The popular image of the Prohibition era consists of gangsters with tommy guns racing around city streets in big cars. In fact, it seems that much of the historical literature on the 1920s centers on large urban areas and the organized crime element.
However, Prohibition also provided rural Americans with an opportunity to make money in the illegal effort to quench the great thirst for alcohol. As one study of Prohibition points out, "Prohibition brought some prosperity to the backwoods. Sharecroppers, tenant farmers, fishermen of the bayous, dwellers on the mud banksof the Mississippi, all found the tending of stills or the sailing of rumrunners more profitable than the cultivation of the overworked soil.... The illicit liquor trade became almost decent as well as profitable." Hernando County, Florida, was one backwoods area that benefited from rumrunning, especially after the onset of the Great Depression.
Florida was made to order for bootleggers. The state has large tracts of dense forests, a long coastline with many inlets, and a close proximity to Cuba and the British West Indies, where alcohol was readily available. Summarizing the attitude of many Floridians toward Prohibition, state historian Charlton Tebeau observed: "Local authorities proved indifferent if not outright hostile to enforcement, which was left to federal agents of whom there were never enough".
Floridians resented federal interference with individual freedom and feared that enforcement would harm the tourist industry." The state's economic life became deeply involved in taking advantage of the dry laws. In frustration, one Coast Guard man charged with patrolling Florida's coast exclaimed, Floridians "would stagger to the polls and vote Dry.”
Hernando County lies on the Gulf coast midway up the state, some forty miles north of Tampa. In the 1920s and 1930s, the county's natural appearance had not altered much since the first settlers had arrived. The coastal region was predominantly marshland, laced with hundreds of bays, bayous, creeks, and rivers. The coastal region was accessible from the Gulf through a small fishing community, Bayport, which had a relatively deep water channel and a road leading inland. The county seat, and indeed the only community with enough size to be called a town, was Brooksville, located in the county’s center. The rest of the county was covered with hardwood forest, sand hill scrubs, and swamps. The natural thickness of the vegetation, combined with a tough, independent, pioneer-like population, gave the county the right character for the illicit liquor trade. A post-Prohibition tour guide of Florida made special note of the region's many moonshiners in the Volstead era.