People love to imagine this road full of moonshine runners in the old days, tearing through the curves with a trunk full of white liquor and the law on their tail. It's a great picture. And it's mostly hung on the wrong road — so let me set it straight, because the real moonshine road is right next door.
That highway that meets US-129 down at Deals Gap — North Carolina 28 — has a nickname of its own: Moonshiner 28. And it earned it. These deep, roadless, hard-to-police mountains were prime moonshine country for generations. Corn was heavy and hard to haul out over bad roads, but corn turned into liquor was light, valuable, and — well — thirsty folks would come to you. So the hollows ran with hidden stills, and the twisty mountain roads like 28 ran with the men hauling the finished product out to market, fast and quiet, mostly at night.
And here's the piece people don't connect: that outlaw driving — running loaded down twisting mountain roads, outrunning revenue agents, souping up ordinary cars to do it — that is a direct ancestor of stock-car racing. The skills the moonshiners built dodging the law became the skills that built NASCAR. The mountains taught America how to drive fast on a bad road.
So yes, there's real moonshine blood in this pavement — just on the road one gap over. When you finish the Dragon and roll onto 28, tip your hat. You'll be on the outlaws' highway, where fast driving in these mountains was a way of life, and sometimes a matter of freedom.
Photo: Brian Stansberry (photographer) · CC BY 3.0
