Harry Caudill: Appalachian Environmentalist

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CAUDILL: That's right.

PLOWBOY: OK. Why did those ancestors come here anyway? Our English forebears must have already been farming better land back in North Carolina and Pennsylvania and the other states they left behind. Why did they trade that for this? Did they-as all the history books tell us-move here when "civilization" began to crowd them too much back east?

CAUDILL: Yes, in a sense. Some of those settlers simply wanted to stay on the frontier and, of course, the frontier seemed to last longer here than practically anywhere else. After all, we were still paying wolf bounties in Clay County, Kentucky up into the 1840's. The fact is, when I was a boy there were great sections of this country still in virgin timber. It was easy to believe that you were in a frontier setting as recently as 30 or 35 years ago down here in places like Lion Fork Creek. There were no roads-nothing but great trees-and it was practically impossible to get back into sections like that. And that's just what a certain kind of person was looking for

PLOWBOY: People who

CAUDILL: People who, in large measure, made whiskey. Now that's not as bad as it sounds because, at one tine, making whiskey on little farms in small individual batches was a perfectly legitimate and legal "cottage industry". People would raise a little patch of corn and make it into whiskey and then sell it to the big firms which, in turn, would bottle it and market the liquor. And that's how thousands of early farmers in, say, Pennsylvania earned a cash income every year.

But then our new government began to cut in on the business by imposing a tax on the trade. The result was the Whiskey Rebellion, which Washington suppressed during his first term as President and the result of that was that something like 6,000 families got up and moved out of Pennsylvania into Kentucky to get away from the revenue collectors. I've read that this was the biggest single immigration into Kentucky, percentage-wise, in all its history. Those 6,000 families spread all over the state and greatly enriched and deepened the whiskey-making tradition and some of those people founded the great bourbon industry in central Kentucky.

Others, of course, settled right here in these mountains, grew little patches of corn just like the ones they had grown back in Pennsylvania, and set up and ran their home distilleries the same way they had done back in Pennsylvania. To tell the truth, those mountaineers-even the ones who didn't drink were almost universally distillers. That's the way they got their money and they thought that, by moving over here, they could get away from the government's whiskey tax.

PLOWBOY: But they didn't

CAUDILL: No, and it was even worse than that. Eventually the government didn't just tax these little farm distilleries it outlawed them completely. And that, I think, did much to push the mountaineer into poverty-contain him in poverty-because it was just like telling a bunch of farmers, "You can't farm" or doctors, "You can't doctor". When you turn someone's life upside down like that, it takes a long time for him to adjust to the changes and learn new ways to live.

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