Moonshine Along A1A

The following account was given to Jim Netherton, Mayor of Marineland, in July of 2008 from an old time resident of A1A. He was chatting with one of his old timer friends that used to make moonshine. In the 1920's Prohibition turned some of the A1A residents away from farming and to another source of income – moonshine. The abundant water supply and deep wooded areas along the Intracoastal Waterway and the beaches were ideal for the concealment of illegal whiskey operations. The moonshine industry thrived even after the Volstead Act was repealed in 1933, but the rising price of sugar finally brought the illegal whiskey industry to an end...even though it survived into the 60's and 70's. 


            Making moonshine along the A1A corridor is kind of historical, really, because everyone made a living off of it around in St. Augustine. When I was a kid everyone did it. This was 1959, 1960, and on up. You could make it a lot cheaper than legal whiskey and the blacks could afford to buy it. Your customers were mainly the black people but you also had a lot of local people who thought it had better taste and flavor than regular whiskey. Plus you could make it stronger and still buy it cheaper.

We always made it the same way, just changed the grain you started with. During the winter time you would use rye or wheat and during the summer time you used corn, because corn wouldn’t work real fast in the winter time. We liked to use what they call an ambrosia seed rye that you had to order from the feed store. A local sheet metal store made the still parts for you. They had a big loft upstairs where he kept the stuff because there were probably 20 bootleggers in town that he made parts for.

We made it in a big old drum, like a kerosene drum, that would hold maybe 350 or 400 gallons. When you had everything working right you could get 9 five gallon jugs of liquor from a charge. You would start with about 40 pounds of sugar and 50 pounds of grain, plus your water, and in the summertime it would take three or four days to ferment. The very first time you started you would only get four or five jugs, but you would take what was left over, what you call the backings, and add about half to the next charge. Then you can get your nine jugs of 90 proof whiskey. Cooking off the liquor to fill the jugs took about two and a half hours, that’s all.

Over the years I must have had 25 or so stills, something like that. I usually ran an average of two different spots in the county. I used to have one where the Publix is now on A1A, over toward the beach. I had one for a long time there at Butler Beach until a hurricane, Donna or Dora or whatever, tore it slam to pieces, then I never did go back there. We could only get to it by a creek at high tide. We had a boat that was sitting in the woods and we would load it with stuff and go up that creek and take our two and a half or three hours to fill the jugs. We had to work the tides just right so we could get back out. If we messed up we would have to walk out, go home, and come back the next day and bring the whiskey out.

There was not nearly as many people along A1A then, maybe two or three houses on the beach. We used to ride along and shoot rabbits all the time because there were so many rabbits and nobody hardly lived there, nobody paid any attention to you. It was a good place for a still.

In the end what killed moonshining here was the increasing cost of sugar. At first I could buy a hundred pounds of sugar for six dollars but when the price went to 30, 40, or 50 dollars for that bag it all got too expensive. I think what happened was that the Hershey’s sugar that was coming out of Cuba and was cheap got knocked off the market by the Evercane and US Sugar that they grew down in Miami and Clewiston and that area. So probably the government subsidies to the US sugar growers made local sugar so expensive that nobody could afford to make moonshine cheaper than legal whiskey any more. It was economics that finally put an end to moonshining along A1A, not law enforcement.

                                                                 A retired moonshiner

  "Still" available on Ebay !