The city of Lawrenceburg voted for total prohibition of alcohol sales almost twenty years before the United States passed a Constitutional amendment to do the same, and the action sparked the outrage of Lawrence County’s German population.

Lawrence County has had a complicated history with the issue of alcohol sales.

For the first eighty years of the county’s history, alcohol–mostly in the form of whiskey–could be obtained easily and drank freely in our streets. County father David Crockett distilled his own brand of whiskey at Shoal Creek, and some early pastors were even said to have been sometimes paid in whiskey by their congregations. Indeed, it was not uncommon in those early days for jugs of whiskey to be used as currency in Lawrence County.

Throughout the nineteenth century, saloons, taverns, pool halls, and grocery stores in Lawrence County stocked and sold liquor with relative ease. People also gathered in grocery stores to drink at all hours of the day.

When the blacksmith Lewis Kirk shot and killed Giles County farmer Robert Westmoreland on the Square in Lawrenceburg in 1859, it was a Tuesday afternoon, but Kirk, himself, may have well been the only sober person on the Square at the time. Many of the witnesses testified that they had spent most of the afternoon drinking at the grocery stores around the Square. Many of those witnesses also recalled seeing other witnesses drunk or near-drunk, including the town’s doctor, who apparently operated on Westmoreland after spending the afternoon drinking with the other bystanders.

Public intoxication, as might be imagined, was a serious problem in those days. It was not uncommon to see men–even public officials–passed-out drunk in the streets for days at a time.

Clerk and Master W.T. Nixon recorded in his journal on at least one occasion in the 1880s that he was unable to have a deed recorded at the courthouse because the Register of Deeds was drunk in his office that day.

Most accounts of violent crime recorded in local newspaper articles and county court minutes at that time began with drunkenness and ended with tragedy.

Although an organized temperance movement existed in Lawrence County as early as the 1840s, it apparently was not enough to curb the thirst of the county’s drinkers. By the turn of the 20th century, a group of Lawrenceburg citizens had had enough.

On the week of March 20, 1901, a large crowd assembled at First Methodist Church and voiced their desire for Lawrenceburg to be reincorporated with a new charter that declared alcohol sales within the city limits to be illegal.

A week later, a majority of Lawrenceburg’s voters chose to make Lawrenceburg a “dry” city, and the city’s charter was abolished and reincorporated by the state legislature later that summer. Under the new city government, saloons were shut down and the sale of alcoholic beverages was put to an end.

But not everyone was pleased with the demise of alcohol sales in Lawrenceburg.

According to a brief article in The Nashville ‘Tennessean’ of March 28, the county’s many German immigrants were greatly “displeased” by the results of the referendum. The paper cites the German citizens’ love for individual liberty as the reason for their displeasure. However, it should also be noted that many of these German immigrants brought their cultural affinity for alcohol with them when they came to Lawrence County, and we have evidence that a great number of them found success making wine and brewing beer on their farms.

The prohibition of alcohol was one of the earliest progressive causes to take hold in Lawrence County and throughout the South. In most of these cases (although we can’t be sure locally, due to lack of written evidence), the most outspoken champions of prohibition were women.