How Does the Law Find Blockade Stills? April 28, 1922

Still Hunting. . . The Life of a Moonshiner Is Not One of Roses

This paper has been asked numerous times, “how do the officers find out where blockade stills are?” Various ways, we guess. Sometimes a blockader gives himself away by his actions. Not long since one of these gentry was in a town buying meal. He looked suspicious to an officer who watched him. The blockader went to several stores and bought meal at each place. He was finally seen to go out into the country in a certain direction. The officer made enquiries and found out where the man lived and a day or two later caught him red handed.

Sometimes a man gets made with a blockader because he refuses to let his liquor go on credit. That man reports the blockader and his still is broken up.

A man in a western county told a citizen, knowing he kept liquor, that he wanted a little for his wife, but the poor wife never saw it. Instead of thanking the man for letting him have it, he reported the transaction to an officer. The whiskey man was cleared in court but the man that did the reporting was sent to jail for a few days for getting the goods under false pretense. It was a mean act, and the judge told him so.

There are many other ways that the officers find out where stills are. It is said that there is one officer in Chatham that has a whiskey-smelling nose; that he can smell the slops around a still five miles away. We do not know whether he can or not, but we do know that when he goes after them he brings them back.

Not many moons since the young man living in the eastern part of Chatham wanted some liquor for his wife. He knew how to make the stuff, so he got him a small still and went to work. “I tell you,” he told a friend, “I make the liquor alright, but I’ll never make any more. I could imagine everything about being caught. It looked as if the very bushes were men waiting to grab me, and at every little noise my heart would jump to my throat. It was a scary time, I tell you.”

Such is the life of all moonshiners, we expect.

From the front page of The News Record, Pittsboro, N.C., Friday, April 28, 1922