Word that workers at North Wilkesboro Speedway may have uncovered an abandoned moonshine operation does not surprise Joe Mickey and Bob Hillyer.
For years, the two friends have documented remnants of the illegal white lightning industry in Wilkes County, a longtime hotbed of hooch.
But most of their discoveries, about 200 of them, were rusting away near streams, boulders and trees and underneath vegetation in the rugged Wilkes County portion of Stone Mountain State Park.
Turns out that maybe they did not have to venture too far into the wilderness to find relics from those rambling days of revenuers and bootleggers. There may have been a doozy of a site just under their noses, or under the fannies of thousands of folks, as it were.
The historic speedway, one of the original NASCAR tracks, announced earlier this week that a work crew, investigating cracks in the cement of a section of grandstands, found what is being described by track officials as a cave.
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Steve Swift, the senior vice president of operations and development at Speedway Motorsports said in a news release: “When we began renovating and restoring North Wilkesboro Speedway in 2022, we’d often hear stories of how an old moonshine still was operated here on the property under the grandstands. Well, we haven’t found a still (yet), but we’ve found a small cave and an interior wall that would have been the perfect location to not only make illegal liquor, but to hide from the law as well. We don’t know how people would have gotten in and out, but as we uncover more, there’s no telling what we might find.”
Surely, the spirit of Junior Johnson, who outran revenuers through the hills of Wilkes County before racing professionally at the track, is having a chuckle.
Hillyer and Mickey both believe it’s highly likely that the cave has some sort of connection to the original mountain dew.
“I would not be surprised,” Hillyer said. “I’d run into people who’d tell me, ‘Yeah, there’s one (an old still operation) in my back yard. It was very prevalent, and I think the infrastructure needed was prevalent.”
Mickey found remnants of an old still site earlier this week at Stone Mountain.
“A lot of those race car drivers had been in the business, so they may have thought, ‘Let’s build us a little moonshine area. Nobody will think to look there,’” he said.
And even if local law enforcement knew about it, they may have turned a blind eye, Hillyer said.
If the discovery proves to have a tie to moonshine, it’s a sure bet state tourism officials will take notice. A few years ago, the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources created a Moonshine & Motorsports Trail, including North Wilkesboro Speedway and Stone Mountain on the trail.
Stock car racing is said to have grown from bootleggers outrunning the revenuers, or federal agents, hired to shut down their operation. Johnson, a Wilkes County native, is perhaps the most famous of all the bootleggers. The speedway sits just off a portion of U.S. 421 named Junior Johnson Highway.
According to the speedway, about 600 seats have been removed from two sections and Speedway Motorsports staff is evaluating next steps for foundation repair and concrete replacement ahead of the All-Star Race week, which will be May 14-19.
“Now we have a race before the race,” Swift said in the release. “The area that’s been affected by the sinkhole is a frontstretch grandstand area with some of the best views of the track. We’ll have a lot of work to get done before NASCAR All-Star Race Week.”