By Tabitha Evans Moore
Editor & Publisher

The Moore County Library’s Brown Bag Book Club is spending August with Hang the Moon, Jeannette Walls’ 2023 novel about a young woman clawing her way into her family’s bootlegging empire during Prohibition. The club meets on the final Friday of each month at 1 p.m. at the library.

Walls, best known for her bestselling memoir The Glass Castle, sets the novel in Claiborne County, a fictional stretch of rural Virginia, in the 1920s. Her protagonist, Sallie Kincaid, is cast out of her father’s house as a girl after an accident injures her younger half-brother, then is called back nine years later to help run the family business — which includes real estate, timber, hauling and bootlegging. The story follows her fight to be taken seriously in the Kincaid family, and a Prohibition-era South, built for men to lead.

NPR book critic Keishel Williams praised the novel in a 2023 review, singling out Walls’ character work: a cast of women from different walks of life, each fighting for a place in a male-dominated world.

Williams’ review also makes a point worth sitting with here at home: Prohibition’s laws hit rural communities hardest, even though it was often rural, religious communities that had pushed hardest for those same laws.

“Rural communities were hit hardest by these laws, even though a few supported Prohibition,” Williams wrote.

It’s a line that lands differently in Lynchburg than it might most places. Tennessee banned the manufacture of alcohol statewide in 1909 and 1910 — a decade before national Prohibition took effect in 1920 — and a local option election closed Lynchburg saloons earlier than that. On January 1, 1908, the White Rabbit and Red Dog closed until further notice.

Two years later the state went totally dry forcing the Jack Daniel Distillery to move its operations to St. Louis, Missouri. Lem Motlow, who had taken over the distillery from his uncle, spent years campaigning to bring it home. In 1938, five years after national Prohibition ended, Moore County voters chose to let the distillery return to Lynchburg — while keeping the county itself dry.

That arrangement never fully went away. Moore County remains dry today, with a narrow legal carve-out that lets the distillery sell commemorative bottles on-site and lets local restaurants serve beer with meals.

Whether that history comes up at the book club table or not, it’s hard to imagine a more fitting place to read about a fictional bootlegging dynasty than a county that spent 62 years unable to legally sell the whiskey it made.

The book club will discuss Hang the Moon on Friday, August 28 at 1 p.m. As the name suggests, those attending are welcome to bring their own lunch or snacks. The Moore County Library is located at 17 Majors Boulevard in Lynchburg. You can learn more about their events schedule on their Facebook page by clicking here.

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