Joe Dabney at Large
Recalling The Heady Days of North Georgia Moonshining
and It's Connection to NASCAR   

By Joe Dabney

 It was around 1970, and the family and I, including the wife and our five kids, were returning home in the old Ford wagon following a trip to the north Georgia mountains. Looming ahead as we came out of a curve was a sign saying there was a museum in Dawsonville, population 300 at the time. Visit World's Only Moonshine Museum in Dawsonville.

We decided to check out the place and we circled around Dawsonville's tiny two-story brick courthouse and soon found the museum and its owner, Fred Goswick who was out in front of his creation.

The museum was housed in an old chicken house! But don't laugh, folks, some of those chicken houses in north Georgia back then could easily gobble up two double-wides with space left over for extra mash barrels, flake stands, preheaters, thump kegs, headache pieces, tempering tubs, mash sticks, doublers, bootleg bonnets, and money pieces, to name a few implements of the trade.

It really was an honest-to-God museum displaying four big stills...a copper pot, a groundhog, a steamer and a pan. Fred Goswick told us that each still represented an era of Appalachian history and that the hardy Scotch-Irish (mostly) mountaineers who didn't go west in California's 1849 gold rush, started turning their north Georgia corn into whiskey in a big way, and funneling the spirits into Atlanta by the wagon load. Along about that time Atlanta's first mayor, Moses Formwalt, had a booming business on Decatur Street near Five Points, building copper stills for a growing clientele!

Nine decades later, the illegal enterprise ­ illegal because the operators were evading federal taxes ­ really took off with the introduction of a cadre of young trippers who drove their souped up '39 and '40 Ford coupes outfitted with super steel springs, down from the hills, each bearing more than a hundred gallons of the white whiskey destined for thirsty patrons in Atlanta.

Fast forward to 1970: I'd been trying to come up with an idea for a book to write and after hearing Goswick's captivating accounts, Susanne said to me, "There's your subject, Joe!"

And what a subject it was! I plunged into studying its history and background. So intense was my research efforts that I got locked up on night in the catacombs of Atlanta's old Carnegie Library. Afterward I set out interviewing ex-moonshiners and revenuers at a furious pace, all in my spare time.

Thus in June of 1974, after receiving the help of scores of retired 'shiners, trippers, bootleggers and revenuers, plus dozens of wonderful librarians, my first book came out, titled MOUNTAIN SPIRITS: A Chronicle of Corn Whiskey from King James' Ulster Plantation to America's Appalachians and the Moonshine Life. It was published in hard cover by Charles Scribner's Sons, the legendary New York publisher then housed on 597 Fifth Avenue. For a country boy still green behind the ears, it was an awesome occasion, particularly when my 12-year-old son Scott and I checked in at the grand old Algonquin Hotel on 44th Street, courtesy of Mr. Scribner, of course.

Early the next morning Scott and I walked down Fifth Avenue for an appearance on the NBC Today Show with Gene Shalit. I carried onto the set a little carved wooden still that the good people of Dahlonega had given me the previous Saturday when the CofC staged the first annual "Ex-Moonshiners and Revenuers Convention" at Gold Hills of Dahlonega. (And later, on a visit to Scribners, I was thrilled getting to sit in the hallowed seat of Maxwell Perkins, the famed editor who discovered Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe and edited Ernest Hemingway and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings,, among others.)

Memories about those exciting days came to mind recently with the publication of two new books, Driving with the Devil: Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels and the Birth of NASCAR, published by Crown and written by Neal Thompson of Asheville, N.C., and MOONSHINE! a collection of mountain humor, recipes, knee-slappers and historical stuff, written by a good friend from San Diego, Matthew B. Rowley, and published by Lark books of New York.

