The Wettest County in the World

The Wettest County in the World
Author: Matt Bondurant
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2009-12-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1416561404

Bondurant weaves a compelling tale of violence, desperation, and greed, as three brothers run moonshine in Virginia during prohibition, in this story that is based on a true story about the author's grandfather and two uncles.

The Old German Baptist Brethren

The Old German Baptist Brethren
Author: Charles D. Thompson Jr.
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2010-10-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0252092651

Since arriving nearly 250 years ago in Franklin County, Virginia, German Baptists have maintained their faith and farms by relying on their tightly knit community for spiritual and economic support. Today, with their land and livelihoods threatened by the encroachment of neighboring communities, the construction of a new highway, and competition from corporate megafarms, the German Baptists find themselves forced to adjust. Charles D. Thompson Jr.'s The Old German Baptist Brethren combines oral history with ethnography and archival research--as well as his own family ties to the Franklin County community--to tell the story of the Brethren's faith on the cusp of impending change. The book traces the transformation of their operations from frontier subsistence farms to cash-based enterprises, connecting this with the wider confluence of agriculture and faith in colonial America. Using extensive interviews, Thompson looks behind the scenes at how individuals interpret their own futures in farming, their hope for their faith, and how the failure of religiously motivated agriculture figures in the larger story of the American farmer.

Franklin County, Virginia

Franklin County, Virginia
Author: Marshall Wingfield
Publisher: Genealogical Publishing Com
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2009-06
Genre: Franklin County (Va.)
ISBN: 0806346175

This is a collection of the abstracts of the oldest court records for Franklin County in existence, ranging over civil suits, appointments of justices of the peace and other officials, references to the principals named in deeds and wills, and so on.

Spirits of Just Men

Spirits of Just Men
Author: Charles Dillard Thompson (Jr.)
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2011-04-20
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 025207808X

"Following the end of Prohibition in 1933, demand for moonshine remained high due to taxes imposed on large liquor producers. Seeking to answer this demand were the distillers of Appalachia who, having established illegal networks of moonshine distribution under Prohibition, continued their activities and effectively skirted the federal liquor tax scheme. Spirits of Just Men chronicles the Great Moonshine Conspiracy Trial of 1935, held in Franklin County, Virginia, a place that many still refer to as the "Moonshine Capital of the World." While the trial itself made national news, Thompson uses the event as a stepping-off point to explore Blue Ridge Mountain culture, economy, and political engagement in the 1930 illustrating how participation in the moonshine trade was a rational and savvy choice for farmers and community members struggling to maintain their way of life amidst the pressures of the Great Depression and pull of the timber and coal-mining industries in Virginia. Through Thompson's prose, local characters come alive as he pays particular attention to the stories of a key witness for the defense, Miss Ora Harrison, an Episcopalian missionary to the region, and Elder Goode Hash, itinerant Primitive Baptist preacher and juror in a related murder trial. Thompson explores how local religious belief both clashed with and condoned the moonshine trade and how stills and the trade enabled a distinctive cultural formation in the region that goes far beyond the hillbilly stereotype alive today. Not only is his work is based on extensive oral histories and local archival material, but Thompson himself is from the area and his grandparents were involved in not only the moonshine trade but the trial as well"--Provided by publisher.

Truevine

Truevine
Author: Beth Macy
Publisher: Little, Brown
Total Pages: 496
Release: 2016-10-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0316337560

The true story of two African-American brothers who were kidnapped and displayed as circus freaks, and whose mother endured a 28-year struggle to get them back. The year was 1899 and the place a sweltering tobacco farm in the Jim Crow South town of Truevine, Virginia. George and Willie Muse were two little boys born to a sharecropper family. One day a white man offered them a piece of candy, setting off events that would take them around the world and change their lives forever. Captured into the circus, the Muse brothers performed for royalty at Buckingham Palace and headlined over a dozen sold-out shows at New York's Madison Square Garden. They were global superstars in a pre-broadcast era. But the very root of their success was in the color of their skin and in the outrageous caricatures they were forced to assume: supposed cannibals, sheep-headed freaks, even "Ambassadors from Mars." Back home, their mother never accepted that they were "gone" and spent 28 years trying to get them back. Through hundreds of interviews and decades of research, Beth Macy expertly explores a central and difficult question: Where were the brothers better off? On the world stage as stars or in poverty at home? Truevine is a compelling narrative rich in historical detail and rife with implications to race relations today.

Buildings of Virginia

Buildings of Virginia
Author: Anne Carter Lee
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780813935652

"This second of two volumes devoted to the Old Dominion encompasses five regions (Shenandoah Valley, Allegheny Highlands, Piedmont, Southside, and Southwest Virginia), comprising 53 counties and 20 of the state's independent cities."--Publisher's description.