White Lightning, bootlegging part of Coweta’s storied past
T
HE NATION’S ONLY LEGAL WOOD-FIRED DISTILLERY operates at Mount Vernon, the
plantation home of George Washington. Under the auspices of distiller-in-chief Washington, the hearth-mounted copper stills produced nearly 11,000 gallons of rye whiskey in 1799 alone. President Washington also paid the taxes his administration first imposed on whiskey craftsmen in 1791 – though it remains unclear if he paid taxes on all the whiskey his six enslaved African-American distillers produced. Needless to say, Washington did not participate in the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. That pivotal moment in
American economics established the precedent for taxing a domestic product (Blame Alexander Hamilton and the Revolutionary War for that one). Contemporary production figures from Washington’s restored distilleries fail to astound, but in October 2015, two bottles of the Scottishstyle single malt fetched $32,000 at auction. This brief history reveals a rarely contemplated truth: Despite its Scottish origins, whiskey is as fundamentally American as hot dogs, bluegrass music, and fast cars. It bred NASCAR, once filled prohibition-era hot dogs, and often accompanied the fiddle and banjo strains emerging from Appalachian hollows and from Coweta porches. Indeed, America’s mythic heart beats to the thump and hum of a hidden still. In the South, that thump and hum pumps veins of corn mash. Coweta’s whiskey history may be less prestigious than Mt. Vernon’s, but it is no less storied. Farming and distilling occupied twin posts: The whiskey met ends when the harvest couldn’t, and the harvest often ended in whiskey. If the price of corn was elastic, the price of an illicit gallon was not. And if a man couldn’t sell his shine, he could always drink it to numb the anxiety of an empty wallet, an empty belly, or an empty silo. As Newnan’s Jimmy Davenport, a relative of multiple deceased distillers, notes, “a lot of farmers made whiskey because it was their only source of cash.” Farming, however, was not the sole avenue to moonshining. Newnan native Scott Lunsford says his ancestors arrived in what would become Coweta County in the 18th century as indentured mercenaries tasked with depleting the native population. When that population proved to be more elusive than expected, Lunsford’s ancestors turned instead to a family tradition: The whiskey still. Lunsford says they traded whiskey for pelts and pelts for cash and goods. In the emerging settlement of Bullsboro, they sold the whiskey to travelers and settlers along the McIntosh Trail. Newnan, Lunsford points out, was built on whiskey. That foundation reflects the American adventure and enigma, a paradox of Puritan values and skilled evasion january /february 2016 | 17