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FALL 2016 ISSUE 02 / VOL. 01
Main: With the great increase in tourism in eastern Tennessee, renovations of antebellum houses is popular, as with this place along the White Lightning Trail( State Route 63) near Speedwell. Right: I was told that this Frostee Freeze Drive-In in Tazewell has been selling soft-serve ice cream and good hamburgers to the locals for the past 60 years; things don ' t change quickly around these parts. revenuers found a 15,000-gallon still under a barn in nearby Dandridge. The 1957 movie Thunder Road romanticized the notion, and probably most roads in Tennessee have been used by drivers in hottedup cars, ready to put the pedal to the metal should a police car appear in their rearview mirror. Such cheerful shenanigans led to organized stock-car racing and NASCAR.
Apparently, if you pay the taxes, you can now sell moonshine— sometimes referred to as white whiskey. Moon Pie Moonshine was available in the store, and we took a small bottle back to the motel for a midnight sampling. Part of my cultural research for the story.
We had new guides in Caryville, a couple of local boys, one of them a deputy mayor. And they did know the back roads, as we whisked along narrow pavement instead of along the newer highways. On the first day out of Caryville we rode up to Rugby, a curious exercise in real estate promotions in the late 19th century. An English utopianist, Thomas Hughes, thought he had a solution to the inherent problems in the British nobility’ s attachment to primogeniture— in which the eldest son inherits everything, leaving second, third, etc., to look for a career in the army or the church. Hughes bought a lot of wooded land, and in 1880 began advertising it in the British press, getting a few hundred jobless aristocrats to come over. Soon a Victorian town appeared, with some 65 buildings, including an Episcopal church and a large library. However, the notion did not last and by 1900 the place had pretty much disappeared. Some 60 years later the few buildings that remained were restored and the place has become one of the nation’ s official historic districts.