THE MAGAZINE OF THE FLORIDA HUMANITIES COUNCIL

DURING THOSE
DAYS IN THE
1920S AND ’30S,
you had to be
closemouthed about moonshiners
and everything else. Anyway,
what they did was their business
and none of mine. Although I
came across many of these men
in my travels, I knew to keep my
mouth shut. If I’d been married, I
wouldn’t have told my wife about
them.
From 1916, when they put
the first part of the Ingraham
Highway in, until 1933, there
were lots of whisky stills in the
Bill Ashley Jungles—at different
times. This was a favorite spot for moonshiners, since they
could put their scows in along the road and travel back into
the mangroves and glades undetected. Whiskey-making
off the Ingraham Highway started as early as Prohibition,
or before. And that riverhead country suited the situation.
Scows, sixteen feet long, four feet
wide, and about a foot deep, could
carry stills, sugar, and corn. I’ve been
told that a lot depended on timing:
meeting the supply truck, unloading,
loading, and moving on. If they ever
left their vehicles on the road, I never
seen it.
How many stills were there
at one time is hard to say. But if I
was walking along the road, fishing
for bass in the late 1920s, I could
hear the sound of a pitcher pump
pumping water in the condenser
barrel. Some of the pumps could be
noisy if you worked them too hard.
I can’t write the sound, but if you
ever heard a pitcher pump, you know
the sound. Kinda like uunk-uunk…
Much spirits were made closer to
town. Moonshiners moved often, for
the most part. This rockland county
(pinewoods closer to Homestead)
was spotted with old dried-up gator
Watchin’ out for moonshiners in the ’glades
GLEN SIMMONS made his living hunting alligators in the Everglades for decades, beginning in the late 1920s.
He has been called “South Florida’s Davy Crockett.” His memories are preserved in the book, Gladesmen: Gator
Hunters, Moonshiners, and Skiffers, which he wrote with anthropologist Laura Ogden. In the following excerpt,
he recalls moonshiners in the ’glades.
A moonshine whiskey still in Miami in 1925.
holes and hammocks, and most
every one of them, at one time or
more, had had stills in them…
Some moonshiners used sixbarrel
pots, which were preferably
made of copper. The prohis
[agents who enforced Prohibition
law] tore these pots up so
often that many moonshiners
used cheaper pots made from
galvanized tin.
Of course, this galvanized tin
was poison, so ’twas said, but the
moonshiners didn’t care about
this. They even started using car
radiators instead of coils. From
the stills I visited, most used up
to about 40 barrels of mash. The
word was if everything was done right, a barrel of mash or
“buck” would turn out six gallons of sellable ’shine—more if
you cut it weak. After Prohibition was repealed [in 1933] and
legal spirits were available, most moonshiners dropped out,
but some kept on. Old habits die hard…
Florida State Archives
Glen Simmons is shown navigating his skiff through the
Everglades near Florida City.
40 W I N T E R 2 0 0 6 / F O R U M F L O R I D A H U M A N I T I E S C O U N C I L
Florida State Archives
Making moonshine was a
rough business. So they were really
hot to catch the moonshiners.
I remember hearing about a
shootout on the Ingraham
Highway, near the Bill Ashley
Jungles, where three men were
killed. These killings took place
about 1925. One lad, a neighbor
of ours named Clyde Parrish, was
about nineteen years old—and
that’s as old as he got…
But I never made ’shine. I
loved my freedom more than
money. A year and a day in an
Atlanta prison wasn’t for me,
and that was the penalty for
being caught. People were so
hellish in them days, some of my
acquaintances probably would
have planted some ’shine in my
Model A Ford if they hadn’t liked
’shine so well themselves.