Once Upon A Lifetime In Baker County, Florida: The Moonshine Legacy, Part Two (file 2/2)

                     By La Viece Moore-Fraser Smallwood
                              Copyright © 1995

File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by La Viece Smallwood, through
Carl Mobley, cmobley@magicnet.net

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           Copies available from the author complete with photos:
                   Rt 2 Box 543 Macclenny, Florida 32063

    Permission has been granted by the author for posting to this page.


   * George Washington 'Dub' Sands, Jr. (in file 1/2)
   * The Skeeter Gainey story (in file 1/2)
   * Tommy Gerald Johns (in file 1/2)
   * Richard H. 'Dickie' Davis
   * Carl Henry Rewis
   * The Sigers Saga
   * Elmer Lee 'L.E.' Wilkerson
   * Tommy Register
   * James Arthur Barton


Dear Readers,

     This volume in the Once Upon a Lifetime in Baker County series is
different. It's subject is very sensitive, one that evokes strong emotions.
For many, these stories have aroused pain, regret, remorse, and even shame,
but still, for most, if they had it all to do over again, they would.

     I think perhaps, to understand why this subject spurs such sensitive
emotions, you would need to understand the history, the people, the times.
This is the logic as to why this book has been written. It is for this
reason, unlike other volumes in this series, that anyone using any portion
or portions of this book for commercial reasons or for any other purpose,
at any time, must have written permission from me, my heirs, or those
individual persons who have signed their names to these stories, or their
heirs.



                         Richard H. 'Dickie' Davis
                            Macclenny, Florida

     Hard work is nothing new to Dickie Davis. He has been doing it all of
his life. in addition, he has worked for the county he proudly calls home,
serving and contributing his time and resources for as long as he can
remember. Those who know him best describe him as ambitious, industrious,
enterprising, frugal, and always, without fail, a dedicated and fervent
worker in all he undertakes to do.

     When this county native was growing up in Macclenny, it was a time
when things were beginning to emerge from behind a dark cloud of recession.
His hardworking, God-fearing father, Richard John Davis, overcame the
obstacles of destitution during the time of the Great Depression in the
nation, and started, in 1931, what is today The R.H. Davis Oil Company.

     'Daddy and I used to get up about 4 a.m. and go down to open the
station in downtown Macclenny, and while daddy went to Jacksonville for a
load of fuel, I pumped gas and ran the station until he got back, then I'd
go to school," he said. "Daddy never knew anything but hard work, and he
taught me the value of it for as long as I can remember."

     During his high school years, Dickie excelled in sports. The first
football team was organized in 1945 and the following year, he joined the
squad. His most ardent supporter was his mother, Carrie, who faithfully
attended all of his basketball and football games. He was among the most
popular in the close knit group of students of Macclenny-Glen High School
and even today maintains close personal friendships with most of them.

     Following graduation in 1950, he married his high school sweetheart
and class beauty, Virginia ware.

     "I took a job working for Walter Denison and Son in Jacksonville
making 75 cents an hour," he said. " Mr. C.K. Tharpe was general manager."

     Davis said it was a coincidence that he got started hauling moonshine.

     "I used to stay at the home of my sister, Kathryn, and brother-in-law,
Clarence Johns, a lot. It was on one of these occasions that a man came by
from Gainesville that needed someone to haul him some whiskey. I told him
I'd carry him some, and it just went from there. I was making $28 a week in
Jacksonville working all day long, and I'd make $150 a night hauling
moonshine to the man in Gainesville. I carried him 30 jugs three times a
week and would get up the next morning and go to work for 75 cents an hour.
I never missed a day's work the whole time I did that, and I did it until I
was drafted into the army and left for Korea," he said.

     The military paid him $75 a month. In just a few days time he was
promoted from a private to a sergeant. "I spent my 21st birthday on a ship
going overseas and my 22nd one coming home," he said.

     When Dickie returned from Korea, his marriage was over. "I didn't have
fifteen cents to my name when I got home," he said. "But I had a beautiful
daughter, Renee'."

     "When I was discharged on April 21, 1953, I borrowed the money from my
sister Kathryn to buy me a 1952 Cadillac and hauled enough moonshine to pay
her paid back in three weeks," he said. Davis took a job with his father
driving a fuel truck for $45 a week. But that was not nearly enough money
to live on, so by day he drove the fuel truck down Baker County's dusty,
unpaved roads, hauling kerosene and gas in a small delivery truck like his
father. At night he rumbled down Baker County's backroads and Florida's
by-ways in his souped-up Cadillac and other fast cars, hauling moonshine.
Besides hauling whiskey, he seized the opportunity to haul and sell sugar
to the local moonshiners. It was a chance to get ahead of the low-paying,
low-scale jobs in the '50's... that is, if you could even find one. It had
long been a way of life in Baker County as a means of supplementing family
incomes and at that time few people thought anything about it.

     Dickie said he rarely slept during those days. "Eventually, I was able
to financially back some moonshine stills and owned half-interest in them.
I hauled a load almost every night, and hired people to haul for me, as
well," he said.

     "The only reason I messed with sugar was to trade it for shine and
double my profit. The moonshiners would come and get 30-40 sacks of sugar
from me and they would owe me, in exchange, 30-40 jugs of whiskey. I was
hauling whiskey to Tampa where I had connections to get sugar right off the
ship. Sometimes I'd go almost a week a time and not hardly sleep."

     Hauling sugar and moonshine by night, and faithful to never miss a
day's work kept him busy, but he had time to meet a 1952 graduate from
Macclenny High School, Taylor native Faye Cowart.

     "Faye was working up at Odom's Department Store in Macclenny. We met
sometime the summer after I got home from Korea and we married January 28,
the next year," he said. The couple moved into a small apartment in
Macclenny. "When Faye and I got married, I was doing very well. I had half
interest in seven stills, and a week later I didn't have the first one.
They tore them all up that week," he said.

     "After we got married, I really didn't want him hauling himself, so he
hired somebody else to haul for him most of the time," said Faye.

     The couple remembers some harrowing as well as humorous experiences. I
didn't get involved or have anything to do with it," said Faye, "but once I
had to go over and get him out of jail," she said. "Dickie was arrested
while speeding and running from the law," she explained. "They had blocked
the road at the Ellerby curve so they got Dickie and took him to jail in
Lake Butler. He was charged $500 and given 30 days in jail.

     I was expecting our first baby any day, so I went over there. I had
the money, but they would not let him out. I remembered that I had met a
judge from there who had attended some parties in Baker County, so I asked
if he was in, and they told me he was. So I went in his office, and I said,
'Judge I've got a problem,' and he looked at me and saw I was pregnant, but
he recognized me, and he listened to me tell him about Dickie. I said, 'My
husband got put in jail last night, and you charged him a $500 fine, and
gave him 30 days.' I told him I didn't mind paying the $ 500 but I couldn't
stand him in jail for 30 days,' so he said to a man standing there, 'Go let
Mr. Davis out."'

     "I'm sure I would have been kept there the 30 days had Faye not gone
over there and talked to that judge," he said.

     Dickie said while most of the moonshiners in Baker County took their
hauls through Baxter and were always being chased by the law, he went SR 90
through Lake City and seldom had the same problems.

     The couple lived conservatively and stashed away cash money, never
using a bank. "I used Mama's pocket book," said Dickie. " I never touched a
penny of it, and many times she went to church with that old pocketbook
full of money.

     "One time, we lived in that little old apartment up town and won't
ever forget it. I was walking the floor one night. It was pretty late and
Faye got up and said, 'What in the world is wrong with you, and I said,
'Junior Crockett is up there in Georgia right now, somewhere running a
hundred miles an hour and he owes me about $12,000. If he gets killed up
there, I'll never get a nickel of it.

     "I had let some boys have about four or five truck loads of sugar and
Junior was standing good for it," he explained.

     "It was just a few nights later that Junior knocked on the door and
came in and sat a whole sack of money up there on the table and said, 'Get
out what I owe you.' He just sat there and slept while I counted it, and I
put the rest of it back in the sack and he got up and left.

     "Back then you didn't have nothing written down on paper, it was just
a man's word. I knew if Junior Crockett lived, he'd pay me, but if he was
laying down there at Brinkley's, he couldn't."

     "Bootleggers had morals, and they were trustworthy people back then,"
said Faye. "They wouldn't let you curse around ladies; they'd get you if
you did and call you down."

     The Davis couple especially remember Junior Crockett, one of the most
prosperous of the Baker County moonshiners. "I want to tell you something
about Junior Crockett," said Dickie. " He was always honest with people. If
Junior told you something, he would do it. Junior Crockett helped a lot of
people in this county. Everybody always wants to talk about the bad things
and seldom say anything about the good, but Crockett helped many an old
farmer and people out there in these woods. No telling what people owed him
at the drug store. His daddy delivered me into the world, and he was the
same way. If you called him he would come, if you had money or didn't have
it. He was a fine man, too.

     "I always kept my dealings pretty quiet," said Dickie. "And I worked
for anyone but myself. I'd buy sugar in Jacksonville, 120 sacks at a time
and bring it out here on a truck. It was only $8.25 for a 100-pound sack. I
even hauled it off the docks when it arrived from Cuba, bringing back 250
sacks at a time from Tampa. If I traded for moonshine, I could make more
money, often doubling it if I hauled it to Miami or Tampa. Most of the
moonshine I hauled from Baker county went into counties that were dry, up
in Georgia."

     Once he purchased a police car. "I bought the car that Deputy Charney
Rhoden drove, a 1940 Ford with a Lincoln engine. It had a siren and all on
it," he said.

     Fast cars, out-running the law, initiating fast car races, 'out
foxing' the authorities was life in the fast lane, and Dickie Davis had a
part in all of it. His stories are endless and even as candid and frank as
he normally is, he steadfastly refuses to relate some of them.

     "In the first place, you wouldn't believe them, and in the next place,
I wouldn't want them printed," he said.

     The Davis's memories of those days are very vivid, and their strong
ties to those who were involved are manifest as they relate story after
story that lingers from that era of time.

     "I remember something about Catfish Stokes I'll never forget and it
always brings a chuckle," he said, talking about the man who, one time,
constructed most of the moonshine stills in the county. "One night, me and
him were up there in Lake City. We went to see someone about some whiskey
and when I picked him up to go with me, he just happened to be barefooted
(which was pretty natural for Catfish), and had his britches' legs rolled
up. We were out in the woods about half way to the man's house when our old
car blowed up, so we decided to walk back to Lake City and call someone in
Macclenny to come get us. It was pouring down rain. We were walking down
this old road, soaking wet, and Catfish said, 'Now here I am out here,
barefooted, and I got enough money in my pockets right now to burn a wet
mule.' I think he had about three or four thousand dollars crammed in his
pockets that day," Dickie laughed.

     In 1959 something happened that changed the Davis's life. "I came home
one day and told Faye I was quitting. I said, 'I'm selling all my cars and
equipment,' and the reason I did was because I saw that the people were
getting down on it. People were telling on their neighbors and things were
beginning to change. Our son, Ricky, was growing up and we had a new baby
daughter, Dana. I told Faye, 'Things are beginning to change and I'm going
to change with it I don't want my kids to grow up in nothing like this.' So
I quit...just like that!"

