The Queen of the Mountain Moonshiners: The Story of Maggie Bailey

On this episode of Our American Stories, she started selling moonshine at 17, and spent the rest of her very long life (she lived to 101) perfecting her business model and putting several local kids through college. She was so popular local juries wouldn't convict her! J.D. Phillips, the Appalachian Storyteller, tells the story of Maggie Bailey.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories. Steve Earl's nineteen
eighty eight hit single Copperhead Road tells the story of
the bootlegging Petamore family and his son who takes a
decidedly more mellow root after two tours of duty in Vietnam.
But while the story of the Pedamore family is pure fiction,

(00:31):
the story of Moonshine Mama aka Maggie Bailey is not
here to tell. The story is JD. Phillips of the
remarkable YouTube channel, the Appalachian storyteller Take it Away, Jdo.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
In many ways, Maggie Bailey was your typical mountain girl,
growing up on Pine Mountain just north of the Virginia
Kentucky border. He was born in nineteen oh four on
this rocky hillside farm where Paul barely scratched out a
living from the poor rocky soil. Now, money was scarce

(01:13):
back in those days, haul across the mountains, and there
was only a few ways that hillfolk could get their
hands on some One way well, that was selling blockade,
corn liquor. And with so many miles of feed, Maggie's
Paul did what he had to do to make hens meet.

(01:35):
So from a young age, Maggie spent many a night
standing barefooted on the top of a split bottom chair
with a long wooden paddle, stirring her PAW's mash and
keeping the firebox stock with plenty of firewood. Little did
she know but her PAW's nightly schooling on the fine
art of craft and white mule would end up defining

(01:57):
her life. By nineteen twenty one, Maggie was seventeen. Now
these were exciting times. The newly built railroad brought strangers
from all over America. Maggie met a professional gambler and

(02:17):
a coal businessman who dressed in fancy suits and even
had the first pocket watch that the young girl had
ever seen in her life. She told him about a
business plan that she had thought of and it was
sure to make her a fortune if she only had
an investor. Although the businessman was reluctant, Maggie had a
way a bout her and she eventually convinced him to

(02:38):
give her thousands of dollars to fund it. You see,
coal towns were literally springing up all over the county
nearly overnight, and Maggie had taken notice of the thousands
of brawny men that the railroad brought in each month.
These same men emerged from the dark coal mines each
evening with a powerful thirst for some to knock the

(03:00):
dust out of the guzzle. But you see, a new
law had recently swept across America making alcohol illegal across
the nation, called prohibition, and that's where Maggie's plan came in.
She knew exactly how to make her daddy's white lightning
even better. During this time in history, the law frowned

(03:20):
heavily on arresting women. Heck, it was illegal to even
search a woman, and if a fellow did arrest a
woman and bring her into court, the jury just knew
that no woman was capable of committing a felony, and
she'd quickly be released and the chart is dropped. Indeed,
it was the perfect plan, and she quickly rented a
house on the outskirts of town, where she turned it

(03:43):
into a moonshine factory, capable of producing hundreds of gallons
of untaxed liquor at a time. Before long, she had
a monopoly on the entire market, and for the most part,
no one had a clue that a sweet young lady
was making all this potent drink. For the entire length
of prohibition, Maggie Bailey's moonshine reined supreme in eastern Kentucky,

(04:08):
but the sudden end of prohibition threatened to shut her
operation down. Nearly overnight, legal taverns and distilleries sprang up
selling tax liquor, and most folks thought this was the
end of Maggie's operation, since only men were allowed to
own liquor businesses. Yet Maggie was now thirty one years

(04:31):
old and she had been running liquor for fourteen years
as an independent business woman. She wasn't about to just
give up and quit, so she did something unthinkable. Maggie
Bailey became the first woman to obtain a legal liquor license.
They named her business Meg's Place. Oh, she could sell

(04:53):
legal red whiskey just as good as any man, but
the folks in Appalachia what they wanted was good old moonshine,
And before long, Maggie Bailey was selling legal whiskey out
the front door and mountain dew out the back, all
the way through the Great Depression. Her business thrived so
much so that eventually federal revenue officers wanted to have

(05:16):
a look see and what made Meg's place so special.
In nineteen forty one, armed with a search warrant, federal
agents burst in and seized one hundred and fifty gallons
of moonshine and promptly sentenced Maggie Bailey to two years
in federal prison. On the day Maggie was to report

