Moonshine, The Last Runner
You don’t hear much on thissort ofpersonanymore. He was distilling corn into whiskey as a kidwith his dadback when NASCAR icon Junior Johnson was running his personal white lightning through themountains of western North Carolina. He kept everything in the entire process the way it had always been: from the outdoor, copper-tubed still stashed away in the woods to storage in old cars and barns.
Born in 1946, Marvin “Popcorn” Sutton lived in one of the few but self-proclaimed “moonshine capitals of the world,” Cocke County, Tennessee. He spent his youth around stills set upnear the woods where he choppeda large stock of hardwood used to fire the boiler, mostly at night so they weren’t as readily seen, working by moonlight and the glowof the fire.
Paying a supplementary tax on what they deemed a “farm product” was unconscionable to the Scots-Irish descendants of the settlers of this area. These folks would be described as libertarian instead of conservative nowadays, since they are extremely guarded about rights and want to see as little of government as possible. They loathed law breaking intensely, and moonshining is against the law, but they had to feed families in a rural agricultural area were jobs are difficult to find at best and nonexistent at worst. In the Great Depression numerous survived by illegal whiskey production; during Prohibition they trulyflourished and grew businesses, buyingcars and building better barns and stills.
So, the era in which Sutton found himself in the last 2 decades was a time when other drugs made their way into manufacture, bringing progressively more law enforcement with worsening tempers (the state is fourth in methamphetaminemanufacturing in the nation). Still, he in no waychanged his methods of distilling the corn. Hepreserved the copper-tubed still fired with hardwood and drove his old Ford Fairlane named “the three-jug” because he paid three jugs of booze for it.
He grew to be quite a celebrity as the supposed “last moonshiner” and had written a book about his exploits. He visited restaurants and bars around Cocke County and western North Carolina. He appeared in documentaries regarding the exciting business he was immersed in.
Sutton had numerous run-ins with the police, and in the 1970’s was arrested for white whiskey production for the first time. He had a few more mishaps with the law (not all of them about alcohol) but in 2007, he sold 50 gallons to an undercover officer and was found guilty the next year. The agents found three 1,000 gallon stills on his property, along with guns and ammo, and 800 gallons of white lightning.
His demeanor sank. Throughout the trial, his discussions with friends about whiskey, rare to begin with, were nonexistent. One of the last pictures taken by a friendoutside the courthouse at the time shows him sitting down sad-eyed, holding up a middle finger. Even worse, a plea deal included forfeiting the stills, whiskey and guns, and the majority of his other property toreduce the sentence from 15 years to a year-and-a-half.
Sutton got that 18-month sentence in January, 2009, but folks who knew him said he was devastated. After many years of telling them that his last run of whiskey would indeed be his last, people believed it this time around. His wife of only a couple years found him in late January, dead by his very own hand, in the old Ford. The Wall Street Journal posted an article regarding Marvin's arrest and can be found online: Popcorn Sutton, Legenday Moonshiner, Headed to the Pokey.
Whiskey boasts a fascinating history. To learn more about the process of making whiskey visit How To Make Whiskey Headquarters for excellent recipes and whiskey making techniques. Also, to learn a little about the current laws concerning making moonshine take a look at "Is Making Whiskey Legal."