Hauled Into Court 100 Times, Convicted Once - Maggie Bailey, Harlan County
Maggie Bailey sold whiskey in Harlan County, Kentucky - a dry county - for eighty-four years. Her lawyers estimated she was taken into court around a hundred times. The federal government convicted her exactly once, in 1941, and she served two years at Alderson.
Transcript
The footlocker
R01 Nearest town to P V & K Coal Company, Clover Gap Mine. Evarts, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
This is Evverts, Kentucky, in nineteen forty-six. Harlan County — a dry county. No legal liquor sold anywhere in it.
R02 Nearest town to the P V & K Coal Company, Clover Gap Mine, Kentucky. Evarts, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
On the eighteenth of February, nineteen sixty-five, nine state troopers came up a road on the other side of the county, to a frame house with green awnings, looking for whiskey.
They found it. Fourteen half-pints, a pint of vodka, six pints of gin, a hundred and sixteen bottles of beer. Routine. They had done this thirty-six times before.
Then they opened a closet in a small bedroom and found an army footlocker.
The United States Tax Court later described what was inside in a single sentence. A footlocker containing two hundred six thousand, nine hundred and nine dollars in cash.
It belonged to a sixty-year-old woman who had never owned a car, never had a bank account, and wore tennis shoes she replaced twice a year.
A waitress in Harlan
Her name was Maggie Bailey. By one lawyer's count she was taken into court something like a hundred times. This is the record of what happened when they got her there.
The court wrote down the basics. Born the twelfth of August, nineteen oh four, in Letcher County, Kentucky. She left home at sixteen, having gone through the seventh or eighth grade, and traveled to the town of Harlan, where she worked as a waitress.
R03 Typical housing and street. P V & K Coal Company, Clover Gap Mine, Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Then one line that covers the next eighty-four years of her life. In nineteen twenty-one, she began her liquor business, starting with moonshine whiskey.
What the county ran on
R04 A row of typical houses. Dixie Darby Fuel Company, Marne Mine, Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
She was seventeen. Prohibition had a decade left to run, and the county was filling up with men who worked underground.
R07 The tipple. P V & K Coal Company, Clover Gap Mine, Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Coal. This is the tipple at the Clover Gap mine, where the loaded cars came out of the mountain and the coal was weighed.
R10 The check weighman at the tipple. P V & K Coal Company, Clover Gap Mine, Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
The man who checked that weight decided what a miner had earned. Every car was somebody's wages.
R11 Motorman. P V & K Coal Company, Clover Gap Mine, Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
These photographs were made by Russell Lee in nineteen forty-six, for a federal medical survey of the coal industry. He went into the same camps Maggie Bailey sold into.
R09 Carload of coal at the tipple. P V & K Coal Company, Clover Gap Mine, Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
The color is not original. Lee worked in black and white. These frames were colorized by a machine learning model, and every color you see is that model's estimate, not the record. The black-and-white originals are free to anyone at the National Archives.
R12 A miner. P V & K Coal Company, Clover Mine, Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
A miner at Clover Gap, coming off shift.
R14 Furman Currington and his son, miners. Black Mountain Corporation, 30-31 Mines, Kenvir, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Furman Currington and his son. Both of them miners.
R05 Street in company housing project. U.S. Coal & Coke Company, U.S. ^30 & 31 Mines, Lynch, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
These were her customers. Men paid in cash, in a county where the law said they could not buy a drink.
The one conviction
R06 Typical home for miners. U.S. Coal & Coke Company, U.S. ^30 & 31 Mines, Lynch, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
By nineteen forty, the federal government had noticed her.
The Harlan Daily Enterprise, November third, nineteen forty. Nine people arrested on liquor law violations, arraigned before the United States commissioner at Pineville. Her name is in the warrant list.
January, nineteen forty-one. Three Harlan people held under a thousand dollars bond each in federal court, including one woman. They were arrested at night, in the Clovertown section.
Her obituary, sixty-four years later, gives the charge as the indictment stated it. She had a hundred and fifty half-gallons of moonshine on hand at the time she was charged.
The Tax Court's version is four lines. Two two-year terms at the Federal Women's Reformatory at Alderson, West Virginia, running concurrently. She began serving in May, nineteen forty-one, and came home in May, nineteen forty-three.
R17 The Blaine Sergent family's house. P V & K Coal Company, Clover Gap Mine, Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
It is the only conviction anyone has been able to find against her.
Nineteen forty-six
R15 Blaine Sergent, coal loader. P V & K Coal Company, Clover Gap Mine, Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
The court records the restart the way it records everything else — with a date. On approximately the first of July, nineteen forty-five, she resumed her liquor business in Harlan, which she conducted in the home of her sister.
R16 Mr. Blaine Sergent's pay slip. P V & K Coal Company, Clover Gap Mine, Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
So this is the county in her first full year back in business. A coal loader named Blaine Sarjent, at the end of a shift.
R18 The view from the Sergent's front porch. P V & K Coal Company, Clover Gap Mine, Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
His pay slip. Russell Lee photographed that too.
