Jelloway’s bootlegger, Uncle Zip, slips the revenuers

JELLOWAY — On the morning of Friday, Aug. 7, 1925, a bent old man walked into the railroad depot at Brinkhaven.

As always, there was a scattering of people with nothing better to do, hanging around the depot, making idle conversation.

It seems everyone from Jelloway to Brinkhaven knew of the old man, who only identified himself as “Zip.”

He’d become known as Uncle Zip, and was over 6-foot when he straightened up, though he rarely did. It seemed Zip would rather not be noticed.

That morning, he was uncharacteristically social. He pulled a pint bottle out of his pocket and offered to share its contents.

The bottle was passed around the chatting men, and according to a news article that later appeared in the Mansfield News Journal, they all smacked their lips and said that was the best rye whiskey they’d ever tasted.

“I made it myself,” said Zip.

He’d long been known as a pious man, known for dressing up in his finest suit every Sunday and attending church in Jelloway — where he’d kneel and pray, but never socialize.

But this particular morning, he told the depot loungers that every time he came to church, the people he supplied took a truck to his farm, picked up his latest batch of liquor, and left him a stack of money.

Let it be remembered that this conversation was going on in the mid-1920s, at the height of Prohibition in the U.S., when alcohol-making and consumption had been outlawed.

It was startling to hear Uncle Zip admit to being an illegal distiller. But then again, it hardly mattered. He had a ticket for the next train outbound.

Zip had showed up in 1922 and bought a parcel of land south of Jelloway with cash. He didn’t give his full name to anyone in conversation, and only said that he had moved there from Kentucky.

He was called Uncle Zip because of his age, and the one time in three years that he received a letter through the Jelloway post office, it was also simply addressed to “Uncle Zip.”

He was seen as a quiet and harmless eccentric who never swore nor gambled, whose only bad habits were smoking and chewing tobacco, which almost everyone did in those days.

Turns out that he had one other bad habit: He was brewing his own hard liquor and selling it to what were almost certainly organized crime distributors based in the big cities, where Zip’s liquor would sell for a pretty penny. 

The reason he left Kentucky, it was later theorized, was because Federal Revenuers were looking for him. In all likelihood, he left Knox County when he got wind that the revenuers were about to track him down again.

Zip told the people in the Brinkhaven depot that morning that the last truck from his customers had also picked up his still and left him extra money, and that he was taking his money and heading back down to Kentucky.

When the train arrived, Uncle Zip boarded the smoking car, and was never heard from again.

Considering that no known articles about the arrest of a character by that name are on record, it seems likely that Zip gave the lawmen the slip and disappeared somewhere back into the hollers of Appalachia.

If you’re wondering why I would get such a kick out of a story like this, it’s because my great-grandfather, a man by the name of Willie “Poppy” Snipes, was an eastern Kentucky moonshiner in the 1920s. 

Poppy’s still was located just off Smith Run Road, west of Olive Hill, Kentucky, and his brew was said to be in such demand that there was a path worn a foot deep at the entrance into the field where he kept it.

Years later, he gave up moonshining and moved north to Ohio, where he lived out his golden years in Mansfield.

He lived into his mid-80s, giving me the chance to get to know him a bit. Most of the family kids were afraid of the gruff old man, but I had listened closely and realized that his gruffness was an act. 

Poppy actually had a very sharp sense of humor, but you had to listen closely to his mumbles and grumbles to catch the jokes.

I can’t help but wonder if he ever crossed paths with Uncle Zip, and might even have known exactly who he was.

Like Uncle Zip, Poppy Snipes was a savvy moonshiner, and to the best of my knowledge, he never got caught, either.

Who knows how many other bootleggers may have been brewing liquor in secret corners of Knox County during that wild decade of Prohibition?