Alabama moonshine raids through the decades: 81 years of lawmen battling bootleggers
By Jeremy Gray
August 21, 2018
Bootlegging has been going on in Alabama for centuries and in recent decades photographers were often on the scene as lawmen smashed the stills where the moonshine was made.
Alabama implemented statewide prohibition in 1915, five years before the entire nation went dry, and remained dry for four years after national Prohibition ended in 1933.
Even after Prohibition, an “unholy alliance between the lawbreakers and the preachers” kept many of Alabama’s 67 counties dry, according to Hardy Jackson, Jacksonville State University’s Eminent Scholar in History.
Many counties held out on offering legal liquor for years because the bootleggers wanted to keep their money out of the tax-collectors hands. The preachers wanted to keep alcohol out of the mainstream, even if they couldn’t stop the flow of illegal booze.
The state’s last fully dry county, Clay County, voted to allow alcohol sales in some cities in 2016.
Here is a look at raids on stills through the decades in counties across Alabama.
The photos date back to at least 1937, the year the Associated Press wrote that “‘bone dry’ Alabama led all states in the number of illicit distilleries,” and the most recent was taken in June 2018.
The captions with the file photos do not always include a date or location. If you recognize a person or place, please drop me a line at jgray@al.com:
Original caption: Down The Drain Goes Moonshine …Patrolman Joe Cottrell empties booze – Patrol halts slow-poke, finds load of whisky – Slow driving, too, can get a driver into trouble. That’s what happened last night when a Highway Patrolman became suspicious of a car which was poking along. Patrolman Joe Cottrell stopped the vehicle to find out why, and wound up arresting the driver on charges of hauling some 175 gallons of non-tax paid whisky. Whiskey, Raids