by Dennis Dalman
editor@thenewsleaders.com
Stearns County moonshine, once known as the best in the world, is the subject of a new movie, which will premiere at 3 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 2 at the Paramount Center for the Arts in downtown St. Cloud.
Tickets are $10 and can be purchased at the Paramount box office or online at www.paramountarts.org.
The documentary, Minnesota 13: From Grain to Glass, was co-directed by Norah Shapiro and Kelly Nathe, with help from late author Elaine Davis and the staff of the Stearns History Museum.
Shapiro hails from Minneapolis; Nathe is based in Los Angeles and has many family connections in Stearns County, including in places where moonshine was made.
Davis, who died just last year at 59 of pancreatic cancer, was a St. Cloud State University management professor, a dancer, intrepid world traveler, mother of three and author. In 2007, she published Minnesota 13: Stearns County’s Wet Wild Prohibition Days. The book, in text and photos, explored Stearns County’s role in the production of the finest illegal whiskey created during the Prohibition years, 1920 to 1933, when all sales and consumption of alcohol were banned in the United States. Raised near Lake Park, Davis’s own relatives had been involved in moonshining, and that was one reason she decided to research the subject, and write her interesting and entertaining book.
The Stearns County “moonshine” was so superior in quality to the usual rot gut, bathtub gin and white-lightning that it was widely sought by speakeasies throughout the world. A speakeasy was a place where illegal liquor was imbibed on the sly. One of the prime networks for distribution of “Minnesota 13,” as it came to be known, was none other than the network run by famed gangster and bootlegger Al Capone. He and his “boys” would make trips to Central Minnesota to check out the supply and to arrange for deliveries to his vast distribution network.
Home brew
Farmers, including those in Central Minnesota, sold millions of tons of corn and grains on world markets during the years of World War I, which ended in 1918.
After the war, farm commodity prices fell through the bottom. Farmers and their families began to suffer severe financial deprivations. A farmer could fetch $5 to sell a calf and could get $5 for a gallon of moonshine. It didn’t take many farmers long to figure out which was more lucrative – farming or moonshine-making. As a result, hidden or buried stills were created on farms far and wide throughout Stearns County but mostly on its eastern side where there were plenty of woods, hills and even caves in which to hide the stills and the production.
In 1920, the national Prohibition Act was passed by the U.S. Congress, forbidding the manufacture, sale or consumption of alcohol products. Despite the risks, the farmers, law enforcement and priests of Stearns County thumbed their noses at Prohibition. In fact, as the demand for moonshine increased because of its illegality, the more the surreptitious business boomed for the corn-growers/distillers in Stearns County.
Priests were often complicit and encouraging in the production of corn liquor. For one thing, they had compassion and empathy for farm families hurting because of depressed farm-product prices and for another the German and Polish cultural heritages, including the Catholic Church, always involved beer-drinking and, in the church, sacramental wine at Mass.
Local law enforcement also turned a blind eye to moonshining. It was only federal agents who would come down hard: smashing stills, destroying casks or bottles of distilled whisky, and running amok on farm property in search of the forbidden liquid. Most often, there were fines for first offenses. But after subsequent offenses, the farmer-makers could be jailed, usually in the 38-cell Stearns County Jail.
Davis, in an interview, told of the time the sheriff was out of town. Prisoners at the jail would hoist up bottles of Minnesota 13 from a jail window, brought to them from moonshining emissaries still in the free world. When the sheriff returned to the jail, he heard the sounds of loud talk and raucous laughter, the sounds of roaringly drunken inmates. The sheriff had a sign made that said, “No passing things through the windows!” that was posted in the jail, as if that would solve the problem. (It didn’t.)
In some cases, when the biggest moonshiners were nabbed by the feds, they were placed in prisons, such as at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., or in one near Duluth.
Thanks to the lax and permissive local law enforcement, the sympathetic priests and the wink-and-nod behavior of just about everybody in Stearns County, the moonshine business flourished, with a sly and expert network of marketing and distribution run by do-it-yourself entrepreneurs.
And farmers were proud of their superior whiskey product, which was often double-distilled and then aged in oak barrels.
It was a micro-brewery phenomenon that would dwarf the current trend of micro-brewries, including the dozens now functioning in the St. Cloud area.
Where?
There’s hardly a town in Stearns County that wasn’t touched by moonshining or “cooking,”as it was commonly called.
Davis’s own uncles “cooked” in Albany, as did her grandmother.
The busiest “Minnesota 13” production occurred in Albany, Avon, St. Wendel, St. Rosa and Holdingford – especially Holdingford, where hidden stills pockmarked the hills and woods. At one time, the “cooking” went on right in the basement of a Polish Catholic church in Holdingford.
Speakeasies also flourished in the towns of Stearns County. Anton’s in Waite Park, which used to be called Brickies, was a speakeasy back in the 1920s. The password phrase to get into the joint was “Joe sent me.” Once inside, patrons could have a good time drinking, socializing and raising up some fun.
There were hotels in St. Cloud that also harbored speakeasies. Nowadays, nearly a century later, those speakeasies – the scores of them all throughout the county – are long gone and so are most people who would remember them. However, the legends and lore surrounding “Minnesota 13” are alive and well, at least in the history books and in the movie that will premiere Oct. 2 at the Paramount Center for the Arts.
These are two bottles of “Minnesota 13” moonshine whiskey that were confiscated during the Prohibition Era.
Teacher and author Elaine Davis, who died in 2015, wrote a book about “Minnesota 13” moonshine that will be the topic of a documentary on that subject, premiering Sunday, Oct. 2 at the Paramount Center for the Arts.
This is a photo by moviemaker Kelly Nathe of an old copper moonshine still that still shows the axe gashes made by federal agents who raided the Bieniek family farm near Holdingford in the 1920s. The Holdingford area during the Prohibition era (1920-1933) was considered the “capital” for the production of “Minnesota 13,” widely considered the best home-distilled corn whiskey in the world at that time.
Filmmaker Norah Shapiro
Filmmaker Kelly Nathe
