The Asheville showdown was the precursor to the state ban

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When John O’Donnell, owner of the Eureka Saloon in Asheville (editor’s note: where the Table restaurant is now located) went to vote “wet” in a ban referendum on October 8, 1907, he was surprised by children who sang a shameful song that named her children.

Rounded up by their mothers, the Young Crusaders for Prohibition surrounded O’Donnell as he lined up with the people with red ribbons.

The statewide ban did not come into effect until seven months later, on May 26, 1908, and the national ban not until January 17, 1920. The Asheville confrontation was a landmark event for the forces of prohibition.

When O’Donnell went into business about 20 years earlier at a store on South Main Street (Biltmore Avenue), he was greeted like a great gentleman.

In his cellars he had choice whiskeys, fine champagne, cigars and all kinds of beers, beers and wines.

“If there is one line of business that complements the industries of a cosmopolitan city like Asheville,” the 1890 city directory wrote in an entry for O’Donnell’s Boston Saloon, “it is that of a wine and spirits merchant “.

The article called “special attention” to the saloon’s sample room and displayed its discreet motto: “Remote trade in demand and with all possible care”.

Yet a group of women, ministers and politicians have found that removing all sources of alcohol is the burning winning issue in the effort to create a moral society.

The day before the 1907 vote, when pro-liquor staged a rally in the Grand Opera House – a historic stage for major political speeches, located where the end of Wachovia Bank now stands – women and children paraded with candles on Patton Avenue. in dazzling numbers.

For 25 minutes, the procession of 5,000 passed as “The Honorable Thomas Settle, Junius G. Adams and others,” a poster read, discussed “issues of (the) current campaign”, with, at intervals, the sounds of a regimental fanfare. going out into the street.

O’Donnell, like others who came to vote wet the next day, reported the Asheville Citizen, found that “children gathered around them and childish hands asked them for tickets and red ribbons were scattered around them. the ground because young hands often didn’t wait for permission to tear off the red emblem. “

Prohibition voted in Asheville by 1,274 votes to 426.

“The ladies won the election,” O’Donnell said. Next year, when Ashevillians went to the polls to vote on the statewide ban, the numbers were similar.

But in the country, another phenomenon occurred. The two Ivy districts in Buncombe voted 328-2. Marshall, in Madison County, voted 516-0. The attempt to control alcohol in western North Carolina has a long history, with ever-changing methods, reasons, and political affiliations.

On December 7, 1862, North Carolina passed its first ban. This means that the 18th Amendment was Asheville’s fourth ban: the first was during the Civil War, when the state needed to conserve grain. In 1866, when the need diminished, Prohibition was repealed.

Then came the Reconstruction and the resumption of inequitably heavy taxes on distilled spirits.

George Washington had fought the Appalachian Pennsylvanians over the same issue during the whiskey rebellion of 1794. The establishment of the Bureau of Internal Revenue and the funding of a trained police force – revenue officers – targeted tax evaders, not drinkers.

Yet this was accompanied by the industrialization of the South, the imposition of a model of education and control of New England workers, the need for a good image of a growing tourism industry and of a media campaign to denigrate the resistant mountaineer as an ignorant and violent drunkard.

Yet the ban dates back hundreds of years.

Alex Gabbard gleans a revealing piece of the country’s ancient history from his book “Return to Thunder Road”. “In 1556,” he wrote, “the British government imposed the death penalty for distillation, except for nobles, and asserted that the intention of the law was to keep grain for food.

Citizen Times columnist Rob Neufeld

Rob Neufeld wrote the weekly “Visiting Our Past” column for the Citizen Times until his death in 2019. This column was originally published on September 26, 2011.

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