighbor to build me a pot.

“It wasn’t but just a couple of weeks ‘til I was back in business. When I run off my first batch they said the sheriff thought my father had escaped."

"Nobody makes whiskey that good," the sheriff said, "except for old man Brasemore!"

“I hadn’t forgotten about the cur dog that had informed on Daddy, though. Giles was his name. Him and the deputy that arrested Daddy were big drinking buddies. This deputy lived out next to Chase Nursery and every Sunday like clockwork, those two would pitch a big drunk.

"Some of my cousins helped me and we took this old worn-out still, it only had a ten-gallon pot, and we set it up out back of his house in a brush patch. First thing Sunday morning we loaded it with mash and started cooking. If you have ever been around a still, you know you can’t hide the smell, and sure enough, on up in the morning the deputy gets a strong whiff and decides to investigate.

"Well, here we are, me and my cousins are hiding in the brush, and the deputy and Giles are stretched out in front of the still sipping free whiskey and acting like they are in hog heaven.

"Next thing you know, there’s this big ruckus and when the deputy opened his eyes, there was the sheriff pointing this big pistol at him," he relates.

"You and Giles are under arrest for making whiskey," the sheriff said.

Seems as if someone had sent the sheriff a note.

"Like I said, while Daddy was in jail I was running the business. One of the first things I did, after I got a little ahead, was to buy me a truck. Daddy wouldn’t have nothing to do with automobiles, he had worked with a mule all of his life. Well I was bound and determined to impress him, so the day he was to get out I took the truck and loaded it down with as much whiskey as I could put on it. It hadn't been picked up in a while and we had a sizable load.

"Daddy was sitting on the front porch when I pulled up..."

"Things didn’t work out the way I figured and the truck broke down a couple of miles from the house. I got the mule, hitched it to the truck and began to pull it on home.

"Daddy was sitting on the front porch when I pulled up in front of the house. He took a long look at that truck I had bought and then took an even longer look at his mule that was pulling it. Finally, after spitting out a long stream of tobacco juice, he asked me, ‘Well, what else can it do?’

"He never did like that truck. Every time I got stuck in mud or whatever, he was always there to tell me that with a mule it would not have happened."


Excerpt from “Making Whiskey,” by Tom Carney, Old Huntsville Magazine, 1992; profile of moonshiner Jim Brasemore, Madison County, AL; online at http://www.oldhuntsville.com/articles/Making Whiskey.php

Did Chicago mobster Al Capone ever set foot in Johnson City, TN? During the 1920s the town was nicknamed Little Chicago. A reference acknowledging crime ties to the north? Or nothing more than an expression of local pride in the railroads, three of which ran through town? Big Chicago was known as a railroad center long before Capone came along.

Speaking of railroads, Capone bought a house in West Palm Beach, FL not long before the famous St. Valentine's Day Massacre of 1929, and Johnson City would have been a convenient layover town en route between Chicago and West Palm Beach in the days before regular air flight.

It is very likely that Chicago gangsters from the Capone mob came to Johnson City, Newport, Knoxville, Chattanooga and other Southern cities to make deals. One piece of circumstantial evidence that clearly puts Johnson City on this list: the town was one of the hardest hit places in the nation by a neural disorder called the "jake leg," which killed many and left others with a distinctive hitch in their stride.

Al Capone's FBI record and fingerprint samples.

The cost of whiskey was extremely high locally, running about $1.50 and up for a flask, while Jamaican ginger, medicinal alcohol and bay rum - all containing lethal denaturants that caused the jake - sold for well under $1.

Why was the cost of whiskey so high in an area of the country where moonshining flourished ever since the first whiskey taxes were levied in 1793? Supply and demand as ever determines price, and it appears that the price of whiskey was being driven up by outside buyers.

Capone was in the alcohol business, and East Tennessee was one of the centers where moonshine was made. While it is likely that he did business with local suppliers, the question remains whether the mob head would have purchased his product lines personally, or would have sent henchmen to do it. Either way, Capone covered his tracks well, leaving no known written records tying him directly to Johnson City. Recall that he was arrested not for his vast bootlegging operations or his speakeasy establishments, but for tax evasion.

