Morrison Moonshiners 'R' Us....

If you've kept up with HH so far, you'd think Great Uncle Math was the only Hesch with a still in the woods...but you'd be wrong. I just heard the BEST stories during a phone conversation with Uncle Tony.

(The call was originally with Aunt Marlene about her family and cool stuff Larry'd found lately, but they use the speaker phone, and pretty soon, Uncle Tony jumped it...lol)

He said that for awhile, grandma and grandpa rented the Sand place (where grandma'd grown up) and that grandpa had a still across the road in a brush grove. A neighbor, Hubert Kelzenberg, could never find the still in that grove, and so, "for fun" set the grove on fire.

Grandpa put the fire out, but he moved the still anyway. Later, Grandpa borrowed a boar hog from Hubert (for the usual purposes...lol) and when Mr Kelzenberg came to pick the hog up, it was sleeping. He nudged its' behind with his foot (kicked it), and it woke, and tried to get up. Nope. The hog tipped over on its' side. Tried again, on its' front feet--tipped over onto its' side, and went back to sleep.

Hubert laughed and said he'd come back for it when the hog had sobered up.

I said I'd heard from dad that grandma sold the stuff at the farm, and UT laughed and told this story:

Grandpa was coming home from town one day and saw a strange car leave his own yard. Since he didn't recognize it, he decided to follow it, out of curiousity. The car sped up and grandpa followed. It sped up again. Grandpa did too. Pretty soon, without slowing, the door opened and a gallon of moonshine was tossed out. Turns out the driver was a judge from Little Falls. LOL

And, oh, yes--my other grandpa was cooking, too--only foolishly, his still was in the basement of the farm house. UT said the thing wasn't working right--there were fumes--and little grandpa went outside for something to fix it. When he came back and opened the basement door, cold air rushed in and the fumes exploded. The house lifted up (OMG!) and resettled an inch or two off the foundation. I don't know if that was before or after the explosion in the attic that burned the floor and blew a window out...whew.
From talking with relatives, it sounds like almost everyone had a still hidden on their farms around Buckman. Adeline said they all knew about the others, but nobody ratted. The 'revenue men' were the adversary, not the neighbors.

Added years later ☺:

I'm reading a book called "The German Americans- an Ethnic Experience" from the Max Kade German-American Center in Indianapolis.  Chapter 8, "Ethnic Politics: German-Americans as Voters and Office Seekers" explains something about the mindset of our ancestors during Prohibition.  It wasn't only rural folk trying to get by while trying to avoid the Feds.  It had to do with our folks being ethnic Germans.  This was after the First World War, a time when being of German ancestry was suspect and could get a person in deep trouble just because of the accent, or being heard to speak German.  I imagine our folks felt they'd just barely made it thru that time unscathed.  Did they hold a grudge?  Oh, yes...

"The violent reaction of many German-Americans to the Temperance Movement becomes comprehensible and more justifiable if we acknowledge that it was in reality a defense mechanism in which the validity of equal rights and self-respect were reasserted.  German-Americans considered legal limitations on the sale and consumption of alcohol, as well as mandatory rest on the puritanical Sunday, as nothing less than discriminatory over-regulation of their personal affairs and their leisure activities."

Scofflaw Heschs and Prohibition

"The Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, prohibiting the manufacture, sale and importation of intoxicating liquors, was ratified on 16 January 1919. Its provisions went into force a year and a day later, on 17 January 1920. Prohibition remained in effect until the 18th Amendment was repealed by the 21st Amendment, which was ratified on 5 December 1933 with immediate effect".

When I was a kid and heard about moonshine and Prohibition in school, it took awhile before I realized someone around here might have been involved...lol

One Sunday, when we were out for a drive, we asked daddy if he knew any moonshiners personally?

He said sure, even our Grandpa made moonshine, and Grandma sold it. Every Sunday afternoon during the summer, Buckman's baseball team played some other town, but Grandma never saw a game although the "whole town" was there. She was at home, 'taking care of business'.

Dad said a byproduct of cooking moonshine was something called mash, and that his job was feeding it to the cows to get rid of the evidence. They had a shack in the woods, in the middle of the pasture, where Grandpa had a still. "The Feds" were always a threat, and the cows were often sorta tipsy, but they gave more milk, too.

We thought staggering cows was incredibly funny, and dad's stories made our silent Grandpa MUCH more interesting. WOW!

This morning, I went to the mailbox, and found more pictures from Irene Kulig, with proof that Hesch Shine was a family affair...lol

This was Math's shack, and Irene says he made moonshine from 1919 to 1932. Click the picture to see the detail--this was 1921--the barrel and copper boiler, and the jug? I don't know much about what made moonshine "good", but didn't it have to age in an oak barrel, at least for a couple weeks? You know there was a pretty neat system involved.

Hmm...the massive woodpile in 1932....no wonder it was all small logs. This information gives a whole new meaning to it! And here's Math the Moonshine Connoisseur. What a precious photograph of him at 35, and what a handsome guy he was, huh?

THANKS, Irene!!