The Liquid History of Pipestem: Stills, Shallows, and My Family Roots

I come from these mountains by way of three families — the Lillys, the Meadows (Meador in some records), and the Eplings. All of them lived and worked along the Bluestone and its hollows in Summers and Mercer counties. So when I tell you about the moonshine history of Pipestem, I'm not telling you somebody else's story. I'm telling you about the ground my people walked.

First, the why. Moonshine around here wasn't a get-rich scheme. It was corn. Corn grew in these hills when not much else would, and a wagonload of corn was worth a fraction of what the same corn was worth distilled into whiskey and poured into jugs. West Virginia went dry in 1914, the whole country followed in 1920, and the math didn't change — it just went underground. Folks made whiskey because it was how you turned a crop into cash.

The park itself carries that history. When the state started buying up land and clearing it for Pipestem Resort State Park in the 1960s — 4,027 acres from 56 landowners, some of whom didn't go quietly — crews found two active moonshine stills standing inside what became the park boundary. That's not legend. That's the kind of thing that makes you realize this wasn't ancient history. There were men running copper in those hollows while the bulldozers were idling up on the rim.

One of those stills sits on display today at the Pipestem Nature Center.

The other one lived on in spirit. For years, riding the old aerial tram the 3,600 feet down to Mountain Creek Lodge, if you looked back at just the right moment about 1,100 feet down the gorge, you'd catch a replica still tucked under a rock overhang — a quiet nod to what those woods used to hold. The park put in a brand-new tram in 2025, and I can't swear the still made the trip. That's as good a reason as any to ride down and look.

Then there's the town of Lilly. It sat where the Little Bluestone runs into the Bluestone, settled in the late 1700s by Robert Lilly and Mary Frances Moody Lilly — the start of a family that spread across the whole southern end of the state. My Meador line runs right into this story too: Josiah Meador married into the family, came home from Yorktown a sergeant-major, and founded the Bluestone Baptist Church at Lilly, one of the oldest Baptist churches west of the Alleghenies.

When the Bluestone Dam went up around 1950, the federal government cleared the village out. Some fifty families were forced off their land because the government was afraid the lake would flood the town. The homes came down. The graves were moved. Here's the part that sticks with me: the water never came. Lilly was razed but never submerged — the lake never reached it. What survives is the name on the Lilly Bridge, a 1950 cantilever truss across Bluestone Lake that's now on the National Register of Historic Places, and a monument to the village.

The Lillys knew how to gather. Starting in 1930, the family began holding reunions at their campground on Flat Top Mountain. They grew into something enormous — thousands of people, Ferris wheels, guest speakers, the State Police once estimating 10,000 cars at a single reunion. Look Magazine showed up in 1947 and ran "10,000 Lillys Hold a Family Reunion." One newspaper later put a crowd at 28,000. I've stood on Flat Top and tried to picture it. I can't, quite. That's the point.

Now the honest part. I've dug around for records tying my specific people — names, dates, an ancestor I can point to — to the stills in these hollows, and I haven't found them. Those stories would live in federal court ledgers and old issues of the Hinton paper, if they're documented anywhere, and I haven't gotten there yet. What I can say is this: the Lillys, the Meadors, and the Eplings were the people of this ground. They farmed it, ran ferries across it — the Talcott ferry went to Griffith Meadows back in 1871 — built churches on it, and buried their dead in it. Whether any one of them ran a still, the stills were running all around them. That's community context, and it's mine by blood.

So go see it. Walk into the Nature Center and stand in front of that still. Ride the tram down to the river and look back at the rock overhang. Drive across the Lilly Bridge and say the name out loud. The mountains remember what the paper trail doesn't, and some of those memories are mine.