The Regional History Center at West Virginia University has a collection on Appalachia. I had to go see what kind of beverages lay dormant in the plastic coil bound cookbooks of bygone mountain culture. As the curator of the collection kindly let me into the Rare Books room, the first thing I saw was not a book. Instead, atop an old desk sat a worn and dented copper keg with a speckled aluminum cylinder attached to its neck.
“Most people think it’s a lamp,” the curator tells me pointing to the object, “but that’s a moonshine still from the 1920s.” The university had bought it at auction from the grandson of the original owner. The curator says that the owner had family stories about the still. His grandfather used to hide the white lighting in the children’s bedroom, lest a revenue man come looking. This was not just mountain moonshine, after all, this was Prohibition.
The well-loved copper still had ended up behind a locked door in the Rare Book room at WVU’s Downtown Library awaiting someone to drive it to eastern Tennessee, where another Appalachian university collects moonshine stills.
This specimen was unique as well. The design of the still was such that evaporating spirits rose through the neck of the copper keg until they hit the surface of an upside down cone. Meanwhile, the exterior of the cone is submerged in cool water held by the aluminum cylinder. Vapor alcohol would condense on the interior of the cone and run down its sides, past the neck of the keg from which it came. Then, once condensed in a trough at the base of the cone around the neck of the keg, a small outlet pipe would allow the moonshine to run out into a collecting vessel.
Really, it is an elegantly simple design. It would not make strong, high-proof liquor, but it would do the trick.
At the very least, I felt serendipity. My search for old drinking heritage between the pages of well preserved books had led me directly to this copper object that is synonymous with Appalachian drinking heritage. At times, moonshine stills really do belong in the Rare Books section. They are part of the history here.
The heritage of Appalachian beverages is rich, varied, and very, very folksy.
Appalachia has been influential in developing a wide-array of clever, home-made distillation devices. It has also quietly provided America with an incredible collection of glassware, including cups, bottles, pitchers, and other drinking accoutrements.
Weston, West Virginia is home to the The Museum of American Glass in West Virginia, and Wheeling has the Oglebay Institute Glass Museum. But many other small cities throughout the state had domestic glass manufacturing. The story of the glass industry is a story of the mountains themselves–and the West Virginian penchant for digging into them.
Both silica and coal were bountiful in the state’s natural geology. Silica is a key ingredient in glass, and coal is a key ingredient in heating it for processing. The state was in a perfect position to leverage its natural endowments to make beautiful, ornate pieces for America’s cupboards.
The industry is not well known for those who have never been to the state, but it is a consequential contribution of West Virginia to broader American drinking culture.
Strong alcoholic spirits were important to Appalachian beverage culture throughout the 20th century. A 1986 study, “Ancillary use of folk medicine by patients in primary care clinics in southwestern West Virginia” conducted by Cook and Baisden, documented the 15 most popular ingredients in West Virginia folk medicine. Alcohol was the 8th most common medicine.
Some texts discuss where all this liquor came from, providing readers with traditional moonshining instructions. West Virginian distillers would have had to know how to malt their own grain and corn, ferment it into a beer, build a still, and distill the beer into liquor. This is a complicated process from start to finish, and West Virginians don’t do it like everyone else.
In Old Timey Recipes, Phyllis Connor explains a unique strategy for distillation in Appalachia. “The ‘cooker’ consists of two main parts, mainly the top and the bottom. After the mash is put inside, the top is pasted on with ‘red dog chop’ or some other paste. This is so that if the fire is too hot and the pressure builds up, the top will blow off preventing an explosion which might wreck the still.” Today, distillers who operate in the tradition of Appalachia will connect their still with paste to avoid catastrophic explosion.
Anthony Cavender documents the specific remedies that existed in Folk Medicine in Southern Appalachia. Liquor features prominently.
Tuberculosis could be treated with whiskey infused with either salt or rattlesnake meat. If a Mountaineer got bit trying to get that snake meat, a snake bite might require “getting dead drunk at once.”
