Photo courtesy of the Franklin County Historical Society
Hosea (Hogey) Thomas distillery -- circa 1916. Standing in back: Spairel (Sparrel) Rakes. Left to right, front: Arthur (Banjo) Martin, Thomas (Press) Martin and Wiley Thomas
Courtesy of The Weinstein Co.
Filmed mostly in Georgia and starring Shia LaBeouf, the movie “Lawless” is set in Franklin County and is based on the book “The Wettest County in the World,” by Matt Bondurant. It’s a fictionalized story of his grandfather and great uncles, Prohibition-era bootleggers known as the Bondurant boys, who took a small moonshining operation and battled urban gangsters and local law enforcement as they grew it into a black-market empire. The movie opens this week.
Kyle Green | The Roanoke Times
Aimee Brookes (left), owner of the Eagle Cinema 5 in Rocky Mount, and her manager Wendy Smith had hoped to screen early showings of the movie “Lawless” before its Wednesday opening. But she was unable to win the approval of Hollywood studios for the early showings. "The whole community is buzzing about it," she said. "You can’t go in a restaurant without hearing about it."
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“Lawless”
Opening in theaters Wednesday
Based on the novel "The Wettest County in the World" by Matt Bondurant, whose ancestors were Franklin County moonshiners.
- Plays Wednesday at 4, 7 and 9 p.m. at the Eagle Cinema 5 in Rocky Mount, and at 1, 4, 7 and 9 p.m. Friday through Sunday.
- More info: 540-483-9121
Head south down U.S. 220 to Rocky Mount, and soon you'll probably find yourself crossing the W.N. Angle Memorial Bridge near the center of town.
It rises high over the railroad tracks, above a stretch of factory buildings and warehouses that make up Ply Gem, a window manufacturing outfit that's one of the town's biggest employers.
A stone's throw down the same block you'll find the oddly shaped art gallery The Grainery, a building that has not a single right angle.
This is pretty much all that remains of Franklin Grocery & Grain, a once-thriving former wholesale operation that for decades supplied foodstuffs and other items to stores all over Franklin County and beyond.
The business played another key role in Franklin County commerce. It bought sugar by the train and truckload, hundreds of tons annually in the late 1940s and 1950s and beyond.
Most of that wound up in stills deep in surrounding wooded hollows, in places like Snow Creek, Ferrum and Endicott. The result was the product the county remains most famous for: untaxed corn whiskey, which fueled Franklin's self-appointed reputation as "Moonshine Capital of the World."
Most of those stills are gone now, but moonshine is still a big business in Rocky Mount.
You can see that in the T-shirts and bumper stickers for sale around town, and in the photos of bootleggers that proudly hang on the barroom walls at Ippy's, one of Rocky Mount's most popular restaurants.
You can find it on the bookshelves over at the Franklin County Historical Society. There, one best-seller is Matt Bondurant's "The Wettest County in the World," a novelized biography of the author's infamous moonshining relations, the Bondurant brothers.
Other recent volumes include "Spirits of Just Men — Mountaineers, Liquor Bosses, and Lawmen in the Moonshine Capital of the World" by Charles Thompson and "Chasing the White Dog: An Amateur Outlaw's Adventures in Moonshine," by Max Watman.
And you can see it each April, when hundreds of tourists descend on the small town for its annual Moonshine Express Tour, which started in 2005 and this year drew about 300 participants from seven states and one foreign country.
"It used to be, we made money making moonshine," said Linda Stanley, special projects coordinator for the historical society. "Now we make money talking about it."
That mini-tourism industry may be small potatoes compared with what's coming, however. Because Franklin County and its most famous product are two chief characters in a major Hollywood movie that hits theaters next week. It will put Rocky Mount on the map like never before.
Based on "The Wettest County in the World," the movie "Lawless" stars Gary Oldman, Shia LaBeouf, Tom Hardy and Jessica Chastain and was a selection for the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. It opens in thousands of theaters across the country Wednesday.
Nowhere will the excitement be as great as in Rocky Mount. The movie opens at 4p.m. that day at the Eagle Cinema 5 on Tanyard Road.
The Franklin County Historical Society will be set up outside, selling "The Wettest County in the World" and other books and untaxed whiskey memorabilia from a moonshine-era vehicle.
Theater owner Aimee Brookes had hoped to have a special preshow Tuesday. But she had to cancel those plans because she couldn't work out a deal with the film's distributor.
Her phone has been ringing off the hook for more than two weeks.
"The whole community is buzzing about it," Brookes said. "You can't go in a restaurant without hearing about it. There are lots of people still around who lived in the days of the Bondurant boys. We're all very excited about this movie."
Another local who's excited is Peggie Foster, 82, a grand dame of Rocky Mount royalty. Her husband, Pete, who died five years ago, and his father E.G. Foster, owned and operated Franklin Grocery & Grain.
The business was closed in the late 1980s but she and her children still own the company's real estate, where Ply Gem is located now.
In 1952, Pete and E.G. Foster were charged criminally with failing to record their sugar sales, which federal agents estimated at 500,000 pounds per year.
"They got a slap on the wrist, no jail time," Peggie Foster said.
Earlier this summer she conducted a personal moonshine tour of Rocky Mount.
"If you had corn, or plums, or apples on your property, you made moonshine," Foster said.
"Everybody made moonshine. They had to, to feed their families. If you said your family had nothing to do with the business, you were either spineless or a liar."
Even to this day, "every family in Franklin County has some at home," she said.
That's probably not much of an exaggeration.
Over at the historical society, we found exhibits of submarine-style stills, the kind favored by Franklin moonshiners, plus other whiskey-making implements such as hygrometers, white oak brooms and mash forks.
More than one wall is lined with black-and-white photos of famous backwoods whiskey makers: T.F. Bailey, the Prillamans, the Cashes and James Lee.
Cecil Love, who's 84 and is a decorated Korean War veteran, holds the title as the county's most recently busted moonshiner. He was arrested and charged in June 2011 and pleaded guilty to reduced charges in April, for which he received probation.
But Love's was a small operation — reportedly he was making corn whiskey and apple brandy only for friends and family — and his arrest was an anomaly.
The days when revenue agents raided 600 stills a year, like they did in the 1960s and 1970s, are way past, said Morris Stephenson, a longtime reporter and photographer for the Franklin News-Post.
For decades he "walked a fine line" between his moonshining acquaintances and the lawmen he used to accompany to raids on their stills.
Stephenson, 76, who went on his first moonshine raid in the spring of 1964, is close to finishing his own book, "A Night of Makin' Likker — Other Stories from the Moonshine Capital of the World."
He's hoping the hullabaloo over "Lawless" will help spur interest by a major publisher in yet another volume about Franklin County's most famous product and the people involved in it.
Stephenson's book begins with an account of a night in Boones Mill when he stayed with some moonshiners as they made 160 gallons of whiskey. Much of the rest is about individual raids he accompanied police on over his career, and people involved on both sides of the trade.
One, in the 1960s, was now-retired Virginia State Trooper Woodrow Ward.
"He was feared," Stephenson said. "He had the fastest car and was the best driver in the county."
The last huge raid was in 1993, when agents found and destroyed an operation that employed 36 800-gallon stills in a metal building off Virginia 40 in the Penhook area near the Franklin-Pittsylvania County line. It still holds the state record for moonshine-making capacity, Stephenson said.
Compared to years past, these days "there's very little moonshine," Stephenson said wistfully. "For all practical purposes, moonshining as we know it is gone.
"Used to be, I could make a call and get a case," he said. "I can't pick up the phone and get you a jar anymore."