R19 Bobbie Jean Sergent playing in her front yard. P V & K Coal Company, Clover Gap Mine, Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
The Sarjent family's house, and the view from their porch.
R20 Wanda Lee Sergent who is seven years old and in the second grade. Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Bobbie Jean Sarjent, playing in the front yard.
R21 Franklin D. Sergent chopping kindling. P V & K Coal Company, Clover Gap Mine, Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Wanda Lee Sarjent. Seven years old, second grade.
Mag's Place
R23 Houses for miners owned by Mrs. S. E. Bennett, Harlan, Kentucky. This was formerly owned by Benito Mining Company...
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
And Saturday afternoon in the town of Harlan. Mister and Missus Sarjent, shopping for children's socks.
Her place stood ten feet off Kentucky thirty-eight, in the Clovertown section. White siding, green awnings. Two children's swing sets in the yard.
Law enforcement called on it often. By nineteen seventy-two the Courier-Journal counted thirty-seven such visits going back to nineteen fifty-three, each ending in a charge of possessing illegal alcoholic beverages.
R24 One of houses rented to miners in this mine. P V & K Coal Company, Clover Gap Mine, Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Her lawyer explained why so few of them stuck. She was very adroit. She had a million different places to hide it.
She had a labyrinth of buildings all around her dwelling. Search warrants were thrown out because they weren't written to include certain buildings. That happened, he said, about every time there was a case.
R25 Child of miner drinking from water supply. Dixie Darby Fuel Company, Marne Mine, Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
She did not drink. She would not sell to children, and she would not sell to anyone she judged had a problem with it. Her attorney said she ran a decent place. No jukebox.
R26 Daughter of miner with pet ground hog. Dixie Darby Fuel Company, Marne Mine, Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
And she spent the money on the county. She bought coal to heat poor families' houses in winter, carried people on groceries, and put several children through college.
R27 Coal camp children. Dixie Darby Fuel Company, Marne Mine, Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
A relative by marriage put it plainly, decades later. Everybody knew her, and she had helped everybody. Why do you bite the hand that feeds you.
R29 Going to Sunday school at the Baptist Church. Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Anybody who wanted to get elected went to see Maggie Bailey. She was very influential, the same woman said. She had power.
The juries
R30 Going to Sunday school at the Pentecostal Church of God. Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Which is the part the prosecutors could never get around.
One of her defense lawyers was Karl Forester, who later became a United States district judge. He called her an expert on the Fourth Amendment. She knew the laws of search and seizure, he said, as well as any person I've known.
R31 Services at the Pentecostal Church of God. Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
He also remembered defending her at six separate trials on the same day. We had six acquittals at three different courts in the same day.
R32 Healing "laying on of hands" ceremony in the Pentecostal Church of God. Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Another Harlan lawyer, Eugene Goss, represented her many times. I don't care what the evidence was, he said. The juries would not convict her.
R33 Healing "laying on of hands" ceremony in the Pentecostal Church of God. Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
I know that she must have been hauled into court at least a hundred times. I do not remember a single time that she was convicted.
The net worth method
Local juries would not do it. So in nineteen sixty-five, the government stopped asking them to.
The state police told the Internal Revenue Service about the footlocker. Within a week, tax liens totaling one million, three hundred seventy-four thousand dollars were filed in Harlan County against her, her husband, and her sister.
She had filed no federal income tax return at all for the years nineteen forty-two through nineteen fifty-four.
So the Commissioner reconstructed twenty-two years of her income from the size of her cash pile. The demand came to one hundred seventy thousand, three hundred ninety-one dollars and ninety-four cents. More than fifty thousand of that was a fraud penalty.
She fought it, and the trial produced the strangest financial portrait in the record.
R34 Company owned hospital. U.S. Coal & Coke Company, U.S. ^ 30 & 31 Mines, Lynch, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Petitioner has always lived frugally, the court found. She paid no rent and spent very little for her clothing.
She regularly wore tennis shoes, purchasing about two pairs a year, and discarded employees' uniforms of the National Distillers Company in Louisville, which were given to her.
R35 Post office and office building. U.S. Coal & Coke Company, U.S. ^30 & 31 Mines, Lynch, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
She bought cheap denim house dresses costing a few dollars. She had never owned an automobile. She and her sister raised vegetables and hogs behind the house.
R36 Mrs. Carl Ruth and her baby. Black Mountain Corporation, 30-31 Mines, Kenvir, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
The largest bootlegger in Harlan County was living on about nine hundred dollars a year.
Asked why she kept two hundred thousand dollars in a footlocker instead of a bank, she gave the answer of someone who was twenty-six years old in nineteen thirty. I lost my money when the banks closed.
Asked why she had never filed, she said: well, I just didn't know I had to make a tax return.
What the court found
The court's answer came in March, nineteen seventy.
On the money, the government mostly won. The judge rebuilt her income at just over nine thousand dollars a year and let the back taxes stand.
But on fraud — the fifty thousand in penalties, the accusation that she had deliberately cheated the government — it lost every single year.
