Helen Strickland is the president of the Wakulla Historical Society and a lifelong resident of the region. Her family once owned a gas station in Wakulla, on a popular intersection. Her family would watch cars go by on the road and her parents could tell if the owners were shiners during the 1950s and 1960s. They would sometimes even shout out “There goes a shiner or a bootlegger.” Her parents could tell because often how the shiner’s cars were built seemed to give them away. “Often their tires were just giant and if they had shine in the trunk it would just weight down the entire structure of the automobile. Just how it was seating you could tell they were going to make a run.”
According to Strickland, there were bootleggers everywhere in Wakulla and in the entire panhandle for that matter. As a child growing up after prohibition Helen Strickland would take walks in the forests and rivers of the community and like relics of a bygone era, she would find the stills, jars, jugs, and even cooking locations. These old bootlegger trail pickups were commonplace. Old habits die hard in the Panhandle, as Helen noted in recalling a quick and cheap method the elderly would employ to get intoxicated. A tradition that stems from long before prohibition.
“Older people would also take corn cobs and hide them in clocks and allow them to ferment. Then after a while, like four or five months they would eat them.”
Apparently, they would just chew on these old cobs, sometimes all day long, and it was like having a continual glass of shine.
People who lived along the rivers during prohibition lived very modest and simple lives. They hunted for duck and fished for mullet and jack fish. They grew cotton, corn, or peanuts and grew their own fresh vegetables. They traded for what they could, and although on occasion they had to sadly part with their hard-earned cash, as John Schafer explains, the only real cash crop in the area was moonshine.
Stills along the swampland were regularly moved and removed, and people in the know would wear special badges or pins to identify themselves. If you operated a still you needed a pin. If you were going to take a look at a still or wanted to make a purchase, you had to wear a pin.
“Everyone it seems wore a badge,” said Jabot Williams a local shiner
“If you didn’t have a badge they would pull a gun on you, and there were a lot of shootings.”
To avoid detection when purchasing ingredients, still operators got creative, going to every other store in a community to buy one item here and another there to avoid suspicion. However, this tactic seldom ever worked because shiners would buy ten pounds of sugar at a time at these stores. Agents would track the increases in sugar sales per grocery store to determine if there were shiners in the area. When approaching their stills from the main roads, shiners would take a different path each time to not wear down a trail. If a still is left in one place for too long, it will certainly attract the attention of wild animals. Wild hogs, the police discovered, love sugar mash. So, they learned to track their swine friend’s paths in the wilderness. Likewise, the shiners learned to also trust the movements of the wild hogs. If they heard a hog nearby, they knew the agents weren’t far behind.
