Taking a shine to Spa City

HOT SPRINGS is known for a lot of things: horse racing, gambling (legal and otherwise), bath houses, gangster hideouts, spring water and Prohibition-era moonshine. One of those things is making a comeback soon, and we’ll give you a hint, it’s not gangster hideouts. (Big Al died in ’47.)

The papers say a couple is going to open a moonshine distillery in town. Danny and Mary Bradley said they want to “educate tourists and the people of Hot Springs on moonshine manufacturing in Garland County during the Prohibition era and bring light to the people in the hills who produced it and brought it to Hot Springs almost a century ago.”

People in the hills of the Ouachitas have brewed enough hooch through the years to fill a couple of Arkansas lakes. Law enforcement and moonshiners were constantly locked in a game of cat and mouse over the stuff, even after Prohibition ended in 1933 with the 21st Amendment.

Maybe as interesting as moonshine itself are all the stories surrounding it.

Ouachita High Country magazine reports authorities would look for smoke coming from the woods and hollows to find illegal stills. To combat that, shiners started burning cypress trees and gasoline—because those fuels didn’t smoke. Some shiners sunk their stills in ponds and creeks to keep them from being found. But perhaps the most ingenious hiding method was the “casket still,” that is, where booze was made literally out of a metal casket buried in the ground. Color us impressed.

Yessiree, Hot Springs has quite a history with moonshine. And we’re sure there’s quite a few people in town who will be glad to see it (legally) return. Although we suspicion for some Garland County folk, it never left. Cheers.