     Contrary to what many people conceive as moonshine days of money
rolling in by the barrels, Davis said it was not true.

     "Back in the' 50's, any amount of money was a lot, because there just
wasn't much money around any place. The average salary was $30 a week. What
little people made, it took every penny to live if you had a car or a piece
of land somewhere. Moonshine supplemented what little you could make at a
regular job, and the money was used for necessities. About the time a
moonshiner got a little money, his still was torn up or his car
confiscated. You'd have to start over. But it was a job, and it paid better
than other jobs that were available in those days. It was hard work, too.
There was nothing easy about it."

     After Davis gave up any activities connected with the moonshine
industry he continued to work with his father in the fuel oil business.

     "It wasn't long after that when daddy came over to the house one day
and he said, 'Son, I'm retiring. I'm going to start drawing my social
security and I want to sell out to you.' I said, 'How much do you want?'
and he told me. I went into the back room, got the money and handed it to
him right then. I was also in the pulp wood business with a man named Roy
Snow and I was making good money doing that. Snow ran it, and I helped him
some. I had bought the pulp wood trucks and he did the business end."

     Although Davis admits that hauling moonshine may have helped him get a
jump on life financially it was the consistent hard work and shrewd
handling of his combined incomes that gave him the real start.

     "I never missed a day's work from my other jobs," he mused. 'Even when
I was making seventy-five cents an hour by day, and $150 by night. I worked
steady for daddy by day and for myself in moonshine by night. I've always
been frugal with my money."

     Today, the R.H. Davis oil Company, boasts of six trucks and eight
modern Exxon stations. It is still a father-and-son operation although his
father died in 1969. Today, Dickie's son, Ricky, is affiliated with the
company which is located on 121 north of Macclenny. In addition, the
business has now expanded to a fourth generation Davis. Richard's great
grandson, Max, who is Ricky's son, will help carry on the business legacy
when he graduates from college.

     LP gas was added to the business in June 1983, and more than 50
employees staff the office, service and delivery departments.

     Before his death, Richard J. Davis was an active member of the
Primitive Baptist Church where he served as a deacon. Among the many things
he did for the community was helping to build the present day Macclenny
Primitive Baptist Church. He served for six years as a Baker County School
Board member. He assisted the needs of the school system during times when
it was left up to the parents and citizens if activities, such as a
football team, were organized for the youth. If it was a program to back
the youth, or community, Richard Davis' name was always on the list of
supporters and contributors.

     Like his father, Dickie contributes his services to the community in
many varied ways. His company is continually asked for support and
contributions, and for years they have sponsored sports groups such as
Little League. The many civic interests he has supported have been varied.
In minutes after hearing about the project SOS (Save Our Station) and the
need for a place to move the historic Macclenny railroad depot, he came up
with the suggestion for the present-day location which evolved into the
Baker County Historical Park. He enthusiastically and financially supported
and served on the first Baker County-Wide Homecoming Committee. He served
on the Board of County Commissioners for 12 years, and on the Baker County
Development Commission for four years.

     "Serving on the Development Commission is what compelled me to run for
county commissioner because I saw so many things that we were missing in
the county on enhancement money that the federal government was giving
away," he said. "We had never got a federal grant until I got on the board
and, when I did, I went after them. We built the Social Services Building
down there and the Senior Citizen's Building and part of the jail. We built
the Fire Department, Bertha Wolfe Health Department Building, and the
Agriculture Building. We built that with federal money, we didn't have any
tax money in that, we got it with grants. Baker County never had a grant
until I went on the Board of County Commissioners.

     "I got a federal grant to bring the water and sewer plant to the
Development Commission property on 121 South before we got Westinghouse. Me
and Inez Burnsed were at a meeting in the Mayor's office in Jacksonville
and a guy from Washington was there. That was back when Carter was
president and he was giving all this money away on water and sewers. I told
him that our county wasn't in the water and sewer business, but the city
was, and the Development Commission had property for it. I told him we
could have it ready if we should land any kind of industry if we qualified.
I asked him if we could get money for that and he said, 'yes,' and said
he'd send me the papers.

     "At the same time, I asked him about Glen St. Mary, and he said,
'yes,' and he'd send me the packet on that for them. I filled out our
papers and sent them in. Then I went over and gave the papers he'd sent me
for Glen to Mr. Phillip Taylor. I told him the money was available if he
would fill the papers out and send them back in. I went back a week later
and Mr. Taylor told me he and the commissioners had talked about it, and
they had decided they didn't want to mess with the federal government. So
they never did send in the papers and they could have got water and sewer
for Glen free. But it's everybody to his own thing I guess, but if the
government is going to give the money away and you're not going to get it
for your county then you are going to be behind times.

     "I got every nickel I could for the county. If it came out, I put in
for it. Some I missed, but some I didn't. The whole time I served on the
county commission, I never charged the county with a phone call, never
charged them with a hotel bill or motel bill or any kind of travelling
expense. I always paid for that myself wherever I went. I used to go over
to the State Road Department yard in Lake City and the salvage yards in
Starke and buy equipment for the county for practically nothing. I bought a
10-wheeler dump truck for the county over there for $1,800, with brand new
tires on it, about a $60,000 truck. So a lot of money can be saved," he
said.

     Still up early each morning and to bed late at night, he continues to
work tirelessly. In the last few years he has been taking more time off to
travel with Faye in their motor home. Sometimes they are accompanied by
close friends, and family. Together they trail across the country hunting,
fishing, attending country shows and seeing the countryside. Since he no
longer holds down positions of government he is free to relax and get-away
more.

     "My daddy always told me if I'd tend to my business, I'd stay about
two weeks behind because I wouldn't have time to spend on other people's
business, and he was right," said the resourceful man, who still believes
in hard work and frugality.

     His parents were a great influence on his life, and he still remembers
back to those days when they were a big part of his daily life.

     "Daddy and Mama didn't approve of moonshine, but back then when I did
it, it was just a way of life, and they just accepted it. In the beginning,
it was either do that or starve to death. After all, seventy-five cents an
hour, or $28 a week, which ever way you want to look at it, didn't take
care of the bills, even in 1950.

     "Daddy never owned property. All he did was haul the gas from
Jacksonville and sell it. He didn't have a piece of property or anything
when I bought him out except for two trucks.

     "I've often wished that daddy could come back and see what all has
happened to the company that he started in 1931," said Dickie. "When I had
that cancer operation 18 months ago, and I came home from the hospital,
Faye moved one of our adjustable beds down here to the family room for me
to sleep in. I woke up about 2 o'clock in the morning and daddy was
standing right there," he said, pointing to near-by spot. "Now I'm just as
wide awake as I was then, and we exchanged words. I said, 'What are you
doing here?', and he said, 'I've come to see about you.' That's all he
said, I remember his exact words."

     Today, as he carries on the family traditions and business of his
father, he knows that the price for legacy is worth more than all the
wealth in the world. And he is passing it on to his son, and grandsons that
follow, for generations to come.



                             Carl Henry Rewis
                           Baker County, Florida

     North, East, South and West -- Carl Rewis lived a nomadic life in
every section of Baker County during his formative years. Like many other
children born in Baker County around the turn of the century, his parents
were poor, but honest and proud tenant farmers. His birth in Manning, south
of Macclenny, on September 28, 1923, was the first arrival of 12 children
born to Harry and Ella Wilkerson Rewis who had married on January 6 of that
year.

     By the time he was a month old, he was living south of Sanderson where
he became ill. Dr. Edward Crockett, the county physician was summoned.

     "I only have one shot with me, Mrs. Rewis," the doctor told Carl's
young mother. "And I can't waste it on your child, he's not going to live,
and I must give it to a child whose life I can save."

     "if you don't give that shot to my child, I'll hit you over the head
with the frying pan, doctor," Ella Rewis retorted.

     Her threat was taken seriously, and Dr. Crockett gave the sick little
boy a shot in the rump. Within two hours he rallied, and miraculously
lived. "Had it not been for Dr. Crockett giving me that shot, I'd be dead,"
he said.

     "We moved around a lot. And I think Mama had a baby every time we
moved.

     "We had an old Model T Ford and somehow daddy would pile it high with
all our stuff. He'd take the headboards and make railings on top of the
car, then he would stack our wood stove, moss mattresses and chairs, tables
and stuff like that all on top of one another. We always had two or three
cats, and three or four dogs, and when daddy would get everything loaded,
he'd pile us younguns on top of all our belongings and start throwing the
cats and dogs up on top, too. We would look like a freight train coming
down the road piled up so high. They had dirt roads back then and daddy
would have to ease in that rut 'cause the car would feel like it was going
to turn over, it was so top heavy."

     Besides Carl, the couple's other children were: Ida, Wash Daniel Verna
Belle, Betty Jean, Nathaniel, Barbara, John and Lizzie (twins, born on
Christmas day), Dolores, Ronald and Melvin.

     "We didn't have plenty to eat, but we had enough," he said "We'd have
home- made grits, smoked bacon, greens and potatoes. We were sure of that
'cause we raised it. Back then, there was a lot of field goats and you
could get a great big one for fifty cents. Daddy would buy one and he'd
castrate the Billy, they called it a ram, and bring him on home, hang him
up by his heels, cut his head off, and let him bleed. Then he'd skin him,
and throw the hide away so the meat wouldn't smell like a goat. And that
was some real good eatin'.

     "We made our pillows and mattresses from moss we pulled from the
trees. We'd pick all the sticks out of it and Mama would boil it in a big
wash pot to kill the red bugs. Then we'd hang it out on the line to dry
before we used it.

     "I remember my grandma had some geese and she had a feather barrel
where she collected feathers she'd use once a year. Someone put an old
gopher in the feather barrel once and forgot him. The next year when
grandma took out the feathers the gopher was still alive, but when they let
him out he went straight for some gourd vines and ate himself to death.

     "We could talk mama out of whipping us, but if daddy told you he was
going to, he did it. We knew we better not tell daddy a lie because he
would put the razor strap on your butt. I used to think he whipped me too
much, but now that I'm grown, I can see where I needed the whipping. Daddy
didn't believe in telling a lie, or picking up anything that didn't belong
to you, and he taught us that.

     "Daddy cut logs, worked in pulp wood, dug stumps, farmed, and done
just about any thing he could do to find work back then. There just wasn't
many jobs around. When I got big enough, about ten years old, me and him
sawed pulp wood and that's the reason I didn't get to go to school. And to
this day, I've always said if I was to do something bad enough that I'd
have to be sent to Raiford and they gave me a job where I'd have to use a
cross-cut saw, then they could put me in the electric chair because I
wouldn't do it again."

     As time progressed, his father, Harry, took a job in Jacksonville at
the shipyards. At the age of 42 he was able to save up $700 and purchase 25
acres of prime land in north Macclenny where he lived until he died in
1980, a year following his wife's death. About the same time,
seventeen-year-old Carl obtained employment at a chicken farm at Brandy
Branch for $12 a week.

