When I think about moonshine and rotgut liquor, which I assure you that I rarely do, I think of places like Arkansas or Tennessee with revenuers chasing old pickup trucks through the hills. In that scenario, Rochester never comes to mind. However, as I was looking through the diary of Annie Hartley Gurney written in 1920, I came across an interesting entry.
On May 26, 1920, she writes that the Acushnet constable, Mr. Gifford, stopped at the Hartley home and along with him was a federal marshal and another man (maybe a revenuer). The men had been up to Snipatuit Pond and found a still. They asked Henry Hartley and the others who were out in the front yard, if they knew anything about it. The general consensus was that they had been suspicious of” the cottages up there for some time as trucks loaded with barrels had been seen going up.”
Later the same day, Herbert Eddleston, Edwin and Greenwood Hartley went to check out the area, and they brought back two barrels of molasses, a partial barrel and ten empty barrels. The still was made of copper and there was a large jug of “the stuff” that was being produced.
All of this was loaded onto a pickup truck and Henry drove it over to the Gifford’s. As Annie says at the end of this entry, “The day has been rather exciting.”
By Connie Eshbach
