Waco History Podcast

This is Living Stories, featuring voices from the collections of the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. I'm Kim Patterson. White lightning, hooch, mountain dew, firewater—all names for moonshine, or distilled spirits made in an unlicensed still. Although moonshine is most often associated with Prohibition in the U.S., the practice as we know it began shortly after the formation of the country, when people were attempting to avoid the new federal tax on alcohol. CBF missionary Earl Martin recalls his encounter with a moonshine still in the late forties, when he was teaching in eastern Tennessee: "I was traipsing in the mountain trails in an area that wasn't too well-known to me, and I suddenly came on a moonshine still. And it was—it was—the fire was going, and it was smoking. But I didn't see anybody because they heard a stranger coming, and I suddenly realized the danger of the situation because to discover a moonshine still back in those years—and since I was from Washington, DC, I could have bee