     "Mama always had 50-100 chickens around and I loved to eat the raw
eggs. I've eat a truck load of 'em. I remember she put a strap on me one
time for eating the eggs and putting the hull back into the nest. She
didn't care for me eating the eggs, but she'd say, 'Throw the hull.' I'd
just punch me a little hole in it and suck the egg right out of the shell.
But after I went to work at that chicken farm and some of the eggs would
bust and flies and knats were all over the nest, I ain't never liked an egg
since. I hardly ever eat one now."

     When Carl was drafted in the military, he reported to Camp Blanding.
They turned him down for military service because his right eye had a blind
spot. He returned the second time, and was rejected again. While waiting on
a bus to return home, a navy recruiter appeared and asked him if the army
had turned him down. "Yes, sir, they did", he said. "Well, how would you
like to be in the Navy?" "Well, I'd like it," he said. So the naval
recruiting officer took him back through the examination line, but when
they approached the eye examination station, the officer pulled him out of
line and took him directly to a section where he was accepted.

     "The first letter I ever wrote anybody was when I was in th Navy. I
could read a little bit, and I knowed my name when I seen it but that was
about all. Mama wrote my company commander complaining that I hadn't
written home, so he called me in. He told me if I didn't have my mama a
letter off in the mail in a couple hours, he would give me KP duty and make
me wash dishes. So a friend I'd met showed me how to start it and finish
it.

     "Two months later, mama wrote another letter and told them they needed
to check my eyes. They did, and gave me a discharge."

     Out of the Navy, he moved to Mulberry and worked on the railroad with
his uncle for a year. Then he moved back to Macclenny.

     Without car, money, or employment, he moved back in with his parents.
Then, two big changes came into his life. First, he married Margaret
Johnson, and second, he accepted a job with Wallace Dupree making and
hauling moonshine.

     "My daddy had made a little moonshine whiskey after he quit drinking
it," Carl said. "He made it in a little branch near the house about a year
or two. But I didn't get involved until I got out of the Navy. It was quick
money."

     Quick money, however, meant only getting paid for the necessities he
needed for his family.

     "Wallace never gave me a salary, or paid me a rate for hauling or
making it. When I needed money for groceries, clothes, or insurance, I'd go
to him and tell him, and he'd give me twenty-five dollars or whatever I
needed," he said.

     As the years passed, Carl and Margaret had five children David, Carla,
Cathy, Harvey and Patty.

     "My children never got involved in the whiskey business. They knew
what I was doing, but not to what extent. I'd do it after they went to bed
and was done by the time they got up in the morning."

     There are many stories of revenuers, raids, hauls, and 'stilling,' and
he's willing to talk about a few of them. "I had to run a couple of times,"
he said, talking about the revenuers.

     "They liked to have got a hold of me when I set me up an operation at
Steel Bridge on the Florida side, once. Me and L.E. Wilkinson -- we called
him Swampy -- were there making whiskey and he was pumping water and
sweetenin' it up. He had already done the first charge and I told him I had
a feeling the revenuers were coming that day. He said, 'Oh, you worry about
them revenuers too much,' but I loaded what we'd made and put it in the
boat. There was a lake not far so I set it out near there in a palmetto
patch and went back to the still. Before I knew it, this revenuer had his
hand on my arm. I run and jumped in the river right behind Swampy. He lost
his britches when he jumped in. I had on a pair of khaki pants and a khaki
shirt so I couldn't swim as fast as Swampy. I heard the revenuers shoot the
lock off the boat and they came looking for us, riding up and down the
river, but I managed to hide in the bushes and finally got away. Later on,
I went back and got the whiskey I'd hid.

     "I left Macclenny one night with a full load of about 275 jugs of
whiskey and, just this side of Phoenix City, Alabama, the law jumped me and
tried to stop me. I tried to turn the truck over, thought maybe it would
catch on fire and burn the evidence, but it didn't, so I just jumped out
and run. There were three or four officers and four dogs after me. I made a
circle and went through a peanut field, then into a corn field and finally
found this big drainage ditch.

     "I started walking it thinking if I could find a pipe to crawl in I
could stop up the end and keep the dogs out. I saw one man on one bank and
another man on the other bank and they started shooting at me. I bent over
to make them think they'd hit me and they quit shooting. I kept running in
the ditch and it kept getting deeper and deeper and direckly I got to
noticing that the bank was way up there. I thought, 'I got to get out of
this place,' but I could still hear them dogs a comin'.

     "I found a tree that had growed upside of the ditch so I jumped up on
a low branch and cooned that thing up to the bank. There was deep
underbrush and I didn't take time to think about a snake being in there, I
just started crawling. By this time it was dark and you couldn't even see
your hand before your face. I was trying to feel my way, didn't have no
idea where I was, and the swamp started gettin' real thick. Direckly, I was
in water and it got deeper and deeper, I had to start swimming and I swam
until I gave out. Then I lay flat of my back and rested, then I swam some
more. It was a lake and I don't know how big it was, or how many gators it
had because it was so dark. I couldn't see my hand before my face. I
finally decided to try and stand up to see how deep it was, and discovered
I could barely touch bottom, so I started walking then to the shore.
Direckly, I came to a big old tree, I could only feel it, I couldn't see
it. It had low branches and limbs on it, so I clumb up and got up as high
as I could go. I'd hang on to the limb and try to sleep, cold and wet, and
I'd near 'bout fall out. I was sitting where I could hold on, but I'd hear
all kinds of things out there making sounds. It'd be such things like coons
and opossums but it would sound like an elephant had stepped on something,
it would just go 'pop pop."

     "Near morning, I could hear these big diesels and I knew they had to
be going down a road somewhere nearby. As soon as daylight come, I crawled
down out of the tree and went toward that racket and found the road. I got
me a lightered knot and put it out on the edge of the highway so Wallace
could find my sign because I knew they'd be looking for me. Then I hid on a
high bank to wait for him.

     "At 11 a.m., he and Tuffy (Junior Crockett) came riding by in a 1940
Mercury and saw it. When they stopped, I slid down that embankment so fast
I almost broke my leg. The Mercury belonged to the man I was delivering the
whiskey to, so we had to go back for Wallace's car. I told them if the law
was to jump us, to slow up and let me out 'cause I've run all this far and
I don't want to get caught now. They said, 'No, and we don't want you to
get caught because it would be five years and a ten thousand dollar fine
for anyone caught with two or more gallons, and you was hauling more than
that.' So, after we got Wallace's car, I lay down on the back seat all the
way back to Macclenny. I told Wallace that I was quittin'. But I didn't
because he talked me into it again.

     "One time, I was over around Lake City with a truck loaded with about
50 five- gallon jugs. I knew they had sent two men over there, one of them
a football player from some college who had gone to work for the revenue
department. I'd heard that he said, 'I'll catch them blankedy blank people
from up there around Baker County that's been out running all them
revenues.' I had told somebody I'd like to take him out somewhere and see
if I could out-run 'em, you know. Well, it was about eight o'clock in the
morning when he spotted me and pulled up beside me in his car, so I had my
chance. I just slid over and jumped out of the truck and started running
down the road with him after me. I couldn't get far enough ahead of him
like I wanted to, so I just turned and went out through the woods. I got to
jumping them palmetto patches and gallberry patches. I had on a pair of
them slip on shoes and they slung off. I found one and stuck it in my
pocket, but lost the other one. Well, when he couldn't keep up with me, it
made him mad and he started shootin'. The bark flew off and hit me on the
face, it was that close, but I got away.

     "After awhile, I heard an airplane coming. They could spot a piss-ant
crawling down there, and they could easily see me running, so I said, 'I
got to do something.' So, when they passed over me, I crawled up in a
palmetto patch and when he came back he didn't see me. He went on a little
further and I'd run to another palmetto patch. I just kept doing that until
I got fer enough they didn't know where I was at. I finally got all the way
back to Olustee, where they had a sawmill and _some men were working. I saw
a man gassin' up his car and when he went in to pay for the gas, I got in
his car. When he came back out he said, 'I was just fixing to go look for
you,' and I said, 'Well, you found me, now carry me home.' They had sent
Shep Johns to get me.

     "The next day there was a picture of that ball player revenuer holding
up my one shoe and said they were wondering who the man was who lost it.

     "I was doing this and scarcely making a living. I didn't even get paid
for a load. I was all the time cutting Wallace's grass and doing other jobs
and he'd just give me what I needed, but right there at the end, when I was
going to quit, he started paying me when I took a load .

     For several years Carl said he tended a large underground still for
Wallace Dupree in north Macclenny.

     "Wallace bought a house out north of town and built a big underground
still inside the chicken yard. I moved in the house and made whiskey for
him there nearly three years. The still was just a big old hole, probably
about 20x3O feet, with concrete block sides and a concrete floor. There was
big timbers in there to hold it up. Then, after we put the timbers on it,
we put tar paper over it, an tarred it, and then we put dirt on top of
that. On the northeast corner was the entrance where there were stairs
leading down into the ground. To get in it we put a big piece of aluminum
on the ground and set a biddies coop over it. When we wanted to go down
into the still, we just set the biddies coop aside and moved back the
aluminum to get down the stairs. I planted me some tater vines in the
chicken yard, but they didn't make any taters. After we worked the still
all night, I'd scatter some corn around and them chickens would come off
the roost and scratch all around in and out of those tater vines, so there
wouldn't be any footprints, and then they'd get right back on the roost."

     Carl said he had a radio inside the underground still, but never had a
television, as was rumored.

     "We had electric lights, water pump and a good drainage system in it.
I could run two charges a night and get out before daylight. I had what
they called a hog's head barrel to put the whiskey in. It must have held
100-200 gallons."

     When a neighbor, Harley Thrift, was raided by the beverage agents in
his near- by underground still, Carl said Wallace shut down his still.

     "They (revenuers) knew it was there. Two of 'em came up there one day
and one of 'em said, 'Well, you've been reported and we know you got a hole
back there where you are making whiskey,' and I said, 'I got a WHAT? And he
said, 'A hole behind your house, and we want to look at it.' And I said,
'Well, me and you will just walk back there and I'll let you look,' and he
said, 'Well, I can't go back there with just me and you,' and I said,
"Well, you'll have to, if you go back there,' and he said, 'Well, I got a
man in my car, we can trust,' and I said, 'You may trust him, but I don't
because I don't even trust you, and if you can't go back there with just
me, then we won't go.' So he said, 'Well, I'll just have to go and get a
warrant.' And I told him to 'Go ahead but they never came back.

     "Later, I found traces where they had already walked all back there
and couldn't find anything. We had it hid pretty good. I had a chimney
built where the still was and it was level with the top of the dirt. I put
a chicken house over it, and a roost.

     "The night they raided Harley's still, I was supposed to have taken
him twelve bags of sugar. Harley had a young son who was present when the
raid took place. He pretended he was sleepy and was going to his room to
sleep, but instead of sleeping, he jumped out the window and ran to his
uncle James Thrift's house. James had a phone so he called Wallace to tell
him and then came on down to my house to tell me because I didn't have a
phone. Of course, we were glad we never delivered the sugar to them that
night because, if we had, we would have been caught, too.

     "We never did 'still' there anymore. We shut down because we knew that
they knew the still was there. We moved the equipment somewhere else."

     Revenuers began to show up everywhere and finally Carl said he told
Wallace Dupree and Junior Crockett he was going to have to do something to
disguise himself to keep from being recognized.

