Moonshine, Revenuers, and the Legal Jar
Near Pigeon Forge, Tennessee
The jars of moonshine sold up and down this parkway are the legal, licensed descendants of an outlaw tradition that ran in these hollows for two hundred years. Scots Irish settlers came to Appalachia in the seventeen hundreds carrying the pot still and the craft of turning grain into whiskey, and here they found corn. The math was brutal but simple.
A bushel of corn was nearly worthless by the time you hauled it out of a remote cove, but distilled into a couple of gallons of whiskey, it was suddenly worth real money and easy to carry. After the Civil War, when the federal government kept a heavy tax on liquor to pay down its war debt, mountain distillers refused to pay, and the long cat and mouse war between moonshiners and revenue agents began. Prohibition in the nineteen twenties only pushed the trade deeper into the laurel thickets.
For generations, making whiskey in these mountains was a crime, a livelihood, and a point of pride all at once. Then, in the late two thousands, Tennessee changed its laws to allow small distilleries, and the outlaws stepped into the light. In the summer of two thousand ten, Ole Smoky opened in nearby Gatlinburg, the first federally licensed distillery in the history of East Tennessee.
Today you can taste, legally and openly, what your ancestors would have gone to jail for.