(05:37):
to prison, she first stopped by her sister's house to
tell her goodbye, and she also left a suitcase there
and told her she'd pick it up when she got out.
Just like that, they hugged, and Maggie spent the next
two years locked behind bars. She put that time to
good use. That's right. She spent the entire time incarcerated

(05:59):
studying the law, particularly the Fourth Amendment dealing with search
and seizure. She became an expert on that law, determined
to never get caught red handed again. By nineteen forty five,
Maggie was back on the streets and up to her
old habits again. The first thing she did was stop

(06:21):
by her sisters and pick up that suitcase, oh, which
just happened to have eighty thousand dollars cash in it.
She used that money to buy a house on the
outskirts of Harlan with the intent on reopening her business.
Yet there were two problems. The first was that she
could no longer get a liquor license because of her felony,

(06:42):
and the bigger problem was that Harlan County was now
a dry county. But you see, she quickly hired several
runners who would make daily trips back and forth to
neighboring counties, returning each time with trunks full of beer, wine,
and whiskey. Meg's Place was back in business, and this
time operating more as a drive through. Folks would simply

(07:05):
pull up in the backyard place the roorder, and off
they went. For nearly three decades, Meg's Place sold the
illegal liquor seven days a week, and the law was
furious and desperate to stop her. During the nineteen forties
and fifties, Meg's Place was rated sixty two times, and
each time the law would find liquor in different places,

(07:28):
mostly hidden in junk cars or various outbuildings, and each
time she was arrested, the charges would be dropped because
the search warrants wouldn't specifically authorize the search of her
new hiding place. And even when the law had solid evidence,
the jury would simply find her not guilty. You see,
by now, Maggie Bailey was an older woman and had

(07:50):
become a pillar of the tight knit community. She had
paid for college for several of her neighbor's kids. Maggie
knew every one of her customers. Each visit to her house,
the visitors would have to set a spell as she
asked how your mama was doing and when when was
the last time your daddy came to town. Still, police
raids continued all the way through the nineteen sixties, and

(08:12):
in nineteen sixty five, a routine raid on Meg's place
resulted in a discovery that would make headlines all across
the nation. A score of deputy sheriffs and highway patrol
men were busy confiscating over two hundred cases of beer
and fifty cases of whiskey. When one cop decided to
have a look in Maggie's closet. Hidden down in a corner,

(08:33):
he saw fourteen brown paper bags and a dozen old socks,
and wouldn't you know it, every one of them was
filled with one hundred dollars bills. The cops claimed that
there was four hundred and eighty thousand dollars cash hidden
in her closet. Oh, that's hogwash, Maggie claimed it was
only three hundred and seventy two eight hundred and forty

(08:55):
one dollars and not a penny more. I know since
I counted every single night. You see, aside from helping others,
Maggie had saved every dime she had ever made. She
never bought clothes from anywhere, and she only wore second
hand clothes from her sister. She'd never owned an automobile
or even went to a movie. Even with all that money,

(09:17):
she still kept hogs and chickens and a milk cow
and raised all her own food. Yet the IRS quickly
took note of the large pile of cash, and they
also noticed that Maggie had never paid income tax, so
they sued her for one point three seven million dollars.
But the IRS was about to find out what the

(09:39):
local police already knew. You couldn't beat Maggie in court. Astonishingly,
Maggie was able to negotiate all the way down and
paid only eighteen thousand dollars in a settlement. The law
had pretty much given up on stopping her every time
she was arrested, the sweet old lady would show up
in court with her printed dress and her baby blue

(10:00):
blue sweater, and the charges they would be dropped, so
Meg's Place kept right on raking in the dollars all
the way through the seventies, in the eighties and even
the nineteen nineties. Maggie Bailey had began her moonshine career
at the tender age of seventeen and continued to sell
white lightning and bootleg liquor all the way until she

(10:22):
was ninety five years old, a career of seventy eight years.

Speaker 1 (10:28):
And a special thanks to JD. Phillips and his remarkable
YouTube channel, The Appalachian Storyteller, and what a story he
told about a Harlan County, Kentucky legend, an Appalachian legend,
the story of the Moonshine Mama, Maggie Bailly here on
our American Stories