     "Well, why don't you dye your hair and curl it?" Dupree suggested.

     "Yeah, that sounds good. Do it and I'll pay for it," said Crockett.

     "I forgot about that conversation," said Carl. "But one night Wallace
came up to the house and he said, 'Come on Carl, we got to go somewhere.'
So I got in the car and he drove me to Bernice Green's beauty shop. Junior
was there. She sat me in the chair and Junior was just a laughing while she
kinked me up and died my hair black. I think Junior thought it was going to
be about $10 or something like that, but when he asked her how much, she
said, 'That will be $35.' Well, Junior didn't laugh anymore after that."

     Carl said moonshining was getting harder and ofttimes his legs would
shake so bad he couldn't control them when the law enforcement came too
close for comfort during his moonshine operations.

     "My wife begged me to quit, and finally I did. I went to work for the
Chevrolet place as a mechanic," he said.

     "Just before I quit altogether, I tried to have a little still near
the house to make a little extra money on the side. I set up six barrels,
but never got to run it. I had to tote all the stuff across the woods about
a mile on my back. I didn't figure anyone would ever find it there. I had
it sweetened and was going down there one morning to check on it and
noticed some tracks. That afternoon after work, I returned and found some
more tracks. The same thing the next day, so I said, 'Well, I'll just
forget it.'

     "Later, Sheriff Ed Yarbrough borrowed his brother's truck an loaded
the bedding up and took the beer and fed it to his hogs. I never messed
with it after that," he said.

     Carl worked as a mechanic for the Chevrolet place for 16 years He was
making $95 a week before deductions when he quit and went to work for the
county where he stayed for the next 18 years.

     His first wife left him and the couple divorced. For the next few
years, his mother and his sisters helped him look after the children. His
second marriage was to Carolyn Boone, and they had a child, Terry. That
marriage ended in divorce too.

     I had to work hard for my next wife, but it was worth it," he said. "I
had seen her practically all of my life, but she was a lot younger than me.
I had to wait several years before I could even get her to go out with me
because she was only 14 years old when I first asked her out."

     The love of his life was Beulah Mae, pretty daughter of Thomas Burton
and Rosie Mae Rhoden Crews. Carl's sisters -- Dolores and Verna Belle had
married Beulah's brothers.

     "It took me a long time to get her to go out with me, but one day I
was going to my mother's house to get her to cook some quails Ralph Sands
had given me, and she went," he said.

     "Yeah, but I had my niece with me," she reminded him. "When he asked
to take me to a movie later, I told him I'd go if my niece could go, too,"
she said. "He told me he didn't care who went if I'd just go."

     The couple said they had always liked each other. They married in
1963, at the home of her mother, when he was 40 and she was 19. Their first
child, a daughter Karen, was born nine years later. They also have a son,
Tom.

     The years seem long past, and some memories are even fading of the
by-gone days of the moonshine era. Today, he'd rather reflect on stories
his grandmother used to tell him about an era he never knew, like when his
great-grand mother lived in an old log house with a clay floor.

     "She said that one night something started digging outside the cabin
and pretty soon a big hairy arm was all the way inside clawing away making
the hole bigger. Great-grandma got the ax an chopped the hand off and she
could hear him hollering as he ran off in the woods. They found out later
it was a bear," he said.

     Then there was another about a panther. "The panthers got on top of my
great- grandma's house and they were trying to come down the clay chimney,"
he said. "After the family burned up their wood,' they burned their chairs
and furniture all night to keep a fire going so the panthers couldn't get
down the fireplace and into the house. They say them panthers would eat a
woman's breast off if they got to one."

     "I'm going to tell you something, and it's the truth. All the money
you could stack in 40 acres, a hundred feet high, wouldn't pay me to go
back and do what I done in moonshine," he says with conviction. "I wouldn't
... no way! I want to sleep at night when I lay down, and at that time you
just couldn't, you just stayed under pressure all the time."

     Today, the couple, with their teen-age son Tom, spends their happiest
moments at home where they have always lived at the corner of Bob Kirkland
and Louder Roads. Carl has a 'piddling shop' where he is constantly doing
something. When they aren't there or visiting family, they are at the
Primitive Baptist Church where their favorite pastor, the Reverend David
Crawford, preaches.

     "Now I really like that," Carl said with a smile on his face, I
haven't ever heard anyone else preach that pleases me like Brother David.

     "But about them moonshine stories, I'd just as soon forget them, and
talk about them exciting stories my grandma use to tell about, like the
panthers and the bears..!"



                              The Sigers Saga

     The afternoon sun casts a shadow over Ralph Sigers' lovely brick home
as a gentle February breeze nips the air. Robust and tanned, his sparkling
blue eyes have that glimmer of mischief to them. It's easy to see he is a
man who loves to share a good laugh, and good memories. His first cousin,
Willard Thrift, often takes time from his 25,000-plus chicken farm to walk
across Highway 121 north to visit with his cousin. Remembering events from
their past often creates a sensational phenomenon, stirring electrifying,
thrilling, and even astonishing stories that some might consider yarns or
tales. It's here though, that the saga of the Sigers' begins and ends, and
the epic history created has left a profound impact upon the annals of
Baker County.

     For many years, more than a mile of a lone unpaved stretch of road 121
north belonged to the Sigers and related families. They had their own
grocery store, farms, aircraft, landing field, and uniquely-crafted cars.
Their scope of living embodied cleverly built underground moonshine stills
as well as those concealed deep in dense underbrush along the banks of the
St. Mary's River and other creeks and branches along the swampy streams in
north Baker County.

     The Sigers brothers, Ralph, Elzy, and Marvin, were intelligent men
despite limited educations. They possessed brilliant, ingenious, an
inventive minds, allowing them to create things that astounded people
around them. Their ideas for the unique were limitless. They even built
their own airplanes, and did so in their staked-out domain north of town.

     Their father, John Sigers, ambled into Baker County from Georgia after
his first wife died in childbirth. He eventually married Serena, daughter
of Baker County pioneers James (Jim), and Nancy Raulerson Thrift.

     "When daddy first came down here from Georgia he made some of the
first small copper stills, because back then moonshine was on a small-scale
operation," said Ralph. " They were usually the two- or four-barrel types
set out and used down by the creek."

     "Our parents were share-croppers when we grew up, and we moved around
a lot," he said, "and we didn't get much schooling."

     "At one time, when daddy worked for a logging company, we lived in one
of the box cars. When we first moved there, we moved into a corn crib with
a dirt floor, and I remember that the hogs roaming the woods would come
inside there. We thought we would be better off living in a box car, but
found out we had to share it with another family. There was no running
water, only a pitcher pump not too far away from the car. The box car was
furnished with a wood-burning stove. Back then you felt lucky to just have
a roof over your head. I never owned a pair of shoes until I was in my
teens. I remember my mother used to make our shoes out of old rubber
inner-tubes. She made our shirts out of feed sacks that people who had
chickens would give us.

     "I remember once daddy brought home an old dirty, greasy tarpaulin and
mama put it in the wash pot with what they called ole lye soap back in them
days. She boiled it, and beat it, and did everything she could do to get it
white so she could make us some overalls from it. She could make most
anything with her pedal sewing machine. We were proud of those clothes.

     "There was a little log shelter out in the woods when we were growing
up that was used for a Sunday School. It wasn't far from where I live now.
We felt proud when we'd get on our feed sack shirts and our overalls, and
go to Sunday School. We thought those were beautiful shirts out of them
sacks and we were proud to have them.

     "The first store-bought clothes I remember having was when we were
living in an old log tenant house, plowing for fifty cents a day. We saved
up enough money so that my mother ordered the first store-bought clothes I
can ever remember having. She got them most likely from the Sears catalog
because there was always one around as far back as I can remember.

     "Another thing we ordered with the money we made plowing was a .22
rifle and a flashlight. I remember we paid $4.10 with postage included for
the rifle, and the flashlight, I believe, was fifty nine cents for it and
batteries. Then we could go out in the fields at night and kill rabbits for
our meals. We killed squirrels in the daytime. Sweet potato and opossum was
a luxury to us back in them days, and I've even killed and eaten skunks.
We'd try most anything. We ate gator tails. Now today, they are considered
a luxury. We were always looking for something to eat. It was rough back in
them times; still, I don't remember thinking of it as hard times. It
wouldn't hurt people today to go back to those days, in fact I wouldn't
mind it, really.

     "We used to plow in the 1930's from sun-up to sun-down for fifty cents
a day and be glad to get it."

     He can't remember when his parents started making a little moonshine,
but eventually making it on the side supplemented his family's meager
income derived from the dawn-to-dark, back-breaking, strenuous job of
tenant farming. It wasn't a big system; in fact Sigers said, the family
once even set their shine operation up in a rented two-story frame house on
the outskirts of west Macclenny.

     "Mama and daddy set up a copper still upstairs in the house," said
Ralph.

     "I remember it," said Willard. "I'd spend the night with you and I
remember when the train would pass through at night and shake the whole
house. They pumped water for it from an old pitcher."

     "I remember when they made it out in the corn field, too," said
Willard. "I'd come in from school and go out there and watch them," he
said. "They'd tote their water from the old hand pump at the house to the
field and she'd maybe make one or two five-gallon jugs from it."

     The two men have always lived a "stone's throw" from each other.
Willard's father, Londa, and Ralph's mother, Serena, were brother and
sister.

     "We could tell you tales from now to dark," said Willard.

     The two men have more than just being related in common. Both were
shrewd moonshiners, who operated their affairs on adjoining land.

     "Other than when my brother Elzy served in the Army, he made moonshine
most all of his life," said Ralph. "Marvin didn't do too much of it."

     "After I dropped out of grade school, I took a few correspondence
courses for radio repairs and such, and I opened a little shop in Macclenny
and operated it until I went into the Air Force in 1942. After I served in
the Pacific and was discharged in 1945, I did some moonshining, while I
worked for the government in electronics at the Jacksonville Naval Air
Station. I stayed with them for about 15 years.

     "During that time, I dabbled on a small scale in moonshine at night. I
never did get real big in it on an individual basis, because it took a lot
of money and you risked a lot," said Ralph, who was married in 1942 to
Suzie Crews, daughter of Lewis and Ethel Crews of Macclenny.

     "I enrolled in school in Gainesville and learned how to build
airplanes," said Ralph "I took flight training, and worked in the engine
shop. I remember how hot that engine shop was, and during my lunch break
I'd usually run out and take an airplane and go up real high where it was
cold. No matter how hot it is on the ground, it is cold up there. I wound
up with pneumonia doing that and have never overed it to this day," he
said.

     The Sigers' brothers common interest was flying and mechanical
operations. After Elzy served in the Pacific theater during World war II as
a paratrooper, he also obtained his flying license. But his full-time
occupation was moonshine.

     "I hired other people to work for me while I was working at NAS," said
Ralph. "One day, when I came in from work, I told the crew working for me
to go check one of the stills to see if it was ready to run that night.
They told me they had seen signs that the revenuers had been around there,
but I thought they'd been mistaken because I'd been down there the day
before and didn't see anything. I went down there and found the tracks, but
I decided I'd go on to the still anyway which was at the Blue Hole. I had
on my work clothes, just like I'd come from work, and as I was just
starting to walk out on this log to get across to the still, I saw three of
the revenuers coming out to cross the log meeting me.

