Every outlaw country has its outlaw king, and this one had a real one — a man whose name rang from these mountains clear to the newspapers of New York. Let me tell you about Lewis Redmond, the man they called the King of the Moonshiners.
He was born in this country, over in Swain County, right in the eighteen-fifties, and he came up in the hard years after the Civil War, running blockade whiskey like half the young men in these hills. But Redmond had a spark of something — a recklessness, a charm — that set him apart. In eighteen seventy-six, when a federal deputy marshal came to arrest him, Redmond shot the man dead, and lit out into these mountains. And that one act turned a mountain moonshiner into a national legend.
Because the newspapers got hold of him. In an age hungry for outlaw heroes, they built Lewis Redmond into a mountain Robin Hood — the dashing bandit of the Blue Ridge, too clever and too beloved by his neighbors to ever be caught, protected by every mountain family for a hundred miles. Dime novels were written about him. He became famous. And there was truth in it: these mountain people did shelter him, because to them he wasn't a murderer — he was one of their own, standing up to the hated revenue men, and they'd no more turn him in than turn in their own brother.
They did finally catch him, in eighteen eighty-one, shot up and near dead. But here's the mountain-justice ending: he was so popular, and the cause so sympathetic, that within a few years he was pardoned, walked free, and lived out his days quiet, dying an old man down in South Carolina — in Walhalla, as it happens, the very town this road eventually runs to. From murdering outlaw to folk hero to free man to peaceful old age. Only in these mountains. When you drive this country, know that its king was a moonshiner — and the people loved him for it.
Photo: Brian Stansberry (photographer) · CC BY 3.0