The following contemporary newspaper account, while making no mention of Capone by name, describes Johnson City's reputation as a "wide-open city" with operating characteristics---thugs, high priced lawyers, judges on the take, hamstrung police---similar to Big Chicago. It specifically cites the liquor ring, rum runners and bootleggers as central to the problem:

"Will it require an atrocious murder? a series of holdups? a veritable reign of terror to jar the smug, self-satisfied citizens of Johnson City, Tennessee into a realization of what is going on within the city?

"TODAY JOHNSON CITY is overrun with criminals; would be criminals; thieves, thugs, gunmen, dope-peddlers, and other undesirables who working hand-in-hand with the liquor ring have so spread their evil influence that its effect has reached even into the juvenile element and more than a score of little boys are striving to emulate the lawbreakers who are apparently being ?glorified? in Johnson City and Washington County.

"Our very courts are apparently inoculated with the general tone of apathy; else they would hand out sentences sufficiently severe to make a would-be evildoer hesitate before perpetrating a crime. But the sentences are so light and it is apparently so very easy to escape the penalties of the law that the criminals scorn any fear of punishment.

"The police apprehend a criminal. Perhaps someone's life is saved. And then a skilled attorney, operating through the mazes and technicalities of the law and employing other aids, extricates his client from the toils of the law and he goes forth to commit another crime. Why is it that it is so hard to secure a jury in Washington County that is not unfriendly or apathetic toward law enforcement? And with each trial the maze of handicaps with which the police department is burdened, is increased.

"The dry organizations demand enforcement of the laws, but if the officers encounter resistance they dare not use force or they will be confronted with the penitentiary.
If a felony is committed the public expects the officers to apprehend the offenders. But if shots are exchanged the officers are in danger of arrest for defending their own lives, or for carrying out their duty. They are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

"Even the Council and Commission seem to feel that the police department can get along with anything second hand or discarded. They are expected to run down rum runners yet the police patrol (car) cannot be operated and the other car is a dilapidated wreck. They are expected to quell riots, yet there is not a riot gun in Johnson City, and some of the officers do not even have revolvers."

---DO WE WANT A REIGN OF TERROR
Johnson City Staff-News,
October 20, 1926
Editorial by Editor Carroll E. King

sources: www.timesnews.net/article.php?id=3660707
www.johnsonsdepot.com/chicago/chicago.htm
www.hollywoodusa.co.uk/GravesOutofLA/capone.htm



Al+Capone Johnson+City+TN moonshining rum+running bootlegging appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

Neal Thompson, author of Driving with the Devil: Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels, and the Birth of NASCAR, read at the 2008 Carolina Literary Festival over in Burnsville, NC this past weekend. We caught up with Neal to get a quick overview of the wild world of early moonshiners and stock car drivers.

Appalachian History: Could stock car racing as we understand it have emerged from, say, New England, the Midwest, or California, or is there some specific Southern cultural attribute(s) that is indelibly connected with it?

Neal Thompson: I'd argue strongly that the varied mix of elements that led to the creation of stock car racing could only have occurred in the South. Just one example is the lack of professional sports and spectator sports in the South, which didn't get it's first true professional sports team until the Braves moved to Atlanta in the 1960s. That meant people were hungry for a sport like stock car racing to attend on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, to root for their favorite driver, a sport to call their own.

Also, the deep roots of the southern moonshining culture are directly responsible for the sport, since so many of the early racers (and mechanics, and financial backers) were moonshiners. As I explore in the book, the Northeast and Midwest and West Coast had their own forms of racing, mainly open-wheel, Indy-style racing. But stock car racing was a truly southern creation, and that's why it remained a 'southern sport' for so long.

AH: During Prohibition, moonshiners were using souped up cars to outrun police. When do we first see a transition from that use to organized races?

