Weekend Edition Sunday:
Moonshine used to be big business in the South, an illegal business
that also kept the federal courthouses busy. Now one of those
facilities, once on the front lines of the war on homemade booze, is
shutting down.
It's in Wilkesboro, N.C.,
where distilling corn whiskey in backwoods breweries was once the town's
main trade. The Johnson J. Hayes Federal Building sticks out in the
town; it's a modern white structure with sleek columns on an otherwise
old-school brick Main Street.
The courtroom
on the second floor is locked up with the lights off all but one or two
days a month now. But this building saw a lot of action in the 1970s,
even though just 2,000 people lived in town.
"In
its heyday, it was a hub of activity," Wilkesboro Mayor Mike Inscore
says. "It had vitality that brought people to the downtown. Sometimes
for the right reasons, other times for the wrong reason."
The Johnson J. Hayes Federal Building is just one of six federal
courthouses closing in the South. The other five are also well past
their glory years, and are all scheduled to shut down within a year or
two.
I didn't know they built federal courthouses around the south for handling moonshiners. I learn something new every day.
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