     "Instead of running I just went straight to them, and they said, 'What
are you doing down here?' and I said, 'I'm walking this river looking for
my boat somebody stole.' So they said, 'Well, there's one right down there
at your still,' and I said, 'No, there ain't nary one at my still because I
don't even own a still.' They said, 'Yes, you do, we know it's your still
and you're coming to see about it.' They told me to walk out on the
sandbar. I did and they said, 'Sit down,' and they looked at my shoes
trying to match up my shoe tracks with the men who had been working for me
at the still. When they couldn't do it, they said, 'We know you just came
from the NAS, and if you don't quit this bootlegging, we're going to get
your job, and we're going to throw you in jail.' And I said, 'I ain't
bootlegging, I'm down here hunting my boat; I want to go fishing.' So they
continued to talk to me, threatened me, and asked me a thousand questions.
I said if I'd known there was a still here, do you think I would come up
here and talk to you about it? I'd have been going another way, or outrun
you.' I told them they were just badly mistaken. Finally, they said, 'We're
going to give you one more chance.' They asked me where my car was, so I
took them there and they checked it over real good. Then they asked me to
drive them to where their car was, and I did. They tore up the still.

     "There were lots of stills up and down the river at the time. We made
our own boats, welding them together. If it rained and the water started
rising, someone would come by yelling, 'The river is rising', and no matter
when it was, even late in the night, we'd go, by boat down the river and
move the stills up on higher ground," he said.

     After 15 years with NAS, he quit, and went into the moonshine business
full-time with his brother, Elzy. With a large tractor and a scoop, the
brothers dug deep into the ground at night and began operating an elaborate
underground still located in an open field. It was entered by a concealed
door covered with grass.

     "We had kerosene burners at first, and it would make you sick down
there because of poor ventilation, so we had to change over to gas. We used
the big old groundhog stills under ground. In one, we had two, forty-barrel
operations and some drums. It took a piece of metal 8 feet long to make a
30-barrel groundhog and the 10 foot sheets made a 40- barrel. We'd buy a
semi load of sugar, which usually was about 240 sacks, to sweeten them
things up. We'd put sixty 100-pound bags of sugar in each one, which would
make at least 150 five-gallon jugs of whiskey."

     Meanwhile, across the road, Harley Thrift, Willard's uncle was digging
into the ground at night to construct him an underground still. Ironically,
the Sigers were not aware of Harley's activity. The brothers had built
three underground stills and had started working on the fourth when the
revenuers raided Harley's one night, about a year after it had been built.

     "We were working in ours at the time they raided Harley," said Ralph.
"We shut down as quick as we could."

     Harley Thrift was arrested and his underground still destroyed with
dynamite. The blast shook the countryside for miles. While those activities
were going on, Willard and his Uncle Elzy were hid out in the field
listening, and Ralph was looking on.

     "That same night me and Wallace Dupree had a truck loaded with 220
cases of whiskey parked behind my house across the road. As soon as we
thought it was safe, we got it out from behind my house and saved it from
being destroyed," he said.

     All three of the Sigers' financially lucrative still operations were a
half-mile apart. They had sold one, with a house on the property, to
Dupree, a bootlegger from Macclenny who was their sugar supplier.

     "We closed all of ours down and I think Wallace covered his up a lot
later after he got the equipment out. We just abandoned the one we'd
started. The law kept watching it, so we just never started it up again."

     During the heyday of the underground still, when production was at its
peak, the Siger brothers did a first for Baker Countians dealing in
whiskey. They began to haul their product in an airplane.

     "Sometimes, Elzy would circle around in the plane and look for
revenuers. They finally caught on to Elzy hauling moonshine in the plane
and planned to catch him," said Ralph. "What he'd usually do is land
somewhere pre-arranged and the man he was selling to would have him five
gallons of gas waiting to refuel. While they were unloading, the man would
hand him the can of gas to refuel. Well, one time, the revenuers were
waiting for him when he landed. Elzy saw them, so he just jumped back in
the plane and took off before they could get to him. He stopped somewhere
else to refuel.

     "Actually that plane, which was a J3 Piper Cub, wouldn't carry much
whiskey. It would only haul about four five-gallon jugs.

     "One of our neighbors had a nice strip of land and he kept wanting us
to land there which was in a cow pasture, so one day Elzy decided he'd do
it. Our neighbor got all the cows penned up but one that was standing far
off. Well, just as Elzy came in that cow ran across the pasture and Elzy
landed right on the cow's back, and that plane just flipped over on its
nose and tore up. Elzy wasn't hurt, and it didn't kill the cow, but the cow
always walked around crooked after that, she never did straighten up, her
back was all tore up."

     The brothers rebuilt the plane.

     The plane was not the only first ingenious plan for haulin whiskey
that the Sigers brothers instigated. "Elzy built seats in our car out of
copper tanks, then reupholstered it to look like regular seats. We poured
moonshine into the tanks which would hold about 10 to 15 five-gallon jugs.
He put a spigot on the bottom to drain it out when we delivered it. Elzy
built tanks from the seats and back rest.

     "We knew one night they were going to stop us, and as soon as they did
Elzy jumped out and said, 'Oh, I know who you are, and I know you want to
look in my trunk, so I might as well let you. So he opened up the trunk and
they looked in there and said, 'Okay, you can go ahead.' When they first
pulled up that night, they asked us if we had any moonshine in the car, and
I told them, 'No, but I was wishing I had some until you come along.'

     "They never did find the liquor when we hauled it in that car," he
laughed.

     "We started breaking it down from five-gallon jugs to pints and
quarts," said Willard. "I hauled it up to Phoenix, Alabama, in trucks made
with false bodies. The tailgate was fixed so you could see up in the body
and the truck looked empty, but in the second story was all this whiskey.
We tried everything we could to outsmart the law," he said.

     "Me and daddy had an old groundhog-type still in our truck and we'd
park it right out there in the barn. If it got to smelling too bad, we'd
have to move it, but when it got ready, we'd go down to the pond to get to
the water to run it. It would usually take three or four days to make it,"
he said.

     "Yeah, we had some mounted on trucks too," said Ralph. "We used gas
burners on 'em."

     "The revenuers were usually nice," said Ralph. "One day, I remember
they were down at my parents little store and a bunch of us were all down
there having a cold drink and crackers. When they finished drinking their
drink, one said, 'Well, we're going on down the road and run the Barton
boys the rest of the afternoon."'

     Willard agreed. "One night, there was this guy at a checking station
up there at the Georgia-Florida state line, and he asked me and Glen
Johnson one night, 'When are you ever gong to haul anything?' We had a load
of whiskey then, and they looked in the back, but didn't see it."

     "Yeah," said Ralph. "They'd take off in the lowest gear, and anybody
in the world should have known it was a loaded truck.

     "They stopped me at a driver's license check one night just before
Christmas up in Georgia," said Willard. " I had a Nabisco Cracker truck
full of concealed moonshine on my way to Phoenix City, Alabama. I had a
Georgia tag, and a Florida driver's license, and I showed it to the road
patrol. He said, 'Well, where do you live?' and I said, 'Valdosta.' He
said, 'Well, where are you going?', and I said, 'Atlanta,'. He said, 'Well,
how come you got a Florida driver's license?' And I told him I'd just moved
to Georgia. He said, 'I ain't going to give you very long to get you some
Georgia driver's license,' and I told him, "Well, thank you, sir.' I told
him I was empty, going to Atlanta to get a load of crackers.'

     "Just as I drove off and got to the top of the hill, I saw the law
coming with red lights blinking. I said to myself, 'Oh, well, they figured
it out, and they're coming to get me,' but they just drove right on past
me.

     There were endless stories of close calls.

     "They arrested Glen Johnson one night for a traffic infraction and
impounded his truck at the jail. It was full of concealed whiskey. They let
him go the next morning, with his truck. It had been parked loaded at the
jail all night."

     Johnson was always in much demand to haul moonshine by the
moonshiners, and reputed to be one of the most reliable and competent
drivers around.

     "I had a still one time right about where Joey Thrift has his old
sawmill, back there in that old bay," said Ralph, blue eyes twinkling. "One
afternoon, we were down there running the still and my worker was talking
about the revenuers and he said, 'Oh, if they were to run in here on me
right now I'd take this knife, and I'd do this, and I'd do that and the
other.' Within about ten minutes they had him around the neck. I was right
there but I ran just as hard as I could to get away. I went by one federal
man named Spanks just a- flying, and he said 'Stop, you son of a so and
so,' and he was shootin' right at my feet, and me with boots on.

     "I ran into the bay and my boots got all full of water and I couldn't
run, so when I got far enough ahead of him, I pulled my boots off and got
out on the other side of the bay where there was a man chipping pine trees.
I said, 'if anyone comes by here looking for me, tell them I went
that-a-way, and I ran and ran so hard that I bled from my lungs. They are
still messed up to this day. I finally got back and holed up in that old
bay and went up under all that under- brush where there were mosquitoes and
moccasins and everything in else. I crawled around in there and finally got
up on a little stump and the bushes were so thick on the ground they
couldn't see me, but one time they were so close I could have reached out
and got a-hold of his boot.

     "When it got dark I finally got away from them people. I found out
later there were at least 25 of the revenuers and that's why I saw one
every which way I turned. I never went back to get my boots.

     "One time, we had a big operation going on up in Georgia. We put the
still up on the sheriff's property and his brother lived in the house. The
sheriff always kept us informed as to danger. Somehow though, the revenuers
got wind of the operation, and by-passed the sheriff to raid. Me and Elzy
went up there one day and as we drove by, we could just sense something
wasn't right, so we didn't stop. We went on up to see the sheriff and found
out that the revenuers had already been to the sheriff's office with his
brother under arrest. If we had gone earlier they probably would have
arrested us, too.

     "Things were beginning to get tough for us. I'll tell you why we
finally quit," said Ralph seriously. "It got to the point that we were
paying everybody off and it took our profit. Everybody was wanting a cut of
the money. Finally, we were told we could not be guaranteed protection
anymore.

     "Do you have any regrets?" I asked.

     Willard is quick to answer. -- "No, I don't." he said. I can remember
how embarrassed I was going to school, or into Macclenny, always wearing
overalls. When I got older I'd wear my shirt hanging out so people wouldn't
know I had on overalls instead of jeans. I didn't know you could tell the
difference back then, and I don't reckon they could, but it don't matter
now. I was about in my senior year when I got started in moonshine for
myself, but I remember how proud I would be when I was able to go into Mr.
Hodges clothing store in Macclenny and buy me some clothes. It was such a
thrill for me to go in and buy a pair of jeans. I didn't ever buy overalls,
I'd had enough of them, but now I wouldn't mind to wear them. I'd go in
there and I'd feel like I was a big shot or something. Mr. Hodges knew time
I walked in I was going to buy some clothes. That's where people like
Wallace Dupree bought a bunch of their clothes and it made me feel good to
be able to do it, too.

     "And I can remember having three or four hundred dollars in my pocket
and I actually thought I'd never need any more money in my life. I hauled
for Wallace Dupree and he paid me $50 a haul," said Willard.