NT: It's hard to pin down an exact transition point, but I've focused in the book on the period of the mid-1930s. That's when bootleggers began racing each other on makeshift racetracks, to see who had the fastest whiskey car. And that's when stock car racing as a spectator sport began to emerge and to spread, a phenomenon that coincides with the advent and spread of Ford V-8s (introduced by Ford in 1932), which became the favorite car of both the moonshine runners and the first twenty years of stock car racers.

The V-8 coupe, for example, was a big, sturdy, reliable car with a roomy trunk to hold plenty of liquor, but it was also relatively easy for mechanics to tinker with - and to make it run faster than Henry Ford intended it to. When fans then got a look at those V-8s roaring around a dusty track, a new sport was born.

AH: Raymond Parks was neither a driver nor a mechanic. What was his role in promoting stock car racing?

NT: Raymond's role in the creation of the sport that became NASCAR is so crucial that it has always amazed me that more has not been written about the man. Although, I've recently learning that when the new NASCAR hall of fame opens in 2010, there will be a special display that honors the sport's five founding fathers, including Raymond and two other characters in the book - Red Byron and Red Vogt. Each of them (and, of course, Bill France) played an important role during those critical early years. But Raymond's role was hugely important.

Not only did he create the first stock car racing "team" before WWII (with two moonshining cousins driving, and Red Vogt as the mechanic, and Raymond as the financier), but he replicated that successful "team" approach after WWII and put together the threesome that won NASCAR's first championship in 1948 (and again in 1949). He also let Bill France drive his cars now and then, and a few times loaned Big Bill money when he needed cash to pay drivers at the end of a poorly attended race.

AH: Early stock cars were all Fords: Ford Model As, then Ford Model Ts, then Ford V-8s. That changed after WWII. What happened?

NT: After the war the nation's automakers got back up and running and Ford's competitors finally began to produce cars that could compete - on the road and on the racetrack - with Ford's V-8s. Within just a few years after the war, the Ford would lose its long-running dominance.

AH: How did 'Big Bill' France outmaneuver Parks & Red Vogt (who coined the name NASCAR) for control of the organization?

NT: A lot of people would argue that Bill Bill "stole" NASCAR from the other co-founders. And it's true that he did nudge aside his friends, including Raymond Parks and Red Vogt, and took control of the organization - and it's shares - right from the start. At the same time, however, no one else was really interested in taking over the business side of the sport - the book keeping and money managing, etc. Mainly, they just wanted to race. So Big Bill, in many views, did what had to be done for the sport to survive, even if he was a bit of a bully about it.

AH: What competition did the NASCAR organization face from other racing leagues?

NT: I found it fascinating that AAA, the organization that now does roadside assistance and promotes safety, was once a race promotion organization. But they got out of the business in the 1950s, as did other groups that were vying for dominance of stock car racing, and ever since around 1955 NASCAR has been the dominant force in the sport.

AH: Thanks so much for joining us today!



appalachia Bill+France NASCAR Neal+Thompson Raymond+Parks stock+car+racing moonshining appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

"Some boys git it in their heads that they can make a sight of money selling liquor. The law cracks down on them almost as soon as they git a start. We see it happen every day around here. You've got to keep the law paid off a good and plenty or else the penitentiary is where they's going to land. Now if they does pay off, where is the profit left from selling? Ain't none. So there they is. I told Cap if he had it in his head to do that, he better be clearing his head of it right now.

"I don't blame him one bit for having his mind set on making a little money to have fun on. Seems like me and Calvin ain't never done a thing ever but work hard all our lives. Some folks find pleasure in going to meeting on Sunday. But it's no church I've had sight of here in Knoxville where the ones coming in and out ain't dressed up fit to kill. Some says it's all the same in the eyes of the Lord about how you dress. But I knows if He's got sense at all, He knows our clothes is too wore out for Sunday strutting. I know they's shabby in my own sight.

"Calvin and me both can read right well. In times back we use to read the Bible pretty much. But seems like you always come across something you can't make out straight. So we just stopped reading it. Looked a pure shame, as wore out as we was, to read things that upset your head.