As the title suggests, Thompson's "Driving with the Devil" is a rollicking no-holds-barred chronicle of NASCAR's moonshine roots, with wonderful accounts of the early race drivers such as Roy Hall, Red Byron and Dawsonville's Lloyd Seay, who unfortunately was shot by a cousin in a dispute over sugar. It came at the height of Seay's driving career and he was buried in the hillside cemetery across the road from Goswick's museum.

Almost as interesting are Thompson's accounts of legendary auto mechanic, Louis (Red) Vogt, and perhaps the real unsung granddaddy of NASCAR, Ray-mond Parks, also a Daw-sonville native, who financed many of the race drivers and their cars in the early days of the sport. This was long before Bill France and his son Bill Jr., turned NASCAR into a behemoth of a sports business and a mega marketing enterprise.

I recently had a chance to visit with the mannerly and quiet-spoken Raymond Parks, now in his 90's, and his wife, Viola, at Parks' office on Atlanta's Northside Drive. Though Parks was unable to talk much, the photographs on his office walls told much of the story of his extraordinary life, particularly his relationship with the early moonshine trippers such as the aforementioned Seay and Hall as well as dozens of other well-known race drivers such as Red Bryon, Fonty Flock and his brother Bob.

When I was researching "Mountain Spirits," a story I picked up came from the late Duff Floyd of Jasper, one of the ATF's legendary revenuers. A Bartow County native and a Gary Cooper look-alike, Duff, such was his courage, never carried a gun when going on a still raid. His territory included two of north Georgia's most notorious moonshine counties, Gilmer and Dawson, the latter of which for many years held the title as the "Moonshine Capital of America," turning out tens of thousands of gallons of booze annually.

At the time, Dawson County boasted dozens of young hot rod liquor trippers. One night, a tripper bet that he could make the turn around the aforementioned courthouse without even slowing down coming out of the Highway 9 straightaway from Dahlon-ega. The car ended up ripping off the corner of the town's post office. Sheriff Charlie Crawford was furious. He and his deputy dropped shells into their double-barreled shotguns and took positions at the old courthouse. The sheriff's own son came roaring around the square and the sheriff shot off his rear tires, pulled him out of the car and threw him in jail.

Meanwhile Duff Floyd and two of his ATF partners were out checking on the likker traffic coming down Highway 9, the trippers' main drag into Atlanta.

"We were sittin' up there on the Dahlonega Road," Duff recalled, "and this car we were looking for, loaded with whiskey, came out on the main road, headed south. We took out after him. When we reached the schoolhouse curve going into Dawsonville, he was out of sight. 'Look Toward Atlanta!' I yelled as we reached the square. They didn't see him and I shouted, 'Gone toward Jasper!' and I shoved that gear into second and poured on the gas. Just as I did, I heard a shotgun go KA-BALOOOM! and I could hear the buckshot singing. Two of my tires went down. I slammed on the brakes and the sheriff came running up, the smoke pouring out of his shotgun."

"I will just be damned, Duff," the sheriff said as he peeked in the car and saw his old friend.

"Charlie, what in the world?"

"I didn't know it was you, Duff. Them trippers have been trying to take over this place tonight and we decided to declare war on 'em."

The sheriff helped Duff replace his tires and even offered to pay for them. "I never saw a pore old feller as sorry about anything as he was," Duff recalled. "Other people got it out that he shot my tires down on purpose to keep us from catching liquor cars."

Such were the days that we shall never see again...now gone with the wind. I regret also that Goswick's museum is no more although Goswick is still going strong as a Dawsonville wood carver. Thankfully we have excellent books such as the two new ones by Thompson and Rowley as well as my own to help us remember those wild and wooly days of yesteryear in the hills of north Georgia.  

Joe Dabney is the author of two books on moonshine, both of which are available in trade paperbacks, "Mountain Spirits" and "More Mountain Spirits." He is also the author of a more recent book, "Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread and Scuppernong Wine", winner of the James Beard Award as "cookbook of the year" and "HERK", the definitive biography of the C-130 Hercules airlifter. He can be reached at joedabney@aol.com.