Yeah birds need bees and ice needs whiskey," he says. He said that even bees' existence helped to make whiskey — and whiskey helped bees. To understand how, McGuigan offers a hypothetical scenario: If the bees disappeared and bees were no longer able to pollinate apple trees in New York, McGuigan said, apples would be a lot smaller and less numerous. In turn, that would mean a smaller apple harvest, and that would mean fewer apples to distill and make into whiskey. A few towns up from McGuigan's is Newtown Springs, a rural community of about 12 people, all of whom work in the whiskey industry. Like the rest of Appalachia, this part of West Virginia is defined by coal mining. Newtown Springs sits at the top of some of the richest coal mines in West Virginia, a region whose coal is the "black gold" in the United States. Most coal companies, including Consol and Massey, are located in West Virginia. But there is also a coal mining section of Kentucky just over the state line from Newtown Springs. It is in Kentucky that a more famous and glamorous piece of Appalachia history happened, in the fall of 1920. A mob came through town on horseback with shotguns and told everyone that if they didn't work, they would die. The miners who did work had to do so under threat of death. The company wanted them to go back down and do the same thing as last year. One day later, in the same month, they were back at work — some at Consolidation Coal Company, others at Massey Energy, which was just created in 1919 and went into operation in 1920. While a new company called "Massey" is what sparked the Kentucky miners to strike in 1921, Consolidation had an even bigger hand in what happened in West Virginia. After the miners strike of 1921, Massey was purchased by Consolidation in 1929, and Consol took over Consol-Lima, which was started in 1916 and owned mines in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky. That means that a mine in Newtown Springs, W.Va., sits in the same coal field that has produced a mine in Pittsburgh, Pa., for the last hundred years. While this is a relatively simple statement, it's also quite revolutionary. During the miners strike of 1922, President Warren G. Harding issued an executive order. The miners — who were striking in part because the mine was unsafe — weren't allowed to return to work until the company resolved health and safety issues. After the strike was settled, Harding said he planned to enforce the law by sending troops to West Virginia. After the strike ended, he died and was replaced with Warren G. Harding, Jr., who was more concerned with running for re-election as president than with the West Virginia miners' struggles. According to W.H. Crawford, author of The Loyal West Virginia Miners: A History of the United Mine Workers of America in the State of West Virginia, "Hard-ing's successor, President Calvin Coolidge, sent troops into West Virginia for the first time on Christmas Day, 1923." This is where whiskey becomes important. During Prohibition, the coal industry flourished in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Coal made up 30 percent of the nation's coal by 1914, but that number was 70 percent by 1920, and the "Black Gold Boom" was on. All this coal gave Appalachia a new industry. And these mines needed workers to produce coal. Consolidation Coal Company, West Virginia's biggest mining company at the time, took their first look at using Kentucky to help with production and recruiting labor, when they tried to hire an Irish band to entertain at the coal camps in Letcher County, West Virginia. They were rejected. The coal company would need to get a band from out of town, but where would the band come from? One of the company's owners went to Kentucky, found a band in Pikeville and brought the band from Kentucky to West Virginia. The band went on to become well-known all across the country. It was called the Jolly Boys of Pikeville. Jobs in coal were plentiful in the 1920s, when the demand for coal and the mining industry exploded. In an article for the Appalachian Journal, author Scott R. Gwyn said that an article from West Virginia State College "estimates the number of miners in West Virginia increased from 150,000 in 1920 to 320,000 in 1932." And during the 1920s, there were only two years in the decade when the number of miners in West Virginia dropped below 350,000. Appalachia has made it all the way to Prohibition, and yet no one notices how important whiskey is to it. It's not the liquor that drives the economic engine of the region, but coal — what coal miners are paid for and how they live. And as Consol's website notes, it's "the most important industry that had ever evolved in southern West Virginia, making the coalfields the most important in the nation." And whiskey was the means by which miners supported their families through those difficult times, whether it was as a bartender or as a patron. The coal mines were a boom time for whiskey, too. If you're reading this, you probably know that Prohibition was repealed in 1933, and this is a long way of saying that whiskey is here to stay. And yet the mining industry will still come and go. We should remember that whiskey never belonged to people in West Virginia. In fact, it was never even really mine-grown. It was people, those that worked the mines, that made their families and businesses dependent on whiskey. But the same way a coal mine can collapse or a coal company fail, whiskey has had a bad name at times. When Prohibition was repealed, the coal industry kept on trucking. But in 1937, President Roosevelt proposed an "alcohol tax amendment" to tax all distilled spirits at 20 percent of the manufacturers' cost. He said he did it to keep the tax revenue for "the common defense and general welfare." The tax worked in other states, but the American Distilling Institute — which was founded by the National Industrial Alcohol Gas Association — fought against the amendment. It wouldn't affect the whiskey-making regions so much as it would any industries that used alcohol in their manufacturing. "The tax itself is a direct attempt to cut into the income of the whiskey-makers and to deprive them of the means of production," said James E. Shreve, president of the American Distilling Institute, in an American Distilling Institute article. But the American Distilling Institute argued that the tax would affect industries that manufactured wine, rum, brandy, beer, and wine, and as a result would affect all Americans. The American Distilling Institute didn't mind the tax for distilling grain into whiskey because that was a product made by farmers, not industries. "By taxation the whiskey industry is put in the same class as rum-making, wine-making, brandy-making, brandy-and-wine-making, beer-and-wine-making, and others with which it has no connection." President Roosevelt withdrew the bill and the amendment, but it was so close to passing that the alcohol industry never wanted another whiskey tax like that. One of the ways that the whiskey industry got people into coal mines was through what they call the "spoils system." When someone died in the coal fields, the person's family might bring the remains back to town and bury them in a family plot in the local cemetery. The families who owned the mines owned the cemeteries, and they charged people who wanted to put their relatives in the cemeteries to do it. It was part of the social dynamic of the time and the community of that time. If you wanted your father to live in a proper grave and not a shallow plot in the coal town cemetery, the man who owned the cemetery had to charge you for his services. Even though there was no law about how much you had to pay, you paid if you wanted your father buried in the right spot. If the cemetery owner didn't want to take your money, you didn't get to bury your father where he wanted to be buried. People who worked in mines or who sold groceries didn't like these charges and had a right to tell them they were paying too much. At one point, a farmer from Kentucky sold a bunch of cattle to the Consol Coal Company. At the time of the sale, farmers had free grazing rights to the land, but if Consol owned a lot of land, they could decide to sell grazing rights and charge for it. Consol sold the farmer all the land they owned that had cattle grazing, for three dollars a year. The farmer told Consol they could keep the money for the privilege of grazing their cattle on the land. Consol didn't do anything, and two years later, when the farmer died, they paid for his plot at a local cemetery to be opened. They put the same money in a tin bank and set it on his grave. The farmer's son sold the land with the bank for three dollars per year. Even in the years before Prohibition, the miners weren't selling whiskey, but people were taking it. When people in West Virginia needed something that a drugstore wouldn't sell — like aspirin — they'd buy it in their home state of Kentucky. One whiskey distillery that was never on "The List" was