Old Daddy Flicker Likes Corn Likker 303 



region. These stills were supplying "blockade" to farmers and 

 storekeepers in the Piedmont areas on both sides of the 

 Unakas, the Great Smokies and the Blue Ridge Mountains. 

 Immediately the revenue officers began the work of locating 

 those stills and destroying them. 



And a chapter was added to American folk history. 



It was their "corn likker" which brought the southern moun- 

 taineers to the knowledge of the great majority of Americans. 

 Stories of fights with revenuers, of feuds which set one county 

 against another, of extraordinary customs and beliefs, came 

 to light. For forty years and more, these became the basis for 

 novels, plays and motion pictures. Radio put the "hill-billies" 

 on the air, and Americans woke up to the fact that they had a 

 national folk song. 



Meanwhile, various religious and educational movements 

 were started to raise the cultural level of these lost Americans. 

 Berea College, in Kentucky, was one of the first. There, it 

 was hoped, the mountain boys and girls would have a better 

 start in life than their parents had had. In Georgia, Martha 

 Berry opened her school with the largest campus in the world 

 a whole state. The young "corn crackers" slid onto the 

 schoolroom benches and took up the blue-backed spellers and 

 learned to read. In the school farms they learned to grow vege- 

 tables to vary the inevitable mountain diet of "yellow bread 

 and sow-belly." It was hoped that they would learn to look 

 with disfavor on "moonshine," which completed the moun- 

 tain corn trinity. 



Prohibition started the mountain stills going again. It cre- 

 ated new markets for "blockade." Lazy little curls of hickory 

 smoke rising from a laurel thicket on some remote hillside 

 were all that told that three or four men had climbed there 

 with sacks of corn to be distilled. Always, the still had to be set 

 close to running water. Often it was the run that gave away 

 the secret. A cow or a pig will drink water that has "slop" in 

 it. A horse will not. Mounted revenuers had an advantage 

 over those who rode in Fords. 



