AS A BOY, HOWARD CONYERS TAGGED ALONG WITH HIS FATHER, HARRISON, to auctions and estate sales all across their native South Carolina. A longtime professional welder and farmer, Harrison might pick up a vintage washing machine at one stop, perhaps a pea sheller at the next. He’d often let his young son make the bids, directing Howard when to raise the paddle and when to let it fall.
In the early 1990s, Harrison, who is now seventy-two, joined a group standing around a machine at an auction. “I didn’t know what it was,” he recalls. “But the other fellows didn’t know either.” Harrison forked over ten dollars and took it home. A bootlegger friend then helpfully explained what the contraption could do: crush corn into meal. And with a heap of sugar, the right equipment, and a little discretion, that cornmeal could become moonshine.
Even decades after Prohibition, there was still money to be made in the open-secret liquor trade. In the Conyerses’ corner of South Carolina’s Pee Dee region, in Clarendon and Sumter Counties, “revenue men” and other authorities had never quite managed to eradicate illegal liquor making in tiny places like Pinewood and Rimini. And farming, always a risky profession, had never employed Harrison full-time. A hurricane or ravenous deer could doom a season’s corn, his extraordinarily flavorful sweet potatoes, his bottom line. He became a handyman to moonshiners, wielding his metalworking prowess to repair stills. They’d bring him components piece by piece until they trusted him enough to show him their distilling operations. He also began supplying them cornmeal, thanks to his new mill.
Preteen Howard ground bushels of that corn regularly and thought little of it—just another chore on the family’s now-eight-acre spread outside Paxville, where he’d tended his own patch of vegetables since he was six. He also dropped off large
