Now here's a wrinkle in the moonshine story that I love, because it's so perfectly, stubbornly mountain: the county you're driving through spent most of the last century bone dry, by its own choice — and it may have been the moonshine capital of the state the whole time.
Graham County, right here, voted itself dry back in nineteen forty-eight — meaning you could not legally buy a drop of liquor, beer, or wine anywhere in the county. And it stayed that way. While the rest of the country loosened up decade by decade, Graham held the line, hard, and became the very last completely dry county in all of North Carolina — dry clear up until Robbinsville finally allowed a little sales in twenty twenty-one. Seventy-some years without a legal drink.
And here's the beautiful contradiction. This deeply religious, Baptist, teetotaling county, that would not sell you a legal beer to save its soul — was riddled with moonshine. Folks called it the wettest dry county in the state. On Sunday morning the church was full and the preacher thundered against the demon liquor; and up in the hollows, the stills ran quiet as ever. Both things, side by side, for generations. The same families, sometimes.
Now, is that hypocrisy? I don't think so, quite. I think it's something more honest and more human: a proud, poor, private people who believed drinking was a sin AND believed the government had no business taxing a man's own corn — and saw no contradiction in living out both beliefs at once, in the same green hollow, on the same Sunday. That's not a slogan on a highway sign, friend. That's the real, tangled, stubborn soul of these mountains. And you're driving right through the middle of it.
Photo: Miscellaneous Items in High Demand, PPOC, Library of Congress · Public domain
