Qualla: Franklin County, Virginia

Franklin County, Virginia: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit IceJesse, CC BY-SA 4.0. Historians have estimated that during the 1920s, ninety-nine of every hundred residents of Franklin County, Virginia were in some way involved in the illegal liquor trade. The math is almost certainly an exaggeration - but only barely. Local stills ran day and night through Prohibition. The whiskey moved by truck through the Blue Ridge passes to Chicago, New York, and points in between. Between 1930 and 1935 alone, federal investigators estimated that Franklin County still operators sold a volume of whiskey that would have generated $5.5 million in 1920s excise taxes - a number adjusted for inflation that translates to many tens of millions today. The local chamber of commerce eventually adopted the title Moonshine Capital of the World as a tourism slogan. The bootleggers became local legends; one of them, Forrest Bondurant, became the subject of his grandson Matt Bondurant's novel The Wettest County in the World, adapted in 2012 as the film Lawless. The county that produced that liquor also produced Booker T. Washington, born enslaved on a tobacco farm near Hale's Ford in 1856. Today, with about 54,000 people on 712 square miles of Blue Ridge foothills, Franklin County is still working out what it wants to be remembered for.

Image: IceJesse | CC BY-SA 4.0

Franklin County, Virginia: Born on the Burroughs Farm

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mrsbethbarton, CC BY-SA 3.0. Booker Taliaferro Washington was born into slavery in 1856 on the Burroughs Tobacco Farm at Hale's Ford in Franklin County. He was nine years old when emancipation came. He walked, with his family, across the mountains to Malden, West Virginia, where his stepfather had found work...

Image: Mrsbethbarton | CC BY-SA 3.0

Franklin County, Virginia: Prohibition Country

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Donnie Nunley, CC BY 3.0. When the Eighteenth Amendment took effect in 1920, Franklin County had several things going for it as a moonshine economy. Abundant clean water in mountain streams. Tucked-away hollers where federal revenue agents would never find a still. Tradition - Scots-Irish settlers had bee...

Image: Donnie Nunley | CC BY 3.0

Franklin County, Virginia: The Bondurant Brothers

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Donnie Nunley, CC BY-SA 3.0. Howard, Forrest, and Jack Bondurant were three of the brothers who ran a bootlegging operation out of the Snow Creek area of Franklin County during Prohibition. Their grandson Matt Bondurant turned their story into the historical novel The Wettest County in the World in 2008. The...

Image: Donnie Nunley | CC BY-SA 3.0

Franklin County, Virginia: Adam Clayton Powell Sr.

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Donnie Nunley, CC BY 3.0. Adam Clayton Powell Sr. was born in 1865 in Franklin County to Sally Dunning, a free woman of color whose family had been free for at least three generations before the Civil War. The detail matters: Powell did not begin enslaved. His mother's family represented one of the small ...

Image: Donnie Nunley | CC BY 3.0

Franklin County, Virginia: Smith Mountain Lake and the New Economy

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Donnie Nunley, CC BY 3.0. Since the 1980s the county's center of economic gravity has shifted toward Smith Mountain Lake - the 32-square-mile reservoir created in 1966 when Appalachian Power dammed the Roanoke River for hydroelectricity. The lake brought lake houses. Lake houses brought retirees and commu...

Image: Donnie Nunley | CC BY 3.0