Distilling Southern Histories: Moonshine and the Remaking of Plantation Landscapes

Moonshine has long captured public and academic interest, though our conception of the people involved in its production remains mired in stereotypes. Popular narratives presume that moonshining occurs solely in mountain hills and hollers, and academic studies of Appalachia likewise situate moonshine discourse in regional historical contexts that reify the notion of moonshiners as inherently poor, white, and operating in rural landscapes that are assumed to be separate from the plantation systems of racial slavery that characterized “other” Southern places. Yet one of the largest production centers for moonshine is situated in the South Carolina Lowcountry, a portion of the coastal South well outside of the Appalachian Mountain South, where the moonshiners with the greatest degree of commercial success were powerful former planters who turned to moonshining after the Civil War. This project will explore whether relationships and practices from the antebellum era were reproduced in former Lowcountry plantation spaces through moonshining that occurred after the Civil War.

Moonshining represented a plethora of opportunities through which Southerners mediated changing social, economic, and material landscapes during Reconstruction and the rise of the New South. When we consider the historical interest in revising collective Southern memory to erase racially charged pasts and the present-day interest in maintaining it, moonshining continues to represent an ideal locus for materializing a whitewashed past. My research creates a space in which to interrogate the historiography and political economy of these linkages in the context of Lowcountry moonshining, where the contradictions and underlying motives that have been overlooked by previous scholarship of moonshining will be more readily apparent.

This file has redacted images that contain sensitive site location data. Please contact the US Forest Service District Archaeologist for South Carolina National Forests to request an unredacted copy of this dissertation.