Those with toothaches could hold whiskey in the mouth, while those with arthritic aches should drink a tincture of whiskey and the bark of the wild cherry.
A colicky baby should be given a teaspoon of “‘scorched whiskey’ (whiskey with the alcohol burned out), and paregoric.” Alternatively, both labor and abortion might be induced by drinking gunpowder mixed into whiskey. Cavender makes the special note that this recipe “may be specific to Southern Appalachia.”
In the early spring, some Appalachians make parsnip wine. Mrs. R.G. Regan of Glade Spring, VA writes, “For the right flavor the parsnips have to be taken out of the ground in February so this wine is supposed to be made in February.” (Old Timey Recipes)
Appalachian people have a history of making a variety of homemade wines including dandelion, pokeberry, elderberry, blackberry, and native grapes like scuppernong. Pokeberry wine, folk medicine dictated, was also good for rheumatism.
On top of this, Appalachia was the birthplace of the patent medicine product Wine of Cardui. This wine was actually invented by outsiders, Union soldiers who opened up shop in Chattanooga, TN, but was explicitly marketed as a drink against menstrual cramps. It is similar to Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound for women out of Lynn, Massachusetts.
In 1775, the missionary Charles Woodson commented of the mountain folk in South Carolina, “As for Tea and Coffee, they know it not.” But the drink became increasingly common in the early 1800s.
Still, the remoteness of the region made it difficult to get coffee reliably. In Pocahontas County Cooking Yesterday and Today, a substitute recipe for coffee is given that involves wheat bran, cornmeal, eggs, sorghum molasses, and sweet cream. The “coffee was used when…the folks couldn’t get to a store to replenish their supply.”
It is likely that Appalachians communities would purchase green coffee and roast it at home until World War II.
Appalachians have some of the finest water in America. Even today, I met several West Virginians who were proud of the natural springs in their hometowns. A glance around a map of the state will underscore the point–many towns are named after the springs upon which they were built.
Back in the day, Appalachian folks would have used their spring house to keep their other beverages, like milk, cold. The spring water bubbles up at a constant temperature thanks to its cool underwater source.
In Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, & Scuppernong Wine: The Folklore and Art of Southern Appalachian Cooking, Joseph E Dabney suggests that pitchers of spring water were the main refreshment on the dinner table. Oftentimes, the water might be served in a cedar bucket.
Tea from India or China was not a major cultural staple in Appalachia. Instead, locals here used the term tea to refer to a variety of herbal infusions made from leaves, bark, roots, blossoms, and seeds. They believed that hot water would “draw the strength out of the plant.” (Cavender)
Accordingly, many herbal tisanes had roles in Appalachian folk medicine. Babies were hived with a bit of ivy tea or catnip tea. Catnip tea was also good for colic, as well as ginger root tea, peppermint tea, and calamus root tea.
Blackberry wine and tea (made from the root or the bark) were considered excellent for curing diarrhea
Buttermilk is the real unique Appalachian dairy tradition. Other peoples around the world enjoy buttermilk as a refreshment, but Appalachians have relied on the thick milk since colonial times. Some locals today can remember their grandmothers sneaking a cup of the rich stuff.
Additionally, stippling milk, or the final bits of milk from the udder, was a suitable drink for those ill with tuberculosis.
Cavender, Anthony. Folk Medicine in Southern Appalachia. The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill & London, 2003.
Connor, Phyllis. Old Timey Recipes Collected By Phyllis Connor. 3rd ed., Bluefield, WV, 1970.
Cook C, Baisden D. Ancillary use of folk medicine by patients in primary care clinics in southwestern West Virginia. Southern Medical Journal. 1986 Sep;79(9):1098-1101. DOI: 10.1097/00007611-198609000-00014. PMID: 3749993.
Dabney, Joseph E. The Folklore and Art of Southern Appalachian Cooking. Cumberland House, Nashville, Tennessee.
Edgar, Betsy Jordan, compiler. Pocahontas County Cooking Yesterday and Today. 1975, Hillsboro, WV.
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