ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, May 26, 1996 TAG: 9605280002
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV19 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG
SOURCE: LESLIE HAGER-SMITH STAFF WRITER
Franklin County got all the press, but there was a time when Montgomery County also had a reputation for producing what one might call "forest products."
Coal Bank Hollow, Toms Creek and Diamond Ridge near Blacksburg and the little village of Cambria made the New River Valley a top producer of illegal liquor for more than three decades.
But Happy Hollow captures the imagination in a way other locales may not. Maybe it's the name, or its titillating proximity to respectability just outside Blacksburg town limits. Or could it be the mysterious way the real hollow veers off the present-day road and into history, deep in the secluded woods?
When Lee Price, 89, was a boy hauling milk for his family and neighbors, the hollow was a dirt "gate road." It meandered along Indian Run, from farm to orchard. A gate at each property kept livestock from wandering off.
Today, the road stretches from Mount Tabor Road to present-day Harding Avenue, spilling into the valley at Lusters Gate. That's where Lee Price once hauled his milk in a horse-drawn wagon to be processed at the cheese factory.
A more ideal location for the production of illegal spirits could hardly be imagined. Even today, Happy Hollow is dotted with cool springs. It offered seclusion beyond town limits, and, nearby, a major road running between a military college (Virginia Tech) and the railroad town of Roanoke. The hollow was home to more than one moonshiner over the years.
The first rule for negotiating the back roads then, Price recalled, was this: If you saw any smoke, you stayed on the road and you didn't get out -"If you wanted to keep living," he added as an afterthought.
"If a stranger came nosing around, the bullets went singing and he got out and got out quick."
Price remembers that at least two men were shot and wounded in Happy Hollow for venturing too close to a still.
As a young man, Price also hauled cattle from Shooting Creek in Franklin County, another place with the same occupational hazards.
Making a living
Perhaps the most colorful of Happy Hollow moonshiners was Warren E. Davis, who started operating from his two-room cabin in the late 1930s. Davis, with his wife, Ocie, and their brood of 12 kids, put the "happy" into Happy Hollow.
``If they come down Saturday, they left happy. But my dad used to say, `Kids, it's not made to drink; it's made to sell,''' said Elton "Honk" Davis, 59.
"My mom was the one named the hollow," he said. "I remember it just as good as anything. We moved in 1944, and I was 7 years old. This old man, Harry Hickman, moved us on a horse and a wagon. I remember my mama crossed her hands and said `I just hate to leave this happy hollow.' And it just hung on: Happy Hollow."
In the early days of this century, many Happy Hollow residents - before it became known by that name - had personal stills. In addition to distilling whiskey, they made grape, dandelion and blackberry wine, apple and peach brandy, and apple cider.
Don Lucas, 66, grew up near Happy Hollow and recalls picking dandelions for his neighbor at 5 cents a gallon.
"My mother was a good Christian lady, but even she kept a pint of whiskey. If we got a bad cold, she would mix us up a `toddy.' It was whiskey and lemon and sugar or honey, maybe. They'd get it real hot and you drank it," Lucas said.
"They'd put a mustard plaster on your chest and cover you with three or four big quilts and you'd sweat the cold out. And it worked. I don't remember ever being to the doctor when I was young," he recalled. "It just wasn't any money for medicine."
If self-reliance and isolation helped establish the practice of moonshining, Prohibition made it good business. In fact, moonshining during this time took on a sophistication it had previously lacked.
Hard times during the Great Depression of the 1930s helped sustain the illegal trade, even after Prohibition was repealed.
"Back during the Depression, people didn't have any money. You done most anything to make a few dollars," Lee Price said. "Of course, we had a few poker players and bootleggers like everyone else did. I had a still on my own place. I didn't do it - they came to ask permission to do it. But I knew if I didn't give them permission, they were gonna do it somewhere else. See what I mean? They'd stick their neck plumb out to help you, if you help them."
Warren Davis became one of the largest producers of bootleg whiskey in the region, according to Jack Powell, a retired investigator who spent 35 years with the state Alcoholic Beverage Control Department.
By all accounts, the elder Davis drank very little himself. Alfred Purdue, a retired insurance broker and longtime resident, observed that such moderation was not uncommon among bootleggers.
"If he thought you'd had too much to drink, he didn't give you no more. Or if he thought you was making your family do without something, you didn't get none," Elton Davis recalled.
"He was a good man, Warren Davis," Don Lucas said. "But he had 12 kids and that was his way of making a living."
But Powell also recalled the grimmer, more violent side of the local moonshining business. In an upcoming book, he writes about shootouts with families who fought law enforcement agents to protect their illegal livelihoods.
'A right lively place'
Happy Hollow's notoriety drew a steady stream of business.
Hatcher Lucas, at age 96, recalls the steady business he had for his taxicab driving townsfolk to and from Happy Hollow.
"By the way, boys, I'll take you down to Davis!" became the friendly trademark for Lucas.
The flow of people in the area inevitably attracted other businesses. In the 1930s, Virginia Tech Dean of Agriculture Harvey Price and his son dammed a portion of Indian Run, poured a cement pool, and erected a bath house on their orchard lands.
"It was a right lively place," recalls Don Lucas, Hatcher Lucas' son, "especially during the summertime."
The hollow also was known as a place where you always could find a poker game going on, according to Lucas.
"The bricklayers - they made good money - and the carpenters and painters and all, they'd work all week and then they'd buy their bootleg and get in those poker games and on Monday they'd be broke."
Several of the locals also talked about a brothel that operated in the hollow well into the 1970s, although the house no longer stands.
