Catoctin Mountain Park

After Monocacy the next stop was Catoctin Mountain Park. It was really quite pretty and not at all what I expected to find in Maryland. We hiked out to Cunningham Falls. At 78 feet it is the largest cascading waterfall in Maryland.

It was so nice to be out of the city and hiking through the woods. It was a very easy hike.

There was also a short hike out to the Blue Blazes whiskey still. The interpretive signs along the way told the history of this place which I will share because I think it is so cool.

In the days before good highways and before rails had been laid, the rugged mountains presented a barrier for horse drawn transportation. Products such as grain, meat and lumber were too heavy to be transported to the more profitable markets in the larger cities. Corn and rye were also very bulky to transport but when converted to whiskey, they became a better profit. While the average horse was capable of hauling only 4 bushels of corn at a time, the same horse could haul the equivalent of 24 bushels if the grain was manufactured into whiskey.

Until Congress passed the 1791 Excise Tax, every farm probably had it's own still. For the next 128 years it was legal to own a still--provided you paid the tax. Not until the adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution was possession of a still an offense.

The problem with the 1791 Excise Tax was that it took the profit out of making liquor. For mountain people, the liquor concentration of rye and corn was the most practical way to get crops to market. So rather than pay the tax they went underground, operating by the light of the moon.

On the last day of July 1929 --Deputy Sheriff Clyde L. Hauver was fatally wounded in a raid on the Blue Blazes Still. It was a large commercial operation, a "steamer" still. More than 25,000 gallons of mash were found in 13 vats of 2,000 gallon capacity each. Police eventually tracked down several suspects, and two moonshiners were convicted in connection with the murder after several days of conflicting testimony. Tales of a double-crossing informant, a love triangle, arson, and other rumors spread throughout central Maryland. What exactly happened remains a mystery.

Our last stop of the day was Sauck’s Covered Bridge, just outside of Gettysburg, PA. Due to its involvement in the Battle of Gettysburg it is known as “the most historic covered bridge in the state.” It is haunted according to this tale: as Robert E. Lee's troops were withdrawing from the field, three Rebel soldiers were found to be spies. A speedy trial on the spot found them guilty and they were hanged from beams in the covered bridge. Their bodies were discovered by Union soldiers patrolling the area.
We also passed by the Jack's Mountain bridge. The traffic light cracked me up. I drove across the World's Largest Covered Bridge in Hartland, New Brunswick last fall and there was no stoplight for that bridge (you had to speed through and hope no one was coming the other way AND it was in a decent size town) and yet this tiny little bridge in backwoods PA has a traffic light!