     "We didn't make piles of money because it took a lot, especially when
they'd tear up your still, but we got by," explained Ralph. "I built my
first house for $7,000, paying for it as I went along. I sold that house
eventually and added $5,000 to it and built this house where I live now."

     The Sigers brothers quit making moonshine about 1960. They worked hard
at other jobs and through the years they pursued their infatuation with
airplanes as a hobby. They bought kits and built their own.

     "Daddy had an inventive mind, and I think one reason he was so
involved in the things he did was to escape reality," said Beverly Hall,
Elzy's daughter. "Daddy didn't have any education to speak of, but he was
very smart. Had he been able to get an education he may have been head of a
big corporation or something because he wag very resourceful. His parents
were illiterate, too, and instead of daddy being able to think about an
education or what he wanted to do in life, he was having to think about
planting a garden, or butchering a hog because farming was a year
responsibility. His parents were not in the best of health, and in those
days children took care of their sick or ailing parents, physically and
financially. So daddy used his talents to create and invent with what he
had to work with and escaped into his own world which became his only way
of life."

     On March 8, 1984, Ralph watched Elzy take up their new creation, an
Ultra-Light, wood-constructed plane for testing. With 1,000 air flying
hours to his credit, Elzy was excited about the 213-pound craft that was
powered by a 20-horsepower engine. The plane was the first of five kits
from the manufacturer that the brothers planned to build. It was about 2
p.m. when 61-year-old Elzy was flying over wooded area near the Ode
Yarbrough Road and CR23-A (Yarbrough Road intersection) when suddenly, and
without warning, the craft came straight down, throttle wide open, and
crashed nose first into the tops of several large pine trees. His beloved
brother was dead.

     The fatal craft that had been on its maiden flight was inspected by an
official of the National Transportation Safety Board, and he reportedly
could find nothing apparently wrong with it that might have caused the
crash. Witnesses said that the craft did not appear to be experiencing
engine problems, and they heard it operating until the craft slammed into
the tops of several large pine trees.

     Ralph thinks Elzy had a heart attack, or passed out, because witnesses
said he was slumped over the controls which would have caused the
ultra-light to go into a dive at full throttle.

     Elzy's daughter, Beverly of north Macclenny, thinks not. "The autopsy
said differently," she said.

     Regardless, she feels her daddy died doing something he loved. "Flying
made him happier than anything else," she said. "He didn't want me to get
married when I did. He wanted me to get my own flying license or become an
airline stewardess. He loved flying and he thought everyone else ought to.

     "Daddy never knew anything else but moonshine, when I was growing up.
His brothers had other jobs, but that's all that daddy did. Uncle Ralph was
more of the mechanical mind, and Uncle Marvin was good at radios and
electronics. Daddy didn't have the book knowledge and education that they
did.

     "He was good as far as being a daddy. He never spanked us, he was very
quiet and gentle and kind, and he would give anybody his shirt off his
back. I think that's why daddy never had anything, he gave it away.

     "I was at least seven or eight years old when I realized daddy was
gone a lot, especially at night. Sometimes he'd take us fishing down at the
river and he'd usually walk off for a while. We knew he was doing something
at his still.

     "When we were asked our daddy's occupation at school, or had to fill
out any papers, I'd always put farmer.

     "Daddy took me lots of places with him, such as gator hunting. I
remember shining the lights at night in the river looking for the gator's
eyes to shine. That was illegal, too, but it was exciting. Daddy sold the
gator hides. The reason he said he did it was to provide for us all the
things he always had to do without.

     "I remember we had an old screened-in back porch where he had stacks
of sugar and wheat brand and stuff like that. Grandma and Grandpa Sigers
had that old general country store up there on the road and that's where
daddy would get his supplies. Except for school, we didn't go to Macclenny
but about once a month, and I didn't bring many friends home with me from
school. I remember having a birthday party once when I was about twelve,
and I was embarrassed having all that stuff stacked up there on our porch.
I felt everyone knew what it was for, but I feel sure most of them didn't
even know. I was ashamed, and I wanted daddy to move it because we were
having cake and ice cream back there, but he wouldn't. I knew moonshine was
wrong, but it was the only kind of life we'd ever known.

     "When daddy got caught at his still and had to go to prison, we'd go
visit him, and he would cry. It liked to have killed him. That's when he
started changing and getting closer to the Lord. When he got out and
started driving a truck, he had a bad wreck and had to have a blood clot on
his brain removed. That's when he quit altogether."

     Eventually, Elzy Sigers became associate pastor of Mount Zion
Congregational Methodist Church, located on 121 North near his home. His
last days were peaceful, joyful, and happy serving the Lord and his fellow
man. He and his brother, Ralph, became chicken farmers. Like the hobby of
flying he so loved, his memory soars upward for his family. After all, they
say, it is that which is found inside a man that counts. Their moonshine
days lay buried as deep in the ground as the under-ground stills where they
once toiled through the night.

     And though the two remaining brothers have a new hobby, searching over
land and sea with Hi-Tech, sophisticated, expensive metal detectors, they
aren't looking for any kind of treasure in particular. And they certainly
aren't keen about digging up their past. Instead, their treasure is focused
on the future.

     For many years, Ralph and his wife of 52 years, Suzie, have been
active in the North Macclenny Christian Fellowship Church. In fact, he
helped to construct it. The friends they have cultivated there are
priceless to them. They are surrounded by children and grandchildren living
nearby, and occasionally they take their motor home through the countryside
so Ralph can get in some fishing and treasure hunting.

     Still, there are moments when he reflects, and remembers Elzy and the
unique lifestyle they shared that will never pass this way in Baker County
again. It is a legacy frozen in time, dissolved only with the warm memories
they hold close to their heart.



                        Elmer Lee 'L.E.' Wilkerson
                           Also known as 'Swampy'
                            North Baker county

     After meeting overall-clad L.E. Wilkerson for the first time, I
wondered how I would describe him, or even if I could. After hundreds of
interviews over my lifetime, I felt helpless to characterize the unique
74-year-old north Macclenny man whose manner certainly is one set apart
from any other I've known. His slow southern drawl lends credibility to his
classic backwoods charm. His intense brown eyes sparkled with mischief, yet
you know he is a man of profound thought. He appears simple, yet complex.
He seems innocent, yet you know he isn't. Uneducated, yet you know without
question he is many, many notches above ignorance.

     Ed Yarbrough, former Baker County Sheriff, classifies the former
moonshiner as a shrewd woodsman.

     "Nobody could turn a leaf out there in the area where he lives without
him knowing it," he said chuckling. "He has the nature of an Indian, and if
you go near the area, he'll know you were there or have been there. He
always knows everything that is going on, that's for sure. His world is
right out there where he has lived all his life and that's it. He has never
been far away from his environment and he don't care to be away from it.
That's the only life that's ever been for him, and that's because he wants
it that way," he said.

     L.E. scarcely weighed two pounds when he was born to a poor farm
couple, Elisha and Holly (Crews) Wilkerson, on homesteaded property that
borders the big St. Mary's River that divides Florida from Georgia. He was
the lone surviving child of the couple.

     They told me I was put in an old coffee pot when I was born, I was so
little," he said. "I had yellow jaundice, whooping cough, the measles, and
hives. They said I almost died."

     It's a wonder he lived," said his wife of 48 years, Lavon. "None of
his parents' other children did."

     Wilkerson grew up in a primitive, rough, frame farm home on 82 acres
of land in north Baker County cleared for farming long before his birth by
his Wilkerson forebears. He rarely left the area, though sometimes he
walked the seven miles into town. He attended the Garrett Community School,
often riding a horse. He went to about the fifth grade, he says, though he
barely learned to read or write.

     "I didn't like school and I didn't go much," he said. "I still ain't
sorry I didn't go much. I make a living without that. I've seen some with
an education that ain't doing as good as I am."

     Why did he get involved in bootlegging? "I didn't have no better
sense, I reckon. It was easy money. Well, it weren't easy money, it was
fast money," he said. -- Faster than plowing a mule from sun-up to sun-down
with his father in the hot fields, anyway.

     "My daddy worked at a sawmill for one dollar a day. He went to work
before daylight and knocked off just before dark, right across that river
over there. I did the farming. I never took money from my daddy to do the
farming because he was taking care of me."

     By the time L.E. was 14 or 15, he met Wallace Dupree of Macclenny and
began making moonshine for him along the isolated river banks and in the
thick palmetto thickets of the secluded nearby woodlands. Wallace and
another man, Bobby Johns, bought his whiskey and paid him one dollar a jug
for it. By the time he was 17, he had saved enough money to buy a Model-A
Ford. That ended his walks into town.

     "I thought I was something. Back then that was a good car."

     Unlike farming all day long, moonshining provided him with fast money
in his pockets. In addition, he loved it! -- Except for the days when the
revenuers came calling.

     "They didn't catch me none," he quipped, "Unless they come up to the
house to get me. In all my years of messing with it, I never did run from
the revenuers but twice. I had stills on down the river, had 'em out in the
woods, but don't you think beverage agent Floyd Bennett couldn't find them.
He'd find them every time, and then he'd come tear it up.

     "I drank moonshine, too. You don't supposed to make it if you don't
drink it," he said.

     Wilkerson was 26 in 1948 went he married 15-year-old Lavon Mikell,
pretty daughter of Solomon and Evelyn (Pierce) Mikell.

     "I knew L.E. was making whiskey when I married him," she said. "I
never asked questions then, and I still don't ask questions now. When I was
growing up, I was taught never to ask questions, because if someone wanted
to tell you something, they would."

     The couple moved into the house with L.E.'s father, Elisha, and his
stepmother. His mother had died when he was young.

     "L.E. mostly worked on the farm back then during the day and ran the
still at night because he had to burn fat-lightered wood and it smoked so
much, the revenuers would have spotted him," she said.

     The couple had five children: Holly, Wayne, Windell, Billy and Susan.
They now have eight grandchildren.

     Wilkerson always evaded the beverage agents one way or the, other. One
occasion, when agents attempted to apprehend him at the still, he ended up
naked.

     "One day, me and Carl Rewis was making shine out there near the
river," he said in his slow southern drawl. "Carl told me he suspected them
revenuers was going to come that day, but I told him he worried too much.
Old beverage agent Bill Eddy was sittin' right there behind the barrels at
the time listening to us, but we didn't know it. Carl decided to take what
whiskey we'd already made and hide it down the river, away from the still.
When he got back, I asked him if he had seen any signs of revenuers and he
said he hadn't. I asked him if he locked the boat, just in case, and he
said he hadn't, so he went back to the river to lock the boat.

     "Just as he walked back up the hill to our still, them revenuers
reached out their hands to grab us. Buddy, we didn't wait around long when
we heard him shoot that pistol. I headed straight for the river and jumped
in. I stripped off all my clothes so I could swim faster. I left my shoes
where they were at the still. They couldn't catch me', because back then I
could go. I didn't know what was happening to Carl, and I didn't care.
Anybody stupid enough to put a khaki shirt in his mouth and take a half
hour to swim the river I wasn't going to worry about, and that's what he
did. I swum the river and come through the swamp and laid down buck naked
in them palmettos. Them misquotes liked to have killed me. The revenuers
was all around me. If they'd been listening they could have heard my heart
beat, cause I was done give out.

