Step inside Don Walton Jr.’s distillery in Jacksonville, and you see it. It’s in the center of the tasting room, a still made with country ingenuity: a black barrel, a stainless-steel drum, and a beer keg that served as a filter. Walton’s cousin Norwood Rochelle built this still, and the two of them used it to carry on a family tradition at Walton’s Distillery — making moonshine. The cousins relied on a recipe that generations of their family used to create this illegal liquor. Their relatives had been making it this way since before Prohibition, more than 100 years ago. “I want to preserve my heritage,” Walton says. “I like the old ways, I guess.”
Walton grew up in Jacksonville and moved to Kentucky in the 1980s for a job after graduating from UNC Wilmington. A few years later, he enrolled in law school at the University of Kentucky. While living in Lexington, he toured distilleries and pored through records in the university library, learning about pre-Prohibition recipes and distilleries and dreaming of opening his own one day.
In the 1970s, when Don Walton Jr. was a teenager cropping tobacco for a local farmer, he’d smell a sweet, strong odor wafting from the woods, and he’d know folks back there were making moonshine. photograph by Charles Harris
After law school, he returned to Jacksonville to be closer to family, and in 2013, when Walton finally built his distillery, Rochelle came to see him. Rochelle, who was in his 70s, sat with his cousin in the distilling room and discussed making moonshine. Rochelle had been making it in the woods of Onslow County for half a century, and he and his older cousins didn’t want the family tradition to die. He became the teacher and showed his younger cousin how to make moonshine in a 30-gallon copper still.
“Look,” Walton told Rochelle, “I want a still like you would use in the woods.” “Well,” his cousin responded, “let’s go to the salvage yard.”
Walton’s Distillery Photography courtesy of Walton’s Distillery
“I wanted to re-create, as much as I could, the manner in which my family had made [moonshine] in the woods,” says Walton, who still practices law in his hometown. “To share the history, the cultural aspect of it. People fabricated all kinds of vessels to make moonshine or to distill. People just made use of what they had.”
The family tradition can be seen on the jars and bottles of Walton’s Distillery liquor as well. Walton named his products after his ancestors and put their black-and-white portraits on the labels: E.M. Walton’s Straight Bourbon Whiskey, after his great-grandfather; Junior Walton’s Authentic Carolina Moonshine, after his grandfather; Kitty Walton’s Apple Pie Moonshine, after his great-grandmother. On the back of some jars of moonshine is an old photograph of Rochelle in his characteristic trucker hat, sometimes holding a fiddle.
“I promised him, before he passed, that I would never sell a jar of moonshine without his picture being on it and him getting credit for it,” Walton says. Although the two didn’t know each other well before making moonshine together, Walton says he cherishes the memories he made with Rochelle.
From the rocking chairs Walton’s father handcrafted to the portraits on the bottles lining the shelves, the family’s colorful past is revealed everywhere you look inside Walton’s Distillery. photograph by Charles Harris
When Walton bought the land for his distillery on Ben Williams Road, he found scrap barrels and drums. A neighbor later told him almost everyone along that road had been involved in making moonshine at some point.
Walton also makes bourbon, and he still likes to drink it. But there’s just something special about ’shine. Walton would take jars of it back to his friends in Kentucky to try. “We were there with all these nice distilleries, in a part of Bourbon Country,” he says, “and they wanted to try some moonshine from North Carolina.”
What did it taste like? “Like it does now: good.”
Walton’s Distillery
261 Ben Williams Road
Jacksonville, NC 28540
(910) 347-7770
waltonsdistillery.com
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