Book Review: “Cornbread Mafia”

By Richard Thomas

Technically, James Higdon’s The Cornbread Mafia is about pot-farming in Central Kentucky, and not about whiskey-making. Even so, the history of whiskey-making in Marion County is heavily interwoven into the story. In a different venue, I endorsed Higdon’s book as a must-read for any lover of True Crime or recent Kentucky history. From a bourbon-lover’s point of view, the backstory of how Kentucky’s so-called Cornbread Mafia came into being provides insight and local color into a particular corner of Kentucky’s bourbon industry, and should therefore provide an interesting read.

Marion County’s origins are enmeshed with dissident Catholics who settled in the area during the mid-to-late 18th Century. As a largely Catholic region, Marion County quickly developed two characteristics that set it apart from the surrounding region, dominated to a large extent by teetotaling Baptists: it’s insularity and it’s love of liquor. Of interest to whiskey-drinkers is how the latter made it a major distilling center for decades, until Prohibition. Today, that distilling tradition is embodied in Maker’s Mark.

Prohibition sparked bootlegging and moonshining. The former resulted in thefts and raids from the mountain of whiskey stored in Marion County warehouses; the latter turned many former distillery employs to use their skills to continue making booze, only now as independent contractors and for the black market. The culture of socially condoned illegality that grew up around the moonshiners, in Higdon’s opinion, contributed heavily to the pot farming industry that grew up in Marion County in the 1970s and 1980s.

True, Cornbread Mafia isn’t centered on whiskey, but whiskey plays a major role in the first third of the book. If you like whiskey and any other aspect of the story, this well-written work is for you.