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An underground 450-gallon moonshine still that a wily mountain man operated undetected for over 20 years at the dead end of Carr's Creek Road in Townsend is now on exhibit at Great Smoky Mountains Heritage Center in Townsend.

The entire still, including a home-made elevator, was donated to the center by the family of the late Charlie Williams, author of "Memoirs of a Mountain Man."

The moonshiner's son, Charles Michael "Chuck" Williams of Venice, Fla., is in town and on Monday explained how the still operated.

"Good whiskey is very hard work, like running a dairy. Cows have to be fed and milked twice a day. Mash has to be checked on several times a day. The hardest I have ever worked in my life was making whiskey with my Dad," Chuck Williams said.

He was a toddler when his father started making shine.

After World War II, Charlie Williams got a job at Oak Ridge with a long commute to work, and then his hours got cut. "Things got tough in the late '40s and early '50s and he naturally fell back to the old family standard: moonshining" on the family property, a trade he learned from his uncle. He and his brother had a smaller still earlier.

He said the work better suited his father emotionally because he was sort of an isolationist. While revenuers for Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms found a still Williams had at another location, they never located the underground stillhouse.

It took the family three years to build the stillhouse because they knew anyone who helped might talk and expose the illegal activity, so it remained a family affair.

Normally the way a still was discovered was for the revenuers to follow a creek or spring to discover a still or the odor from the fermenting mash that can be smelled for a mile, Chuck Williams said.

The entire operation was located in an underground 20- by 40-foot room beneath a utility shed Charlie built near his house.

There was a 4,000- to 5,000-gallon holding tank like a septic tank out from the stillhouse. He stored the spent mash in the tank until an opportune time when Carr's Creek rose due to a good rain. He then released the mash into the swollen creek that runs into Little River and the smell was not evident.

It took 500 pounds of sugar for each run of moonshine. As a way to catch the illegal whiskey makers, in the 1960s the government started making people sign when they made large purchases of sugar.

Charlie Williams, who formerly had a grocery store on Morganton Road when he lived in Maryville, still had connections with the grocery trade and was able to purchase sugar on the sly. Sometimes he also used molasses.

Initially, he purchased cases of new gallon jars to contain the finished shine. Then in the 1960s revenuers came up with another hindrance, one that Chuck Williams truly hated. They started making people sign for large purchases of jars.

This meant the Williams family had to procure used plastic jugs in which to sell the shine. After he graduated from Townsend High School, Chuck studied engineering at the University of Tennessee, schooling financed by shine. He had a regular route in Knoxville where he had rounded up used jugs to bring home. Instead of new jars, the family then had to wash the jugs, adding to the work load. He still remembers the rank smell of soured milk that had to be washed out of some jugs.

His sister, who lived in Maryville, also had a route to collect jugs.

"When they asked me why I wanted so many jugs, I told then I sold them to some old mountain man who was probably using them for moonshine," Chuck Williams said.

Basic Hillbilly method

To cook a run of shine took six days and involved three separate processes. "My father focused on quality, not quantity," Chuck Williams aid. He read everything he could find on the Jim Beam and Jack Daniels distilleries, trying to find ways to better his product.

"He used the basic Hillbilly method, but his was more dependable. He added things like temperature controls," Williams said. "The whole process stank."

Charlie used Hickory Cane corn to make his shine, corn that had to be washed until it was very clean before he would use it. He grew some and bought more from farmers and feed stores.

The corn was then soaked a couple of days in burlap toe sacks in warm water until sprouts grew to be an inch long. The sprouted corn then went through a grinder until it turned into meal.

The meal was placed on top of old sugar sacks so that it would dry without molding.

The entire process required that the stillhouse be kept very warm, around 96 degrees, Chuck said.

"The cooking pot was filled half-full of water, which was heated. The water was then transferred into a huge mash barrel using a pump. Then 25-pound sacks of corn meal were emptied into the almost boiling water. This makes a very stiff mash that looks like oatmeal," he explained.

The mixture sits overnight.

"The next morning the mash has solidified and you add water and four gallons of malt corn (a type of yeast) and sugar. Ice cubes (gallon jugs full of frozen water from the freezer) were added if it got too hot," he said.

"It begins to ferment if the correct temperatures is 96 degrees in the whole room. Mash must be kept at 90 to 100 degrees where the underground still is located.

"You keep adding sugar until you have 500 pounds of sugar and you can taste the alcohol in it."

"On the sixth day the microbes have generated so much alcohol that it kills them and it tastes very bitter," Chuck said.

Then you clean the pot and pump the mash in and fire up the furnace (a Kerosene burner) and keep stirring it with a mash stick. "It's like the fires of hell it is so hot. The mixture is thick. One side of the pot is shorter so you can bend over and stir the mash," he said.

"Before it boils you put the cap on the still."

The steam goes through a pipe into thump kegs, wooden barrels that contain some lower-proof whiskey from the last batch. When the steam hits the water it goes underneath, causing loud thumps,

"The first steam is the highest proof because the alcohol is lighter than the rest or the liquor -- 160 to 170 proof. That is undrinkable," he said.

"You get a purer whiskey with the thumping kegs than if you ran directly in the condenser," Chuck said.

At the end after the top is taken off the pot, "the steam is so thick you can't even see."

From the condenser the whiskey went into a tempering barrel from which the final product is poured into jugs, ready for Williams' wholesale customers.

He did not sell anything to his limited customer base except cases, which consisted of six-gallon jars or jugs The cost was $25 a case. A run of whiskey usually produced 80 to 90 gallons, depending on how much sugar was used.

The pot runs six hours and the proof keeps dropping until it reaches the desired level. Charlie preferred 104 to 107 proof.

The lower proof liquor that is 60 to 80 proof, called backuns, is saved to fill the thump kegs for the next run.

Large fans blew steam out through a vent up on the mountain in a hollow log.

Mash was drained to the holding tank, except for the thick portion, which was fed to the family horses and cows. "They loved it."

Elevator system

Chuck helped Charlie engineer an elevator system that was covered with a plank top when not in use. It was used to ferry the heavy bags of sugar and corn down and the cases of whiskey up for distribution. It was the size of the pot because it was made outside and moved to the stillhouse.

The whole family worked in the business. His mother had muscles from helping move the supplies and whiskey.

Once, government agents found an earlier still that Charlie operated on the mountainside up from the house. That still was partially buried but had a roof built down on the ground.

Chuck said a Tennessee Highway Patrol helicopter flew over and the agents knew the roof on the top of the ground likely covered a still.

His mother panicked and wanted to get rid of the evidence fast, but his savvy father knew it would take the agents several days to notify the proper authorities and raid the still.

There was a run of moonshine cooking and Charlie decided to wait until it was done. The family moved everything nonessential from the site. Charlie had a bulldozer and he dug a huge hole in the middle of a field and plowed around it. Once the moonshine was bottled, the family jerked the pot out of the ground and Charlie buried the pot. Agents never even got close to it in the plowed field, Chuck said.

"The FBI showed up, Dad was out delivering a load of whiskey."

They knew a still had been operating, but without the pot they could not prove it was being distilled and could not arrest his father.

His mother treated them like guests and asked if they wanted coffee. They had been dropped off at the site and asked to use the phone, which the family did not have. His mother offered to drive them to a house with a phone, but they were so embarrassed they walked all the way up Carr's Creek until they found a phone, Chuck said.

They told his mother for his father to come into the office later, which Charlie did.

Charlie Williams died in his 80s and is buried on the family home place.

"This was not an easy way to make a living the way people think," Chuck said. "This is dear to me. I spent my entire childhood working with that still."