"I guess I got on to the main of it, though. I know that Jesus Christ died to save sinners. And all that me and Calvin have to do is trust in Him. And we do. And we believe in Him. I don't see where they's any way to keep me and Calvin out of Heaven. Calvin moved away from the mountains to keep a killing from happening. That clears what's said about not killing. We ain't never stole and have always told the truth. We never brought false witness against nobody.

"They's more to it, but I counted them off one day and we is all right. Calvin and me ain't never harmed a living soul in our lives. So I ain't bothering about Hell if I never gits inside the door of a Knoxville church. When me and Calvin gits there I'd be more than glad to do what I could to help others git in.

"They's some folks, not a thousand miles away from here, that are going to need a heap of help. Ah, Lordy, yes!"

Lola Simmons
Knoxville TN 1938 or 1939

Such as Us: Southern Voices of the Thirties
by Tom E. Terrill, Jerrold Hirsch
UNC Press, 1978


Lola+Simmons Knoxville+TN Tom+E.+Terrill Jerrold+Hirsch moonshining religion+in+Appalachia appalachia appalachian+mountains+history

Kephart: “People up North, and in the lowlands of the South as well, have a notion that there is little or nothing going on in these mountains except feuds and moonshining. They think that a stranger traveling here alone is in danger of being potted by a bullet from almost any laurel thicket that he passes, on mere suspicion that he may be a revenue officer or a spy.

“Of course, that is nonsense; but there is one thing that I'm as ignorant about as any novel-reader of them all. You know my habits; I like to explore--I never take a guide--and when I come to a place that's particularly wild and primitive, that's just the place I want to peer into. Now the dubious point is this: Suppose that, one of these days when I'm out hunting, or looking for rare plants, I should stumble upon a moonshine still in full operation--what would happen? What would they do?

Moonshiner: "Waal, sir, I'll tell you whut they'd do. They'd fust-place ask you some questions about yourself, and whut you-uns was doin' in that thar neck o'the woods. Then they'd git you to do some trifflin' work about the still--feed the furnace, or stir the mash--jest so's't they could prove you took a hand in it your own self."

"What good would that do?"

"Hit would make you one o'them in the eyes of the law."

"I see. But, really, doesn't that seem rather childish? I could easily convince any court that I did it under compulsion; for that's what it would amount to."

Revenue officers with a captured still on Rich Mountain, NC in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, November 18, 1931. Photographer George A. Grant.

"I reckon you-uns would find a United States court purty hard to convince. The judge'd right up and want to know why you let grass go to seed afore you came and informed on them."

He paused, watched my expression, and then continued quizzically: "I reckon you wouldn't be in no great hurry to do that."

"No! Then, if I stirred the mash and sampled their liquor, nobody would be likely to mistreat me?"

"Shucks! Why, man, whut could they gain by hurtin' you? At the wust s'posin' they was convicted by your own evidence, they'd only get a month or two in the pen. So why should they murder you and get hung for it? Hit's all 'tarnal foolishness, the notions some folks has!"

"I thought so. Now, here! The public has been fed all sorts of nonsense about this moonshining business. I'd like to learn the plain truth about it, without bias one way or the other. I have already learned that a stranger's life and property are safer here than they would be on the streets of Chicago or of St. Louis. It will do your country good to have that known. But I can't say that there is no moonshining going on here; for a man with a wooden nose could smell it. Now what is your excuse for defying the law? You don't seem ashamed of it."

The man's face turned an angry red.

"Mister, we-uns hain't no call to be ashamed of ourselves, nor of ary thing we do. We're poor; but we don't ax no favors. We stay 'way up hyar in these coves, and mind our own business. When a stranger comes along, he's welcome to the best we've got, such as t'is; but if he imposes on us, he gits his medicine purty damned quick!"

Our Southern Highlanders by Horace Kephart
(Outing Publishing Company, 1913)


Our+Southern+Highlanders Horace+Kephart moonshining revenuers rich+mountain+nc Great+Smoky+Mountains+National+Park appalachia appalachian+mountains+history