     "Old Bill Alford was one of them revenuers, that day, and he'd done
shot the lock off my boat. They were running up and down the river looking
for me in it. There was nine of them agents on the Georgia side of the
river. Later, when I made it to the house, I saw Carl's track where he had
crossed that old wide dirt road. He had hit it one time in the middle. He
was moving on.

     Wilkerson finally made it home without his clothes, but safe. "When I
came walking up to the house buck naked they all knowed what had happened,"
he smiled.

     Wilkerson said he got the last laugh. "Back then, if you got away fair
and square and they didn't catch you, then they wouldn't arrest you later
on. I put me two gallons of whiskey in my car and drove to town right past
them. I had got away fair and they knew it, so they never bothered me."

     Wilkerson remembers state beverage agent Bill Eddy, and other law
enforcement officers as well, during those bootlegging years. "Eddy used to
ride out here about once a week," he began. "He would drive by the house,
go down there a piece and turn around and drive right back by the house
again, then leave. He was a good old man. He had a job to do. He mostly did
investigation work. He thought he was slick, too, but he wasn't.

     "Ed was a pretty good ole feller. Asa (Coleman) was okay. I never
heard of any of 'em ever taking pay-offs, and I believe I would have if
they'd done it. I can tell you, they never took nothing from me or anyone I
knowed. People may get mad with 'em and say that, but I don't believe it.

     "Floyd Bennett would tear 'em up as fast as I'd put 'em up. Then they
got to blow 'em up, but old Floyd had a job to do. If you treated him nice,
he'd treat you nice. Ed was a little rougher. But Floyd would be out there
on top of the still before you knowed it. He was a good man, he sure was.
Now, don't get me wrong, he'd catch you, but if you didn't talk about him,
or mess with him, he'd be good to YOU."

     His favorite law officer was G.W. Rhoden. "He was a good man. If he
went to arrest you, you went one way or the other. He'd come talk to you
nice. G.W. was the only man that could go get Sylvester Mann with no
problem. G.W. would say, 'Sylvester, I've come for you,' and Sylvester
would just crawl in the back seat and go with him. Everybody liked G.W.,"
he said.

     "One evening, I was about five miles from my still and I looked up and
thought I saw the top of a jeep out there in them woods. I just turned off
and went out there and there was G.W. sitting there. I said 'Where's Ed?'
and G.W. said, 'I don't know.' I just kept sittin' there and direckly I
seed Ed coming from toward where the still was, and they' found it. They
tore it up the next day. They knowed I knowed it."

     "Bill Eddy used to wear this big old floppy hat; well, he looked like
a tramp when he'd come out in it. He'd go in them bar rooms, and take him a
little drink along and along. He said he'd get all the news he wanted, just
by listening to the bootleggers in there. He said he'd set there just like
he was drunk and he said, they'd just roll the talk out.

     "Floyd Bennett came out one time and I had a jug of liquor sitting out
there in the yard. I got a pea hamper real quick and covered it up and an
old sow came along and liked to have turned it over."

     Wilkerson got arrested by Sheriff Yarbrough with a load of sugar in
front of his house one time. "We'd kept this old car, about a 1940 model,
in Macclenny at my sister-in- law's for a year. Finally, I fixed it up and
got it running. The very day I brought it home, and loaded it with sugar,
here they come," he said.

     "I said, 'Boys, here the law is.' They carried me, sugar and all to
the jail. "I posted bond. I served probation for it."

     Lavon remembers the day well. "I was making pickles for all the
family. We thought they'd think the sugar was for making the pickles, but
they didn't believe that story," she said, laughing.

     Wilkerson said he never hauled whiskey, only made it "No, ma'am, I
didn't do that. I rode with Wallace one time with a few jugs, and I told
him then, 'When we get back to the house, I'll make it and you haul it.'

     "I didn't care much about working anywhere else, or doing much else
but moonshining. When I was a making moonshine, there wasn't many jobs
available for the uneducated, but I didn't really want naren.' Once, I
worked at a sawmill cuttin' logs, but I didn't like nothing but
bootlegging. And let me tell you something. Some people say it was easy
work. But that was the hardest work I ever done. You know them old tanks of
gas we used, well, tote one of them up a river hill and you'll know how
hard it is. And all them five-gallon jugs of liquor to tote down the hill
to put in the boat, then take it out and tote it back up the hill. Well,
you got troubles.

     "I made whiskey, some at night, some in the day. I didn't like that
night work. I liked to be home at night, and then I also liked to see where
I'm a-going, and see what's a-coming."

     The most he said he ever made at one time making and selling shine was
$300.

     How did he spend his money? "I spent it on groceries and cars and
clothes. I didn't throw any away," he said.

     Moonshining had its shining moments that now bring a chuckle to his
family. "We had this old goat that would get just as drunk as any man you
ever seed," said L.E. "We'd have to tote her to the house; she'd be so
drunk, she couldn't walk," he said.

     "L.E. would always tell me to tie her up when he went to the still,"
remembered Lavon. "He'd say 'How about tying her, she's going to give us
away,' and I'd tie her and about the time I walked away and got out of her
sight, she would be gone. She'd get to that still and she meant she was
going to have the first drink."

     "Yeah," said L.E. "We'd have to pour her some in something. I remember
there were three of 'em drunk down there at the still one day. She was
drunk, I was drunk and T.J. was drunk. What happened, she was trying to
have her a kid and she couldn't have it, so T.J. and me were going to take
it, but they had to get drunk first. She had her baby, and she had a
hang-over the next day, too.

     "That goat drank pure liquor. We had to give it to her to get rid of
her, or she'd stay right there until she got drunk and we'd have to bring
her home. She pestered us so bad we finally had to get rid of her. She'd
get on top of the still and have her feet all twisted and turned it would
get so hot. She'd sit up there and eat the flour we used to keep the steam
from coming out, then we'd have to re-flour it back up to seal it."

     "I was running from the revenuers once that had spotted me from an
airplane. I jumped in a ditch barefooted and split my foot wide open on a
ragged stump. Someone in a car came by and picked me up by the road. We
contacted Wallace and he took me to the doctor in Callahan. They just done
it up and said it wasn't broke nowhere, but about 12 o'clock that night it
got to hurtin' and Wallace got me in that car and I thought he was going to
kill us before we got there. They x-rayed and found the bone was split wide
open. The road patrol caught us four times that night running back and
forth to the doctor; he was driving 120 mph."

     That incident didn't slow him down from making moonshine. "No, it
didn't. I made it right on. I rode the horse to the still and when it come
sundown, that horse would bring me to the house; he wouldn't stay there no
longer. He'd stand there all day, but when it come about dark, he was ready
to go. He knew it was feed time. We really had some smart animals, smarter
than we were," he laughed.

     Wilkerson said most of his moonshine stills were constructed by Londa
Thrift or his neighbor and long-time friend, Catfish Stokes.

     Me and Catfish made some shine together, and he made just about all
the moonshine stills around here. Boy, it'd be a sight to see all the
stills that boy has made."

     He may have saved his friend's life once. "I was going hunting over in
Georgia real early before daylight one morning, and it was cold, ooheee, I
mean it was cold. There was an old wooden bridge I had to cross over and
when I run up on the bridge, I said, 'Dad gum it, if that don't look like
some of Stokes' signs there.' I went back and I seed where he went over in.
his truck. I said, 'Cat?, and he said, 'Yeah, get me out of here.' The
truck was upside down in the water so I got down in the water and saw that
the doors were jammed. He'd been there about four hours with just a little
breathing space in the cab of the truck. I told him I'd run up to Clarence
John's Truck Stop, and get some help. He said he had a good quart of shine
in the truck but he said he couldn't find it. Anyway, just his nose was
sticking up. You just could hear him down there. I knowed it was Cat by the
time I seed the sign where it went off. I don't see how come it didn't kill
him. It was 32 degrees. When we got him out he acted like there wasn't
anything wrong with him. He's always been a lucky Catfish. We've been
friends ever since we've been big enough to know each other."

     Wilkerson said someone came around once and tried to sell him some
parts to stolen cars. "I knew they was stolen because they were too cheap,"
he said.

     "There was a bunch of them fellers stealing cars and things and the
law thought I was in that bunch, but when they come to search the house
they didn't find no stolen stuff," he said.

     "Bill Eddy thought he was slick, but he wasn't. He was constantly
telling me he had something on me and wanted me to plead guilty, but I told
him I didn't know nothing and if he had evidence on me then he could let me
know at the trial because I wasn't going to come back down there. He lied
about having pictures and such because he didn't have them and I knew it
'cause I didn't do what he was saying I did. I wasn't found guilty either,
because I wasn't."

     It was a different story with a different ending when the Federal
agents came calling at his house early one morning a few years ago.

     "It was in 1987 and my son Windell had met a girl that he let move in
with him. They were planning to get married, but about a year after he met
her she planted some drugs in his house and turned him in. She was a pimp.
She told them I was involved, too. Them people come out here and searched
my house; they never found anything, but they took plenty. They even took
our toaster apart. They took every penny of money we had, even the baby's
piggy bank. I said, Hey, it's Friday, leave us enough to get groceries,'
but they didn't do it. They took all my hunting guns, even a gun that had
belonged to my daddy. They even came up here with bullet proof vests on, 18
of 'em.

     They held guns on us. I just don't understand that, but they can come
up here right now and kick my front door down and there's nothing I can do
about it because they are Federal," he said.

     Many of L.E.'s friends thought him innocent. One was former Baker
County Sheriff Paul Thrift. He went to court as a character witness for
L.E.

     "I knew L.E. Wilkerson. I don't think he had anything to do with it. I
knew L.E. for years, and his dad before him. L.E. had bought groceries from
me for years, and always paid his bill faithfully. He was honest, and I
knew it. I don't think he had anything to do with it, that's why I went as
a character witness."

     Father and son were sentenced to five years in Federal prison in
Atlanta. After a year they were released and put on probation.

     Four of the Wilkerson's children live on the property close to their
parents.

     "They went into my house without a search warrant," said Holly. "They
never found any drugs, but they took all of our hunting guns. They
eventually gave us ours back, but daddy never got his back," she said.

     How did he feel being away from home for the first time in his life?
"Well, I bet I had never even been to Taylor more than three times in my
lifetime but it wasn't so bad. We had air conditioning in the summertime
and heat in the wintertime, and plenty of groceries. I got homesick, but it
weren't no use. I could have come home anytime I wanted, just hit the road
and come on. I got a seven-days vacation while I was there and I never
heard of that before and neither had anyone else," he said.

     "Yeah, one day they called and said to come get Windell and his daddy,
that they could come home for a week. Windell wanted to fly home because it
was quicker, but L.E. wouldn't do it," said Lavon. "They were home a week,
then I drove them back up to prison "

     "I had bought us an old van for $1,000 to drive back while he was in
Atlanta," said Lavon. All he had was an old truck, and the federal people
didn't even want it when they arrested him, because it was no good," she
said. " The van got us there and back. My job driving a school bus was the
only thing that kept us going. Twice a month, when I got paid, me and the
kids would drive up there. We went and came back the same day because we
didn't have the money to stay over night."

