East Tennessee Outdoors: The Blind Tiger

Published 11:26 am Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Moonshining. The word brings to mind secret meetings under a full moon where an illegal product would change hands and money was pocketed.

My grandfather was a moonshiner, and several of my uncles were moonshiners. Without making excuses for them, these were people who were trying to provide for their families in the best way that they knew how. That, and they really enjoyed drinking the stuff.

Ask any moonshiner and he will tell you that the most dangerous and difficult part of making a living off moonshine is selling of the stuff. “Bootlegging” alcohol or selling alcohol was the part that put you in the biggest danger of being caught. Because of this moonshiners had to come up with ingenious ways to distribute their products while keeping attention away from themselves.

Sometimes they left the product at stash houses or other hideaways, while other times they hid the product in almost plain sight. Still another way to bootleg was so ingenious only a moonshiner would come up with it. This involved using the state line.

Many years ago, when little run down houses dotted the mountain hollows and ridges, the laws for or against possession and consumption of alcohol varied from state to state and sometimes from county to county.

One state may be a “dry” state or a place where it was illegal to use or sell alcohol and a neighboring state may be a “wet” state. Even today there are counties in Tennessee that are dry counties and wet counties.

During this time the Cloudland Hotel was built on top of Roan Mountain, and it is said there was a big white line down the center of the dining room and even down the center of the dining table.

This was the state line that separated Tennessee and North Carolina on the mountain. Tennessee was a wet state at the time, and diners in the hotel could drink alcohol on the Tennessee side of the table. They could not drink on the North Carolina side of the table because North Carolina was a dry state.

Rumor had it that a Mitchell County, N.C., sheriff hung out in the hotel seeing if he could catch someone drinking on the North Carolina side of the hotel.

Moonshiners on other mountains also counted on a similar way of not getting caught by using houses called “Blind Tigers” to help with the disruption of their product. These were houses usually built on the state line connecting North Carolina and Tennessee.

A thirsty person would come to one of these houses. He would knock a special knock on the door of the “Blind Tiger” and wait. A drawer was usually slid out to the buyer who put his money in the drawer. The drawer was pulled back into the house and the appropriate amount of moonshine was sent back out to the customer who then went on his merry way.

A “Blind Tiger” worked so well in the mountains because of two reasons. First, the transaction was always anonymous, you never knew who was selling the moonshine, and second the moonshiner rarely got caught.

If the North Carolina police came to arrest him, he would simply step over into the Tennessee side of his house where the North Carolina police had no jurisdiction. If the police came from Tennessee, the moonshiner simply stepped into the North Carolina side. If they both came at the same time, he was in trouble.

There is a reason Tennessee is known as a state of moonshiners. Moonshining was in our culture when we came from places like Scotland and Ireland, and it was sometimes the only way we had to make a living. Times may have changed, but I think that maybe there is a little moonshiner in all of us.