08/25/2026
"'Peculiar's a peaceful little town. Who'd dream that the wooded hills concealed a whiskey still....they'll never suspect anything.' Such must have been the judgment of those persons who sought to build a profitable whiskey distillery in the days of Prohibition. Ironically, they chose farm land directly across the road from the George Moore farm, the girlhood home of America's most famous temperance crusader, Carry Nation. A piece of pipe still protrudes from the ground in the region of the still that was confiscated when it became known to authorities in Cass County.
O.E. Reid's recollections give a sequential account of what really took place:
'There was a fellow, Tom Stiles [actually his last name was Squires per the criminal case that followed- see attached news articles], around over here just west of our cattle barn. Tom just rode around, walked fences, carried a gun around most of the time. I said to him along in October after I heard a lot of activity going on back in there, "Tom, there's a lot of hammering and pounding down there. What are they doing down there?" Tom said, "I don't know, I hardly ever go down there. A bunch of Italians are planning to clear off that bottom down there and raise garlic they said." Mr. Reid said he didn't think much more about it then. Then about the same time Clarence Stine was working for me shucking corn and helping with the chores. Clarence had a c**n hound and of an evening he would go up in that pasture west of mine and in this particular area and he treed a possum right on the fence but right over the fence in Borserine's pasture. Clarence was walking and I had my horse. About that time Tom showed up. He said "We can't allow nobody on this place. If there's any fur around here I want to trap it myself. It's the only way I have to make a living and you'd better leave and get off." And we did, Reid commented.
Reid continued, "I just lived a quarter-mile away and I would always stop and talk to Tom and he kept walking around with a rifle under his arm. I thought maybe he was shooting rabbits. I don't know that he ever shot at anything else. But he was watching pretty close that nobody came on the farm. They run about thirty days after building that building and I would see those sugar trucks hauling that corn sugar, most of it at night, and sometimes in daylight. I never was down there.
John Wass, he like to roam around the woods and timber in the fall with his dog and he had been down on that McEowen 40. He cut across this place and walked close to this still. They saw him and then ran him off right quick. They made him detour around but he is the fellow that reported it to the authorities. Otis Martin was sheriff at the time [he served from 1925 to 1928]. That night the sheriff came out there with five of these officers from Harrisonville for deputies. Otis told me this. They ran onto Tom before they got to the still so they disarmed him right quick and took him with them. They went down to the plant and pushed the door open and the still was running, Otis said. They watched them fill one or two of the jugs full in just a little bit. Mr. Borserine wasn't there but there were three or four fellows running the still. They arrested them and took them to Harrisonville and took several of these five gallon jugs of whiskey. They turned the mash barrels over. That building, I would say it was at least 60x60, a kind of feed-barn type building, and that building was just full of barrels of mash fermenting as it could be. They turned them all over and left a deputy to watch. Otis told me how fast this still was running, how quickly they would fill a five-gallon glass container of corn whiskey. Of course, they dumped a lot of whiskey on the ground and the next day a lot of people went down there and were walking around in that mash up to their shoe soles.
A few days after that, Mr. Borserine had some two or three head of cattle and they went to Kansas City for him. He was locked up several days until the trial. Since he had those cattle, I went to see Mr. Borserine. He said, "You know, they said in the Democratic paper that I was running a still on my farm." He said, "You know I wasn't doing that. If I had wanted to run a still I would have gone to Kansas City on one of those buildings, but they had it in the Democratic paper that I was running a still out there on my farm." I told him I had seen it in the paper but that I didn't know. He let on like he didn't know what these fellows were doing. He said, "Some fellows built a club house and were going to put that bottom, five or six acres, and raise vegetables in the spring, but mostly garlic."'
In thinking back over this incident several years ago, a long-time Peculiar resident remarked about the community and authorities being surprised to find the still in operation, for it was general knowledge that the corn sugar was moving in that direction in camel-train fashion."
A Peculiar Heritage pgs 51-52B
Check out the newspaper articles to see how this story ends.
Turns out Borserine ended up being drafted into the Army in 1943. He survived the war and died in Kansas City in 1966.
