WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (AP) — Joe Mickey and Bob Hillyer often stumble upon surprises when they venture off the marked trails in Stone Mountain State Park, and not all of them involve snakes and bears.
The two men have developed a nose for finding rusted barrels, jerry cans, yeast containers and other remnants of the area’s extensive moonshine history scattered in the folds of the park’s 14,300 acres. Over the last 30-plus years, they have discovered and subsequently catalogued about 200 abandoned moonshine sites, most of which are on unmarked trails.
On Thursday and Friday, Hillyer led two-mile guided hikes off Garden Creek that swung past about 10 different sites in the park as part of N.C. Trail Days, a four-day festival in Elkin that celebrates the area’s parks and trails.
Guided hikes are a smart and safe way to see the old scrap parts of this infamous and illegal industry, which thrived in Wilkes County up until the 1970s.
Any off-trail venturing in this sprawling park is not recommended, said Park Superintendent Jeff Jones.
“We try to make our trails safe as much as we can. A lot of the liquor stills are in areas that are not on marked trails, with a lot of blowdowns and rocky cliffs,” he said.
Because distilling corn whisky without paying federal taxes is illegal, moonshiners had to be evasive, so they set up their stills deep in the backwoods to avoid federal agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, commonly known as “revenuers.”
The mountains that became part of Stone Mountain State Park provided plenty of cover for the scores of moonshiners who lived there. Most of the stills that Mickey and Hillyer have found are in the Wilkes County portion of the park, fitting into the county’s reputation as a hub for hooch.
Mickey, a Winston-Salem native who now lives in State Road, is a longtime visitor to the state park. Hillyer, an Elkin resident, is also a veteran hiker who feels comfortable enough in the wilderness to go off-trail.
“You follow creeks and you’ll find them,” Hillyer said of the old stills.
The two men did a lot of exploring in Stone Mountain when their kids were young.
“We started finding more and more stills so we left the kids and got off the trail,” he said.
Intrigued by the old stills, they learned about the art of distilling corn liquor and talked to locals about their memories of the area’s moonshining days, which ended about the time Stone Mountain became a state park in 1969.
“They all have stories,” Hillyer said of the old-time moonshiners he talked to, “but whether they’re true or not... .”
Because the soil is not great for farming and there is little pasture land in the area for cattle, moonshining became a way for local people to make money. The early stills of the 1800s used furnaces built with stacked rock to heat the mash. Though rare, some of the rock formations are evident in the park.
The most common stills in the park were fashioned from 55-gallon drums. Often, two or even three drums were stacked on top of the other and welded.
Scores of these fallen stills are strewn throughout the south end of the park, beneath white pines, amid piles of leaves. Last week, Mickey and Hillyer pointed out the jagged ends of the drums, a sign that a federal agent had destroyed its contents with explosives. Sometimes, revenuers would swing an ax at a drum in an attempt to destroy the still and empty the mash. That wasn’t always enough, On one still, you could see the scars of a one-time gash that had been welded and repaired.
One of Hillyer and Mickey’s most exciting finds was a submarine still rusting away behind a bank of rhododendrons just a few feet off an unmarked trail. Built by men who picked up welding skills after World War I, submarine stills could hold up to 900 gallons of mash. They were big-time moneymakers that could bring in $5,000 a week.
“This one was here a long time before we saw it,” Mickey said, walking around the old tank.
Not far from the submarine still, up a steep hillside, the men ambled past an old graveyard, with smoothed over headstones and footstones, another reminder of the hearty settlers who once inhabited this rugged wilderness.
Hillyer has enjoyed imagining what happened in these remote hills when moonshiners and revenuers played endless games of cat-and-mouse.
“You come across a still that isn’t blown up and you ask yourself, ‘What happened? Why didn’t the revenuers get that one? Maybe they got caught doing something else and decided to give it up,’” Hillyer said. “I guess it’s the stories behind each one of them that interest me.”