Constable Dan Smith was a young man of 27 with a wife and three children in 1925. He had developed a reputation in the southern end of Lawrence County as a prolific finder and destroyer of moonshine stills.

The illegal whiskey business has always existed in Lawrence County, but it became a bustling trade in the years after the passage of the 18th Amendment. Prohibition created a high demand for illegal liquor.

Poor farmers with no scruples about the evils of alcohol and a desire to make a quick buck soon found that their corn crop was worth a great deal more as hooch than it was as corn, and so the county began flowing with moonshine.

One such local moonshiner was Dave Styles. A semi-literate, 51-year-old farmer with a large family and a place on Center Point Road, Styles was one of the few moonshiners in the area who hadn’t yet been visited by Constable Smith in the summer of 1925. And Styles intended to keep it that way.

“If Smith ever comes on my land,” Styles allegedly boasted to a friend, “I’m going to kill him.”

But Styles, if Federal authorities were to be believed, was not just a lone wolf moonshiner looking to make a small profit. Neighbors believed that he was the head of a local moonshine ring which included nearly half-a-dozen men clandestinely making and transporting whiskey in the community’s hills and hollows.

The situation came to a head when Styles gave a severe cursing to an associate named Hubert Brown. Brown, resenting Styles’s insults, quickly betrayed Styles to Constable Smith, telling him exactly where Styles kept his moonshine still.

The next day, Constable Smith and deputies J.E. Keeter and Dan Hardeman set out for the Styles place with axes and long-arms in tow. At about 10 a.m., while the three men were pushing their way through a dense cornfield toward the copse of woods where the still was hidden, a shot rang out, and Smith fell wounded.

Keeter and Hardeman hit the ground, the three lawmen hidden well within the dense cornstalks. With all the speed they could muster, the two deputies reached the constable, and they quickly realized there was nothing they could do. With his final breath, Smith said, “I guess Styles got me after all.” The two deputies later testified that they followed a set of wet footprints from the cornfield to Styles’ home, where they found a shotgun leaned against the wall. The gauge of Styles’s shells would prove to be the same gauge that killed Smith.

That night, the people of Center Point decided they had had enough of Styles and his friends running liquor through their community. A lynch mob of about 75 armed and angry people arrived at Styles’s house by night to mete out their own brand of harsh justice on him for the murder of Constable Smith.

The sheriff, however, was two steps ahead of the lynch mob. He had arrived at Styles’ home just an hour before and arrested Styles and his son for the murder of Constable Smith. Whether it was by coincidence or by shrewd instinct, this quick thinking no doubt saved Styles from a violent and humiliating death at the hands of his neighbors that night.

Styles remained in jail until his trial the following February. Meanwhile, Lawrence County did what it is still well-known for doing in times of crisis: it went to work to care for Constable Smith’s family, whom the ‘Lawrence News’ claimed were left with only $9 to their name.

That newspaper immediately set up a fund for the relief of Smith’s wife and children. It was later claimed by Styles’s defense attorney that, as Smith had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan, that organization also did a great deal to help the Smiths financially, including allegedly paying for his funeral and offering to pay the fees of the prosecuting attorneys.

This became an important point of contention in Styles’s trial. At the behest of the defense, for one of the first times in Tennessee history, potential jurors were vetted in part on their willingness to take an oath that they were not and never had been in the Ku Klux Klan.

Whether Smith actually was in the Klan or not cannot be said with certainty. There is no doubt that some klansmen probably contributed to his funeral expenses, as many of the leading and most wealthy citizens of the region at that time were also leading klansmen. However, the looming specter of Klan involvement made the trial that much more of a sensation in the Nashville papers.

At his first trial for the murder of Constable Smith, Styles was found guilty of second-degree murder. Some years later, the Tennessee Supreme Court threw out the verdict due to inconsistencies in evidence collection.

Styles, as much as I have been able to find, seems to have left Tennessee for South Carolina, where he died in his 90s. Constable Smith was buried at Bethel Cemetery on Revilo Road, where his grave remains unmarked to this day.