Posted by JB(MS) on 5/17/2009, 12:55 pm
66.175.148.151
Cowbell mentioned in a post about moonshiners hiding money that was never recovered, here's one that could very well be true and I've been asked to look for it. Last Thursday I went to the local co-op to buy bird seed, my wife feeds the wild birds, and a guy I've known for a long time, but never been around much, was there. He asked a few questions about detectors and detecting and then told me a moonshiner cache story. He said when he was a kid in the 1950's they lived by an old guy who had made and sold moonshine in the 1930's and 40's. He said the old guy was constantly digging holes for no apparent reason other than to put the dirt he dug out of them back in the hole. The guy telling me the story said when he was a teenager he asked the old guy what the heck he was doing, and the guy told him a story.
He said the old guy told him he had two quart fruit jars full of silver dollars that he had hid while he was still making moonshine in the late 1930's and was looking for them. He said he and a friend were sitting outside sampling some of his brew, that he had went inside and got his jars of money and showed them to the friend. The friend told him he should hide them because if he got caught making moonshine the law would take them. He set the jars on the ground and they continued drinking until they were drunk, but when he sobered up he couldn't find his jars of money and didn't remember what he did with them. The friend told him that he vaguely remembered helping hide the money while they were drunk but said he didn't have a clue where they put it. The "friend" may have took it, but according to the guy telling me the story the friend helped the old man look for it until he died. The guy who told me the story is an honest, well respected man. He repeated that he had grown up living next to the old man, had seen him looking for the money and believed it was still there or the old man wouldn't have kept looking for it. The place the guy was talking about is here, near town, but like all treasure tales there a catch or two in the story and a huge problem. The problem is that it's on U.S. Army Corps of Engineers land that was bought in the 1970's for the Tenn-Tom Waterway. Corp land here is open for hunting, but not for detecting so unless the guy can get a permit...........
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