     "They tried to send me to school while I was there," he said, "but I
didn't want no part of it. I told 'em 'You can't teach an old dog new
tricks.' I was just a yard man up there, that's all I knowed to do, and
that's all I wanted to do."

     Windell was trained to make mattresses during his imprisonment, the
couple said. Today, he works in air-conditioning.

     "When L.E. and I got married, we lived in the house with his daddy and
step-mama and there's no place big enough for two women," said Lavon. "So I
moved to Macclenny and bought me some furniture and stuff. When he came to
see me, I told him to go pay for the furniture because I wasn't going back,
so he said, 'Let's move,' and I said, 'if you got a place to go to.' Then
L.E. made arrangements for us to move into a house nearby where he grew up,
so I was only gone one day.

     "His uncle moved out the front door of the house and we moved in the
back,' she said.

     "The windows were broken out of that old house, and the tin roof was
leaking," she said. "Just before he came home from Atlanta we bought this
double-wide because I told him I needed something where I could be warm and
dry. And we've been here ever since," she said.

     It isn't that L.E. Wilkerson likes to talk about his life. He's really
a private man. His children are proud of their daddy and they wanted him to
tell his story. He loves his children and wants to please them. During the
conversation, he was relaxed and talkative, even posing without a fuss for
a picture which shocked his family.

     "Well, I wasn't very proud of doing time in prison," he said, "but I
didn't do nothing. I did make moonshine just about all my life. I made my
last to sell in 1975," he said.

     For the past five years he has worked for the City of Macclenny.
"Well, I have to pay my taxes somehow," he said. "This place has always
been homesteaded, but about three years ago they poured the taxes to it. I
never paid any taxes when it was homesteaded. I think that county
commission just sits up there and figures out what they have to have, then
they're going to get it. Yeah, that's just the way it is.

     "I like my job. I do my work like I am supposed to, so I don't have to
see a bossman very much. That's the way the city works, you do your job and
the boss don't mess with you," he said.

     What is his favorite thing to do? "Well, it would be bootlegging, if
they'd let me do it," he said. "I don't even have to fish anymore; my boy
goes all the time. He catches them, cleans them and brings them to me."

     Would he like to reveal his best kept moonshine secrets? "No", I might
want to do it again someday," he quipped.



                              Tommy Register
                            Macclenny, Florida

     Tommy Register was 22 years old in 1953. He and his wife, the former
Imogene Dopson, were renting land and a dwelling from a man named Buck
Rowe, south of Macclenny where they were living with their young son, Billy
Ray. Times were hard, jobs were scarce, but Tommy was making a good living
like many other Baker countians.... manufacturing moonshine.

     The afternoon sun was setting in the west and a cool wind blew
eastward. One good whiff of the afternoon aura attracted the attention of
one passerby that would change Tommy's life forever. He was state beverage
agent Phil Tomberlin.

     As Tommy and his co-worker, the late Babe Rewis, lolled around in the
back yard of his home waiting on darkness to fall so they could go to work.
Tomberlin and three of his co-workers drove up to the clapboard house
surrounded by a picket fence. Tommy sent Babe scurrying into the house
while he greeted the men who were anything but casual visitors.

     "How do?" Tommy politely asked as the men proceeded to come onto the
premises without permission. "Got a search warrant?," Tommy asked, as the
men continued toward the back yard where the chickens and hogs scurried
around in their pens.

     "No, we don't have to have one," came the beverage agent's reply.

     "When he said that, I just hushed," said Register.

     Phil Tomberlin followed his nose as the east wind continued to blow a
slight breeze over the area. It led him south to a fenced in area where he
climbed over the fence to get to the east side. Noticing four old-fashioned
chicken coops behind Tommy's residence, he continued his trek to where he
noticed a green rubber water hose that was oozing liquid. He bent down,
picked up some of the dampened sand, and smelled it. His companion standing
nearby suggested it might be soured wash water, but Tomberlin's keen nose
told him different. Peering inside one of the chicken coops he discovered
several six-foot-high stacks of Ball fruit jars and as far as he could see
there were wooden barrels. Without a search warrant or regard for Tommy's
request for one, the four men proceeded with the raid and made their
discovery of the decade.

     "It was the first of Baker County's reputed underground moonshine
stills to be discovered by the beverage agents. Tomberlin's keen smell for
fermenting mash and whiskey, aided by the eastern wind, had led him
directly to the right place.

     Tommy was one of five children born to honorable but poor tenant
farmers Bart and Daisy Harris Register of north Macclenny. Unlike his older
brother, Hamp, Tommy did not plow in the hot dusty fields alongside the
rest of his family from sun-up to sun-down.

     "I was the puny one," he said, in his typical southern drawl. "I was
hospitalized one time for hookworms that I think they said had got in my
kidneys. It's been over 50 years and it's hard for me remember, but I think
it was something like that."

     With little schooling, Tommy turned to making moonshine at the age of
15. He sold it mostly to locals, but occasionally he hauled it to places
like Valdosta, Georgia. He was earning a little spending money, he said.

     "Daddy made us all a good living while we were younguns," he said. "We
didn't go hungry."

     During WW II Bart Register left the farm and obtained work at the
shipyards in Jacksonville, but when they closed down he was out of work.

     "Daddy and I made moonshine together. It didn't make us a lot of money
because there were too many people making it, but it made us a good enough
living," he said.

     Making moonshine was not easy work. "No, you were always in a strain,
watching, looking for someone to come along and catch you and tear the
still up. Sugar was in 100- pound bags, and the whiskey weighed 55 pounds
and that was pretty bad when you had to carry it a good ways. We toted a
lot of ours on horses. we'd ride the horse to where someone would be with
the car and supplies and then take the things to the still on horseback.
The horse tracks would not easily give our location away because it was
hard for the agents to tell what was going on with the horses. Back then
everybody had a horse to help out with the work and they were all over the
area,'. he explained.

     At first Register said he ran his own moonshine still operation.
'Then, when the ship yards shut down in Jacksonville, me and daddy set up
some stills on high ground out there in the woods. He had to do something
to make a living, at least until things got better.

     "I've had to tun three or four times but the revenuers never caught
me," he said. "I remember one time, me and my brother-in-law were in my car
up there at Lake City at a place called Five Points. We knew it weren't no
use to run from the law because they could catch us in their car when we
ran out of gas, so we tried to get us a good place to jump out and run. My
brother-in-law fell down and they caught him, but I got away because it was
night and they couldn't see where they were going and neither could 1. The
agents confiscated my car and all the whiskey that night, but they'd have
took it anyway if they'd caught us in the car. As it was, at least I got
away. I never did get caught by them until they finally caught me at the
hole."

     The hole was a 40x40 foot underground moonshine still operation
located in South Macclenny near Woodlawn Cemetery, and that's where he was
the day the special beverage agents came calling. The still was owned and
operated by him and his daddy. After 'the hole' was discovered by Tomberlin
and his agents, they arrested Register and took him to jail, while his
helper, Babe Rewis, hid out in the attic.

     It was five years before Register would have a trial. "I come clear of
the charges, I didn't serve nary a day, nor do I have one thing on my
record. The judge said I was not guilty. He said I violated the law, but he
said they violated the law, too."

     The beverage agents admitted they did not have a search warrant giving
them permission to legally go onto Register's property the day they came
calling in 1953.

     "When that man came crawling over that fence, I asked him didn't he
have to have a warrant, but he said no they didn't have to have one. He
just walked right over to the hog pen and where the chicken house was and
looked in one of them holes and found it," he said.

     "The night they took me to jail we just talked all the way there about
all kinds of things except whiskey-making. All of them people was nice. If
you try to be nice then they try to be nice," he said.

     "The next morning, the revenue man came and got me from the jail and
took me over to the Federal building where they finger-printed me. We all
cut the fool, joked and talked. I knowed them all and they knowed me. All
of them people was nice. it was about 7:30 a.m. and I was out in the hall
and the Clerk of Court came out and got me. He told me to come with him, so
I went with him and he carried me back into a room adjoining the judge's
chambers and told me to sit by the door. He had left it cracked a little
and I could hear what my lawyer and the judge were talking about. So I
knowed before I went, into that court room what was going to happen.

     "Later, my lawyer went out there to my house and made pictures and
when the judge saw them pictures and seen that them revenuers couldn't have
seen anything unless they had gone on the property, he didn't find me
guilty'cause he said they had violated the law, too. Boy, that revenuer's
face turned red as blood, but he didn't deny he come on the property
without a warrant," he said. "of course, they could have gone and got a
warrant and come back and tore the still anyway," he reflected.

     Two weeks after Register's still was destroyed by the state beverage
agents, the agents received a tip phone call about another underground
still operation. This one was located in north Baker County and belonged to
Register's brother, Hamp.

     "Back then people had just started tattle-tailing on one another," he
said.

     "Me and my brother never did discuss too much about each other's
business," he said. "We didn't want the younger kids to know about it. We
always figured the more you talked about something, the worse it was. If
you didn't talk about it, there weren't no danger in it getting around. He
helped me a lot if I needed help, and if he needed help, I helped him. He
really helped me lots more than I helped him, like when our still would get
tore up, we'd help each other get the stuff up to start another one.
Sometimes, we'd pay him back, and sometimes we wouldn't; he'd just give it
to us, or we'd help him do something he needed done. His whiskey operation
was a lot bigger than what me and daddy had," he said.

     "It took me a long time to make up my mind to put in an underground
still. I'd never been to one, but I'd heard of the ones in north Macclenny
that belonged to them Thrift fellers and them Sigers'. I guess I had mine
about two or three months when it was torn up. It was about 7 1/2- to
8-feet deep and about 40x4O feet. Me and my daddy and brother-in-law used a
bulldozer to dig the hole."

     When Register's daddy left the whiskey business, he lived on Social
Security until he died at the age of 74. His mother, now 93, is still
living.

     "I'm proud of my mama. She was a good mama, always wanting us to do
what was right. She knew we made whiskey and she didn't approve of it, but
she knew we had to have money from somewhere. I think people way back then
weren't in it for gettin' rich, they were in it just to make a living for
their families. There weren't no real good jobs back then," he said.

     While Register was awaiting trial he went to work for the government,
working in the Osceola National Forest. A year later, he joined Rayonier
timber operation in Macclenny where he stayed for five years, working and
living at least two of those years in St. George, Ga. Then in October,
1958, he moved to Jacksonville and obtained employment with the City Parks
and Recreation Department, working with the tree- trimming and planting
crew. He retired in 1986 because of arthritis. He has had both of his hips
replaced.

     He and his wife Imogene have only one child, their son, Billy Ray, a
physician specializing in family practice for the state of Louisiana.

     "He's 42 years old and never married," he said. "He's got a big old
house with 4,000 square feet in it and lives alone."

     Register said he has no hobbies and stays around home unless he is
visiting north of Sanderson with his mother who lives just down the road
from his brother, Hamp.

     "I don't ever think back too much about them moonshine days," he said.
"It's something we used to didn't talk about. I figured we never would have
need to either, but if someone wants to know, about it, at least what I
know about it, well, that's how it went, at least all I can remember of
it."