“Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don’t they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people on earth.” 

—Will Rogers 

Painting Near Ellis Square in Savannah City Market 

While painting this scene En Plein Air, I am standing in the busy heart of Savannah’s City Market, facing Ellis Square. The Square was named for Henry Ellis, Georgia’s Second Royal Governor beginning in 1757. 

The 1930 Ford Model A is advertising for the American Prohibition Museum located nearby. It is the only museum of its kind in the country, and a fun Savannah stop with family and friends — especially those who might enjoy swilling down a little moonshine.  In addition to historic artifacts and displays, it includes an authentic ‘speakeasy’ serving up delicious and notable cocktails from that historic era. 

Savannah is well known for its free-flowing bar scene as well as its signature ‘to-go-cup’ that conveniently encourages lengthy sightseeing, especially in the typical warm-weathered evenings. 

The prohibition of alcohol has a long history in Georgia, from the very beginnings of the colony. 

Let’s not forget that Georgia Colony founder James Oglethorpe had some noble and fairly utopian ideas. Unquestionably, he was ahead of his time in prohibiting slavery — although that distasteful practice was adopted by unscrupulous Savannahians soon after their founding leader returned to England for good.  

The Georgian colonialists had witnessed slavery from the very beginning, as it was actively practiced just across the Savannah River in South Carolina. Tomochichi, the Yamacraw leader whose cooperation was essential to Oglethorpe’s original plans for Georgia, was an active slave trader when the two men met. 

From the first, Oglethorpe tried to outlaw rum and other spirits, as well. But Savannahians didn’t take kindly to that idea, either. So, bootlegging and moonshining had an early beginning here in Georgia. 

Georgia counties had the ability to outlaw the manufacture and sale of booze since 1885. Most counties had done so by the time the state prohibited alcohol entirely in 1907. Georgia fit right in when the entire nation attempted to go dry with the passage of the Volstead Act in 1919, after the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. Georgia remained dry for a couple of years after the Twenty-First Amendment repealed the Eighteenth. To this day the State of Georgia has five dry counties.  

Naturally, bootlegging was a busy trade in Savannah, by land and by sea. The distillation into whiskey of apples, corn, grains, and even Georgian-peaches helped small farmers obtain cash and tradeable goods. 

Some of the top moonshine bootleggers in Georgia were soon ‘driving with the devil’ and helped give birth to NASCAR. Henry Ford was a devout teetotaler, but his cars provided the engines for bootlegging. 

In 2006, Ellis Square was remade when a large parking garage was torn down. The parking garage itself had replaced buildings that had stood since the early 1870s. For decades, the Savannah City Market area housed a full array of fish vendors, basket weavers, and a farmer’s market filled with fresh produce. 

Henry Ellis was an explorer of the Northwest Passage, an author, and a mapmaker; he was also an active transatlantic slave-trader, shipping hundreds of slaves from Africa to Jamaica in the mid-1700s.