So let's answer the obvious question first: why 'Moonshiner 28'? Now, I'll be straight with you — the name itself is modern, a brand somebody cooked up not too many years back to draw riders in. But do not let that fool you for one second, because the heritage under that name is as real as the rock these mountains are made of. This truly was moonshine country, some of the best in the nation, and here's why.
Picture these mountains before there were good roads — steep, roadless, laurel-choked, folded up on themselves so tight a man could hide a whole operation in a cove and nobody the wiser. Now add poverty, hard times, and a cash crop problem: a mountain farmer could grow corn, sure, but hauling heavy corn out over terrible roads to a far-off market barely paid. Ah — but corn distilled down into liquor? That was light, valuable, didn't spoil, and folks would come to you for it. A bushel of corn worth a few cents became a jug of whiskey worth real money. The math wrote itself.
They called it blockade whiskey — white lightning, stumphole, popskull — and making it was a craft handed down family to family. When the government slapped a tax on liquor, a lot of these mountain folks, proud and broke and a thousand miles from the nearest sympathetic ear, simply refused to pay it. They weren't thinking of themselves as criminals. They were making a little corn liquor the way their daddy had, on their own land, and they figured it was nobody's business but theirs. And so these hollows filled up with hidden stills, and the twisting roads filled up, on dark nights, with men hauling the finished product out to market, fast and quiet, one jump ahead of the law.
That's the real Moonshiner 28. Not a slogan — a way of life that ran through this country for generations. And it left behind more than empty jars. It left a road full of ghosts, a style of fast driving that changed America, and about a hundred stories I'm going to spend the next sixty miles telling you.
Photo: Brian Stansberry (photographer) · CC BY 3.0
