Evening Star Newspaper, February 16, 1930, Page 85

m PART SEVEN. The Sunday Stare Magasine WASHINGTON, D. C, SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 16. 1930. | s . 24 PAGES. — e "NO MAN'S LAND” for DRY AGENTS The Story of the Government’s E fforts to Drar. mn “Hell Hole Swamp,”’ a Southern Moonshiner’s FParadise, of Its Bootleg “Likker,” Which Continues to Flow Out in Floodlike Proportions, Despite Concerted Attacks of Prohibition Enforcement Officers. T is an ill wind that blows nobody good. Prohibition has found Hell Hole Swamp its place in the sun. It is the center of the whisky manu- facturing industry of the South At- lantic seaboard. During the 1 rs of prohibition Hell Hole has a checkered career. It has been raided and probed and investigated by everybody, in- cluding the United States Senate. But the stream of white “com whisky” still flows from that valley of a thousand smokes, where nearly every smoke marks a still. For those who are not acquainted with Hell Hole Swamp, it may be explained that this is the name of a low-lying section of Berkeley Coun- ty in South Carolina, which, since the first settlers came 300 years ago, has been an unproductive wilderness. All around it other sections have flourished. Charleston, a few miles to the east, has always been a well known seaport and center of culture, ‘The rice planters of South Carolina, as proud an aristocracy as ever lived, had vast and wealth-producing plan- tations on the banks of the Santee and Edisto Rivers, between which Hell Hole Swamp lies. Some of those plantations were known as “bar- onies,” and they remain mute re- minders of the only serious attempt to create nobility in the colonies. The country abounds in historic interest. When the rice plantations passed away wealthy mepafrom the North, representing a ne#Windustrial civilization, bought the land for hunting preserves. Bernard M. Baruch bought Hobcaw Barony, Ralph Pulitzer has a place near Kingstree and Nicholas Roosevelt has Gippy Plantation. There are scores of other prominent Northern names in the South Carolina low country now. But nobody bought land in - Hell Hole Swamp. The Edisto and the Santee carry much water to the sea, but they do not keep Hell Hole Swamp from becoming a slushy, muddy morass during the rainy sea- son. Alligators and water moccasins @ind it easier going than do men. The inhabitants of Hell Hole Swamp are a race of people whose ancestry goes directly back to the original settlers, who from 1690 on hewed their homes from the forests and drove out the Indians. ‘Their stock, like that of the mountaineers of Kentucky and Tennessee, is pure “American.” Retainers of the lords proprietors, who came from England o a new, untamed continent be- cause of offered opportunity, and French Huguenots fleeing religious persecution mingled in the Carolina lowlands and their great-great- grandsons are there today. They have eked out a precarious living from Hell Hole Swamp. A little farming and, until the timber was all gone, some lumbering and tur- pentine manufacturing provided them with a means of livelihood. TnE world passed by in its parade of progress, leaving Hell Hole Swamp shut up in its secluded wilderness, and people there became & hardy, unkempt and illiterate race, ignorant and superstitious, but with & pioneer’s jealous love of freedom. Their little log cabins have leaky roofs and dirt floors. Their food is “side meat” from razor-back hogs and corn pone. Sometimes antique hunters find beautiful old furniture, chipped and scarred, in their homes, and once a lover of old things discovered an ancient English silver zoblet measuring grain, Soee Scviral families live in a single house. Mothers nurse their infants squatting around tiny fires to warm themselves while Winter winds blow through the mud-caked chinks in the porous walis. In the corner is a gallon jug—or maybe a five-gallon demijohn—of raw corn whisky with a rusty tin cup before it and the nauscous spirits help bring heat to half- starved bodies when the fire flickers low. Peo~ Pple in Hell Hole Swamp have made whisky since they iirst came from the old country. And then came prohibition. Hell Hole Swamp paid litile heed to the law. Perhaps it only heard rumors of it, anyway. News of the out- side filtered into the homes of the people in a rather haphazard fasilon. Then one or two of the more enterprising found that whisky was becoming valuable. People from Charleston, who had always looked on white corn whisky The world passed by, leavi‘ng Hell Hole Swamp shut up in its secluded wilderness. By T. R. WARING, Jr. as a “Negro drink,” began to buy the raw “still juice” and age it themselves in charred kegs. The liquor market showed bullish lean- ings. Stil's became more plentiful. For here, indsed, was the happy hunting ground of the moonshiner. : The same conditions which 150 years before had sheltered Gen. Francis Marion, “the Swamp Fox,” when he made his brilliant rcids on the British redcoats and retired to safety in the wild>rness, made now an ideal scrcen for stills. The tangled underbrush and maze of sluggish creeks lined with cypress trees were camouflage a-plenty. Roads, if such they could be called, were wagon ruts or simply trails through the woods. Scrub growth grew in a tangled, luxuriant