The sheer volume of liquor trafficking in the area invited bootlegging by enterprising neighbors. Whiskey was hauled in from Franklin, Floyd and Carroll counties. But much of it was made closer to home.
Elton Davis can still recite the neighborhoods he delivered to - Mount Tabor, Bishop, Coal Bank Hollow and Nellies Cave.
In the living room of his home, which is no longer standing, Elton Davis had a trap door under the rug where he stored whiskey for sale.
How does Davis account for his own family's prosperous involvement in such a risky business for over 30 years without being arrested?
"I only know if you missed a payment, you didn't get tipped off [about an upcoming raid]. That's what my dad said."
The outbreak of World War II slowed the moonshine business in Happy Hollow. Just about everyone went to work for Hercules at the Army Ammunition Plant after Dec. 7, 1941.
As the war ended, the Davis family moved onto Harding Avenue, not far from Happy Hollow. Warren Davis began producing moonshine in earnest, moving his stills around the wooded slopes of Happy Hollow and nearby Diamond Ridge. He took care to produce a quality product, his son said. His still was copper, he used wood barrels, and he transported his product in glass, said Elton Davis.
Like other agricultural pursuits, the work was seasonal. The elder Davis made peach and apple brandy, as crops came in. Then, he'd turn to making whisky from corn, straight sugar, or "chop," a feed made of corn and wheat chaff.
Mash for whiskey could be ready for distillation in as little as three to seven days, Elton Davis said. Fruit pumice needed to be fermented 16 to 18 weeks, which made brandy a luxury.
The work came to a close after September, when hunters began to roam the woods.
"When the main huntin' season came in, you had to pack your stuff up and haul freight," Elton Davis said. "With firing a still, you didn't want no smoke. It would be like giving a smoke signal to the entire community. You had to get good, dry wood and you had to fire it before the sun came up."
Elton Davis said he made a still for an uncle, whose own substantial operation was on Paris Mountain.
"The ABC investigators never did find that one. I made the still, set it up for him, built a ramp over the top of it and had a trap door. They were standing on top of it, asking him where his still was at. If the trap door had broke, they'd of fell right down in the mash!"
Hauling 'hooch'
Elton Davis began hauling moonshine in 1954, at the age of 17 - almost as soon as he could drive.
"I used to deliver to the grocery stores, to the restaurants, to the rich people and the poor, ... I even dropped some off at the courthouse," he said.
"It was once a year, in October, at the courthouse - always two cases. I always wondered where it went. One night I had a notion to stay and see who picked it up, but my dad gave me orders not to. When he told you something, he meant for you to do it."
Once there was a special meeting of parishioners from Davis Chapel, which bordered Warren Davis' homeplace. The chapel, named after a distant cousin, still stands on Harding Avenue, about a half mile beyond Happy Hollow. The congregation determined to put the Davis moonshiners out of business.
"That's easy!" one of the deacons said. "Let's quit buying it!" is the way Elton Davis recounts the meeting.
But the locals didn't stop buying and the Davises didn't stop producing. The still itself was moved periodically to avoid detection. The whiskey was buried, hidden in brush piles or concealed behind trap doors in the hollows around Blacksburg - not always on their own property.
"We had good neighbors," explained Elton Davis. "They didn't drink but they didn't cause us no trouble."
By the time the Davises' enterprise came to an end, their moonshine was being hauled to West Virginia and Maryland, and as far as Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. The price was 50 cents a pint in the late '30s and $2.50 a pint by the late '60s.
"The ABC investigators used to come. They'd search and they'd break up my mom's canned fruit," Elton said. "One time I bought a new chainsaw from Sears & Roebuck. Come home that evening, and they had took a hammer and beat that up. They'd let the cows out, and they'd cut the mattresses open. They would actually turn cow piles over. You ain't never seen nothin' like what they would do in all your days!"
Jack Powell, the retired ABC investigator, tells a different story. "You hear about officers doing this thing or the other, but we were 90 percent sure of our facts," he said.
Powell has written a book on moonshining in Southwest Virginia. "A Dying Art" is scheduled for publication in July by Prestige Publishing.
"Every time you went there, you had to fight that entire family. They shot at us. We had knock-down-drag-outs, not just at the Davises'. It was a large family, engaged in a major business. They don't mind telling you that they don't appreciate revenue agents taking away their livelihood. A lot of people think there's nothing to it - it's just a tax law, but it was these peoples' life."
ABC investigators spent months in surveillance of major violators like the Davises, collecting information for warrants and waiting for a chance to arrest them. One day, in September 1967, that chance arrived.
According to Powell, investigators arrested a man hauling a load of moonshine from the Davis homeplace. A search revealed a small quantity of additional whiskey hidden in a wood pile and tire tracks leaving that site.
Elton Davis maintains that the whiskey was planted by ABC agents, that his father had sold his entire inventory and declared his intentions to quit the business.
Both parties agree, however, on the sad ending. Warren E. Davis died in December of that year while awaiting trial.
"My mama said that was the end of it," Elton Davis said. "There'd never be no more of that."
LENGTH: Long : 224 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. On a recent visit to Happy Hollow, Elton Davis looksby CNBover a small waterfall on Indian Creek. Davis' father, Warren E.
Davis, began operating a moonshine still along the creek in the late
1930s. color GENE DALTON STAFF
2. GENE DALTON/Staff Elton Davis examines the chimney of what used
to be the old bathhouse built in the 1930s as part of a swimming
pool. color
3. map showing location of Happy Hollow color