Finding Uncle Luke’s Moonshine Still
More Than A Day Away By Mike Steely
We’re blessed to have so many options for outdoor adventures in our region. Over the years I’ve ventured here and there in our mountains looking for interesting and abandoned places and linking some of those trips with my own family history. Sometimes what you find is close to the heart.
I’m sharing this adventure with you and the folk of Jellico, Tennessee, where I spent many of my adult years running the newspaper there.
Back in Jellico, I had many adventurous friends who, like I, enjoyed exploring rock shelters and caves and researching local history. Those adventures, I’m sure, worried the wives of those involved as occasionally we didn’t return home when promised.
My fellow explorers included Roy Price, Keith Hausman, and many other friends and associates. We had many escapades like dropping into the High Cliff pit, crawling around in Mud Creek Cave, walking through a marijuana patch on the way out of another cave, getting stuck in cramped passageways, and visiting the Cumberland Mammoth Cave in Elk Valley many times.
I have a description of many of the shelters and caves on file at the Jellico Library.
There is one special adventure that Roy and I had on the backside of Pine Mountain above Crouches Creek. That’s my ancestral home area and I explored the mountain before and after I-75 cut through the mountain.
Years ago my late Uncle Luke told me that his father and my grandfather, Charlie Douglas, had a moonshine still that was never raided or destroyed. He told me what remained in the rock shelter with a vague description of where it was. My uncle had told me they left the still in place when my grandfather was arrested for moonshining. Roy and I searched for it a few times and eventually one day, when walking back up the mountain to return home, we spotted a dark spot high on a cliff peeking through a thick patch of mountain laurel.
We stopped our walk, slowly climbed up the sheer rock face, and crawled out of the laurel to discover my grandfather’s abandoned still site.
Roy and I explored the shelter and found a stream at the back that supplied water for the operation, a buried barrel in the floor, and pieces of the still. We put the pieces together, more or less, for this photo. Uncle Luke had told me that they stored empty Coca Cola syrup bottles and we found them also, but all of them were cracked. Everything else but the copper pipes were still there.
It felt as if my grandfather and uncle had just been there. We discovered a pathway on the right side of the shelter and followed it to the top of the bluff. I marked the hidden trail with an empty Coke can, wedging it between the limbs of a small tree there, so we could find the site again without having to climb up the rockface.
Shortly after that, Old Man Slidell told me that he and Grandpa Douglas had walked along the top of the bluff and Grandpa was going to show him the shelter. Slidell said that my grandfather walked ahead and, shocking Slidell, he jumped off the edge of the bluff and disappeared. Slidell ran to the bluff to find my grandfather standing just below him on the little path that led around and down to the shelter.
The still probably still exists down Dog Slaughter Hollow but, unless you know where to look, you’ll never find it. The lawmen never did.