mass,*sometimes impenetrable, always baflling to those who are not initiated in the intricacies of woodcraft. It was next to im- possible to be discovered there if one wanted to hide away. And, besides, what was wrong with making corn “likker”? Hell Holeans asked themselves. I'or years it had been a household commodity. Now it was profitable. People pald $2.50 a gallon. Stills sprang up like mushrooms. Sandy farms which never had been productiv: were abandoned. It'was much easier to run a still Corn starch or corn sugar, as the people there call it, was cheap and made an excellent mash. A Charleston merchant shipped in a carload every week. . Fleets of small automobiles began to roll out of Hell Hole Swamp onto the highways of South Carolina. They went to Charleston, to Colum- bia, to Aiken and Greenville, in South Caro- lina, and to Charlotte, N. C., and Augusta, Ga. The whole section of the.country was being drenched in white corn whisky. 3 AS in all profilable businesses competition became brisk among the moonshiners. Among the denizens of Hell Hole Swamp moved a tall man with heavy, stooping shoulders, His name was Glennie McKnight, He did a little farming and he engaged in the lumber business, but in the new order of things in Hell Hole Swamp he became a magnate of the moon- shiners. He did business on the share-crop plan—that is, he fur- nished the stills, the sugar and the meal and all the other appurte= nances, bought the product from the men who actually ran the stills and bufit up a distribution system and a market. “McKnight corn” was known far and wide, not so much for its quality, however, as for its quantity. With McKnight, who kept somewhat in the background, was his brother, Sammie, the active head of the business. Their friends, the Mitchums and the Johnsons, were in on the “company,” too. But a rival clan ecf bootleggers, under the leadership of Ben Ville- ponteaux, made up of the members of his family, whose name is legion, and the Wrights and the Andersons, were cutting into the McKnight trade. It is inevitable in & primitive country such as Hell Hole is that feudism should be rife. Equally in- evitable is the danger of violence in such a business as bootlegging. No court of equity to settle disputes, mo cop around the corner to call in case of a fight—each man his own de- fender, and the devil take the hinde most. With the clan spirit to the right of them and the loss of business to the left, the inevitable happened and there was a fight. On the 8th day of May, in the year of Our Lord 1926, and the anniversary of the prohibition act, the sixth, the occu- pants of two automobiles got out on the highway near Moncks Corner, the seat of Berkeley County, snd shot it out with shotguns and pistols. When the smoke cleared, Sammie McKnight and his lieutenant, Jer- vey Mitchum, were dead. The other member of their party, Glennie Johnson, was unhurt. On the other side were Jeremiah Wright, James Anderson and Ben Villeponteaux. “Ponteaux,” as he was called, was wounded, but he recovered. The others were unhurt. The State rang with news of the bootleggers’ battle. Naturally, every- body knew there was bootlegging in Hell Hole Swamp. And, naturally, there had been efforts to enforce prohibition there, but the'efforts had been feeble and lacking. in results. Agents would bog through mush and mire, tramp through sandy waste= lands and dive into briar patches, Occasionally they would blunder inte® a still. This they would smash with much ado, while the operator, versed in the wilds of his native heath, would disappear. 5 Sometimes bootleg rivalry furnishwe ed a “tip” and then the minions off the law were more fortunate in lo= cating whisky plants. But for every one they found a dozen were une noticed. Among those who laughed at the puny efforts of “the law™ there was none who laughed so heartily as Glennie McKnight. 4 But this war—that was a differ- ent matter. The Federal Govern- ment decided that something must be done. It was not long afterward— in August, to be exact—that the Government added a new man to its employ. His name, according to the records of the United States attor- ney at Charleston, was Glennie Mc- Knight. The Government had hired the king of the bootleggers to carry prohibition to Hell Hole Swamp. Just how McKnight came to join his erste while enemies, the prohibition men, is a moot question. He had pleaded guilty to a charge of violation of the dry law some tim2 before and had paid a fine. He was under indictmeng on the same charge when he received his com- mission. It was easily nolle prossed, however. There were those who whispered that Glennie MeKnight, upset by his brother’s untimely demise, was out for revenge. They said he would end compefition by specializing in the Villeponteaux brand of stills when he did his raiding. The Government has a different story: “The better element” of Berkeley County; granted that such there be, had gone to M. O. Dunning and asked for a clean-up. They had suggested McKnight as the only man who knew the county well enough to find the moon- shiners’ haunts and make effective raids. Mc- Knight had been approached and was consid ering the Government’s offer to join the force be'tdore the battle at Moncks Corner, so theg said. * Whatever the reason' was, McKnight pub-al