Blue Ridge Country March/April 2021 - 63

LEFT: The caption that
circulates with this photo
reads: " Eight members
of the Ingram family
with their turnip-style
moonshine still. Ida
Ingram Nunley is the
woman sitting and holding
a shotgun. "
ABOVE: Lower left male
is Bruce Ingram's great
grandfather, Washington
Ingram, who suffered from
alcoholism his full adult
life and died from the
disease in the early 1940s.

Eerie and Vernon, to do the hard labor at
the still while he watched the logging road
leading to the mountaintop creek where
the still lay hidden. If Grandpa spotted
Revenuers, he was to run up the mountain, meanwhile blowing on a whistle
which was the sign for the sons to skedaddle. Mom's side of the family was known
for their weak hearts, and apparently the
steep, quick climb was too much for Everett as he died face-down on the tote road,
whistle still in his mouth.
Family lore had always given out
that Grandpa died cutting timber on the
mountain-the Revenuer escapade conveniently left out. As was the fact that he
was a chronic alcoholic who beat both his
wife and children, facts I learned while
talking to Eerie's wife, Pauline, in 2004.
In 1962 when I was age 10, my family
attended a reunion at Grandma Maude's
Franklin County home. Grandma, who
never remarried after losing Everett, was
holding forth on some topic when I returned from a morning ramble up the
creek and announced that I had found a
still. Grandma immediately hushed me,
then brusquely scolded that no still ex-

isted on the mountain. I was then ordered
to leave the room, which I did. Later, listening through the door, I heard a family
member say that " if a 10-year-old boy can
find our still, we've got to move it. "
My father's side was no better. My
grandfather, Willie, who was more interested in drinking moonshine than making it, suffered from alcoholism from the
1920s until I was born in 1952. At his
death in 1995, I learned that he only quit
drinking because he " never wanted Bruce
to see him like that. "
My father Roy was generally known
as the " wild one " of the family, drinking
heavily, running corn on twisting, mountaintop roads (with truck headlamps off)
on ebony, moonless nights during the wee
hours. He and my Uncle Vernon took me
on one of their nighttime Franklin County prowls one summer night in 1964.
Dad, who could drive with one hand
better than most folks could with two, effortlessly navigated a Ford pickup (lights
off, of course) up the mountain while Vernon, head and shotgun hanging out the
front passenger side window, shot snakes
that had slithered onto the pavement.

How Dad could see to steer and Vernon
see to shoot, I'll never know as I feared the
entire night we were going to skid off the
mountain into a steep hollow. We never
did, however, and my father and uncle
were thrilled to bag three snakes during
their hunting trip. Just how many laws
did we break that night?
Dad wasn't running moonshine then
because he had been arrested, along with
some other men, for operating a chop
shop for stolen cars in the late 1950s.
Dad and his buddies had apparently
found the stolen-car angle more lucrative and less dangerous than the corn
whisky avocation.
As Dad grew older, he mellowed out
some and contented himself with the
occasional shady car purchase and selling stolen programs at NASCAR races. To
Dad's credit and especially to my Mom's,
he quit drinking because she told him he
had to. Mom who had witnessed firsthand the ravages of moonshine, hammered into me my entire adolescent life
that I was never to even try one drop of
alcohol. Out of respect for my mother
and my fear of becoming an alcoholic like
many generations before me, I never have
drunk any kind of alcohol.
Again, I wish Franklin County and all
the other counties in our region much
success with their various moonshinethemed festivals. Tourism is a major
economic driver in the Blue Ridge, and I
support any effort to help locally owned
businesses to thrive. But I am too familiar with the dark side of corn to attend
any of those gatherings and have lived
a life that leaves me with no capacity to
romanticize the lifestyle that existed in
those bygone days.

MARCH/APRIL 2021

Blue Ridge Country March/April 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Blue Ridge Country March/April 2021