The record, the court wrote, is devoid of any affirmative indication that petitioner deliberately cheated the Government.
R08 Tipple. Turner Fuel Company, Darby Mine, Evarts, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
While we do not doubt that petitioner possessed a shrewd intelligence, the judge went on, she did not conduct her business with such sophistication that the absence of records can be regarded as evidence of a deliberate concealment of income.
And then a line that reads like it was written by a neighbor. It appears petitioner distrusted banks.
The Sixth Circuit affirmed in April, nineteen seventy-one, in four sentences.
Still open
The million-dollar lien came down to a bill for roughly eighteen thousand dollars in back taxes and late-filing penalties. She paid it.
R23 Houses for miners owned by Mrs. S. E. Bennett, Harlan, Kentucky. This was formerly owned by Benito Mining Company...
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
And she went back to work.
The first of December, nineteen ninety-eight. An undercover trooper bought alcohol at Maggie Bailey's home in Harlan. She was ninety-four years old.
Troopers hauled out six hundred fifty-eight cans of beer, twenty-four bottles of liquor, four coolers, and a hundred and seven dollars in cash — and photographed themselves counting it.
The shoes
She was still selling from that house at ninety-five.
Maggie Bailey died on the third of December, two thousand five, at the hospital in Harlan, of complications from pneumonia. She was a hundred and one.
The Herald-Leader ran her on the front page, below the photograph of Saddam Hussein's trial.
Her family told one story that day that says everything about how Kentucky handled her. A governor came through Harlan campaigning and told her: Mag, if you can help me get elected, I'm going to buy you some shoes. When he got elected, he sent his lieutenant governor in with the shoes.
Late in life, watching what came after her, she told her lawyer what she made of the modern trade. I'm glad I'm just a good old-fashioned bootlegger.
R01 Nearest town to P V & K Coal Company, Clover Gap Mine. Evarts, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
What the record settles is narrow. She sold whiskey for eighty-four years in a county that forbade it. The federal government convicted her exactly once. And when it finally came after her with arithmetic instead of a jury, it proved the money and failed to prove the fraud.
R02 Nearest town to the P V & K Coal Company, Clover Gap Mine, Kentucky. Evarts, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
What it does not settle is the harder question. A county that would not convict her was saying something about itself — about wages, about dry laws, about who actually kept people fed in Harlan County. Nobody ever put that question to a witness.
R36 Mrs. Carl Ruth and her baby. Black Mountain Corporation, 30-31 Mines, Kenvir, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Russell Lee · Harlan County, Ky., 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
If your people were in the Harlan coal camps, you may have heard her name at a kitchen table. The comments are open, and the people who remember Mag's Place are still the best source there is.
Sources
- Bailey v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo 1970-64, 29 T.C.M. (CCH) 272 (U.S. Tax Court, filed Mar. 16, 1970) — Docket No. 4171-65; Tietjens, J.; William R. Bagby for the petitioner. *
- Bailey v. Commissioner, 439 F.2d 723 (6th Cir. Apr. 27, 1971) (per curiam) — No. 20729; McCree, Brooks and Miller, JJ. *
- The Harlan Daily Enterprise, Nov. 3, 1940, p. 1, "'Feds' Nab Nine In County For Liquor Charges." *
- The Harlan Daily Enterprise, Jan. 20, 1941, p. 1, "3 Harlan Persons Held Under Bond In Federal Court." *
- The Harlan Daily Enterprise, Feb. 21, 1965, p. 1, "Tax Liens Totaling $1,374,957 Filed Against Local Trio." *
- The Courier-Journal (Louisville), May 31, 1972, pp. 1 and A4, Bill Peterson, "Moonshine Legend … Matronly Maggie amassed bootleg fortune"; photograph by Michael Coers. *
- The Harlan Daily Enterprise, Dec. 1, 1998, p. 1, photograph by Debbie Caldwell, "Raid leads to arrest." *
- Lexington Herald-Leader, Dec. 6, 2005, pp. 1 and A10, Jennifer Hewlett, "'Queen of the Mountain Bootleggers' dies at age 101" / "She knew the ins and outs of search and seizure law." *
- Russell Lee, Harlan County, Kentucky, 1946. Records of the Solid Fuels Administration for War, Record Group 245, series "Photographs of the Medical Survey of the Bituminous Coal Industry, 1946–1947," National Archives. Federal works; NARA lists access and use as unrestricted. Individual records at `catalog.archives.gov/id/<NAID>` — the NAID for each frame is stored with the exhibit in `research/maggie-bailey/exhibits/exhibits.json`. Sampled production dates confirm the Kentucky leg: NAID 541378 was made Sept. 15, 1946, NAID 541497 on Sept. 26, 1946.
- Colorization. Applied with DDColor (`tools/colorize.py`) and audited for missed regions with `tools/spotfix.py`. The colors are a model's estimate and carry no evidentiary weight; the episode says so on screen, and the black-and-white originals are freely available from the National Archives.