“Champion sheriff still-seizer of the South.”
Virtual eradicator of chained lightning from a whole county.
Favorite of the Anti-Saloon League.
“Old Taylor, unhooded terror of Lenoir.”
“Did Arden Taylor, sheriff of Lenoir County, tell a Baltimore newspaperman these things about himself? Local officials “kidded” Taylor considerably today over his breaking into print under big headlines in a Baltimore newspaper. “Working alone against scores of manufacturers and distributors of white lightning, Taylor claims to have virtually wiped out moonshining in his district,” the story read. “Anti-Saloon League members of Lenoir County think highly of Taylor and are warm in their praise of his administration. The mere mention of his name will start a fight in any patronized coffee house in the South. Those denizens of the ‘Sunny South’ who lurk in backwoods over boiling pots and flaming fires have felt his sting and know he is not one to be dismissed lightly.” While in one county of the South last year hooded bands were “reforming” the county, Taylor, by himself and wearing his every-day suit, was cleaning out all the moonshiners by himself.
Tom C. Conway, who weas with Taylor when the interview was given, could not recall that the official said all that he was “put down as saying. He was much more modest about it than that,” Conway declared. “The only thing I saw him try to put over anybody at Baltimore was when he tried to get through fire lines by telling the firemen he was a ‘regular, bona fide member of the volunteer fire brigade at Kinston.’ That gag didn’t work.”
The local sheriff today was not certain that the Anti-Saloon League would “give him strong support” at the next election. Nor was the Court-house lawn all littered up with wrecked stills. Taylor, “towering man with a gruff voice,” has smashed hundreds of stills, as alleged, but not nearly all of the operators have been caught. The Baltimore version gave the number destroyed last year as 125. Taylor declared for local consumption that the number might have attained that figure. He cited a written declaration by a state official that he had smashed more stills than any other sheriff. “Lots of folks” here never learned the fact, his intimates declared today.
At any rate, there is considerably less liquor in some Lenoir localities, and Arden W. Taylor, “unhooded terror of Lenoir,” knows just how to wreck ‘em, as evidenced by a plant and a preacher, the Rev. Baxter McLendon, evangelist, as an outstanding figure in the picture.
From the front page of The Kinston Free Press, February 7, 1923
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