From Moonshine to Main Street: Part 1 – Seeds of the Republic

From Moonshine to Main Street Series
Seeds of the Republic

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From Moonshine to Main Street: Part 1

Seeds of the Republic

When you peel back the layers of Tennessee history, you don’t just find whiskey barrels and fiddles — you find hemp. Long before it was called cannabis, long before it was branded a menace, hemp was a backbone crop in America. It clothed us, carried us, and even held together the sails that brought settlers across the ocean.

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both grew hemp. Washington kept careful notes in his farm journals about planting and harvesting it. Jefferson tinkered with hemp’s processing methods. Did Washington order all farmers to grow hemp? Not exactly — but he did urge them to. He believed it was so essential that he once wrote, “Make the most of the Indian hemp seed, and sow it everywhere!”

Tennessee, with its fertile valleys and stubbornly self-reliant farmers, was no stranger to the crop. Hemp grew thick in the Volunteer State soil, often right alongside tobacco and corn. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was practical — rope for binding, cloth for the home, oil for lamps. In a land where survival meant making the most of what you had, hemp was worth its weight in iron nails.

But here’s the thing: Tennessee’s early hemp story runs parallel with something else — a taste for independence. Just as families would one day cook up moonshine in the hollers, their ancestors were already weaving hemp cloth and pressing hemp oil in barns and sheds. Self-sufficiency wasn’t just a way of life; it was a quiet rebellion against dependency.

This was the seedbed of Tennessee’s cannabis story — not a tale of “getting high,” but a tale of survival, ingenuity, and stubborn freedom. Before prohibition. Before reefer madness. Before CBD tinctures in glass bottles on Main Street. Hemp was here, as common as a plow mule, waiting for its time to rise and fall and rise again.

And rise and fall it would.

In Part 2, we’ll walk into the late 1800s, where hemp, whiskey, and the hillbilly hustle all tangled together — and where prohibition first reared its head.

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