Moonshine, from Outlaw Trade to Legal Distillery

Few things are woven deeper into Smoky Mountain lore than moonshine. When Scots Irish settlers came into these hollows, they brought a knowledge of distilling with them, turning locally grown corn into high proof whiskey. Made in hidden stills far up the creeks, often worked by the light of the moon to avoid the taxman, it earned the name moonshine.

The trade boomed during national Prohibition, when a thirsty country created a wide open black market, and mountain families who never got rich farming could earn real money running shine. For generations it stayed strictly illegal, a defiant, dangerous craft passed down in secret. Then the law changed.

In two thousand nine, Tennessee rewrote its statutes to allow legal distilling in more counties, a deliberate nod to the region's heritage. A Gatlinburg company called Ole Smoky moved fast, opening on the Fourth of July in two thousand ten as the first federally licensed distillery in the history of East Tennessee. Visitors can now watch legal moonshine being made and taste it right off the still, in the same town where making it was once a crime.

For a stretch of years, Ole Smoky was actually the most visited distillery in the entire world, proof that an old outlaw tradition can become a town's proudest attraction.