Water World

Perhaps one of the most welcome impacts of Prohibition is the survival of the Maryland state reptile, the diamondback terrapin. Really!

Between the 1850s and Prohibition, the U.S. developed a love affair with turtle soup. By the 1910s, overharvesting left the terrapin on the verge of extinction. But sherry or Madeira wine are essential ingredients in turtle soup and they were no longer readily available after 1920. Terrapin soup fell off menus and the little reptile staged a minor comeback. Today, the diamondback terrapin is designated as “near threatened” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, largely due to climate change and sea level rise, but it still survives, partly through the reprieve granted by Prohibition.

investigating “vice and violations of the prohibition law.” Whidbee claimed he was sold “about a half-pint of corn liquor in a coco [sic] cola bottle” from George Satchell, a charge Satchell denied. However, it came out that Satchell had multiple previous convictions for selling illegal liquor. A jury found Satchell guilty and sent him to the state penitentiary for five years. The severity of the sentence for selling fewer than six shots of liquor evidently took into account the repeated nature of his violations.

Local police were also active in the community, trying to ferret out prohibition violations. On the 4th of July, 1928, Northampton Constable J.R. Belote executed a search warrant looking for illegal booze at the restaurant of Edward Bloxom in Eastville. The search yielded “one pickle jar containing one pint and one jug containing 3 quarts.” But the jury found Bloxom not guilty, perhaps unwilling to convict a respected local businessman for such a paltry violation.

Out-of-state rumrunners carrying booze from the ships of Rum Row were also in the sights of the local police. In October 1932, Mr. C.B. Cherrix was apprehended in an Oldsmobile full of booze displaying Maryland license plates. Cherrix was prosecuted and his car was impounded and sold at auction, but it brought just $61. After deducting advertising for the sale, the Sheriff’s commission, storage, and court costs, there was just $7.95 left to transmit to the state’s Literary Fund, as required by state law.

There were dozens of arrests in Northampton County for operating illegal stills during Prohibition. In November 1929, a Justice of the Peace swore out a warrant for constables to search the buildings belonging to John Dryden and his wife Mary near Jamesville, not far from today’s YMCA Camp Silver Beach. Four lawmen descended on the Dryden’s property and found “one five-gallon keg whiskey, one gallon jug whiskey, and one 7 quart [keg] whiskey in the barn…One still made of copper capacity 20 gallons in home on said premises.” His indictment notes that Dryden was not a duly licensed druggist and had no permit to operate a still. He was sentenced to 90 days in jail and a fine of $50.

The Northampton County court records also chronicle frequent prosecutions for “driving under the influence of an intoxicating substance” during Prohibition. Under prohibition laws, the act of drinking alcohol was not itself punishable, but drinking and driving most absolutely was and occurred with regularity.

Ultimately, it became clear that the Volstead Act was unenforceable and that Prohibition had many unexpected consequences including runaway crime, high levels of alcohol consumption, and lost federal and state tax revenue. At 5:32 p.m. on December 5, 1933, national prohibition ended with the ratification of the 21st amendment.

Surprisingly, the 21st amendment did not end the federal government’s appetite for legislating morality by banning widely popular substances. Passage of the “Marihuana Tax Act” in 1937

effectively made pot illegal across the United States. This latest experiment in prohibition appears to be grinding to an end as states and the federal government are relearning the lessons learned by our great-grandparents when they tried to enforce the only constitutional amendment that restricted rather than expanded American’s rights.

I’d like to extend sincere thanks to Traci L. Johnson, Clerk of Court in Northampton County, Va., and her outstanding staff of Lauren Brown, Susie Sample, and Connie Wilson, who provided invaluable assistance in researching this article. Northampton County, Va. is home to the oldest continuous county court records in the United States, dating back to 1632.

At 5:32 p.m. on December 5, 1933, national prohibition ended with the ratification of the 21st amendment.

Robert “Gus” Gustafson lives on the Eastern Shore of Virginia by way of Chicago, Harvard University, and a career on Capitol Hill. In his spare time, he coaches the Broadwater track and field teams and cultivates heirloom vegetables and fruits from the Chesapeake region. Lifting a glass or two with friends, post-Prohibition.

(Maryland Center for History and Culture MC8277)

Diving into the Olympics of water tasting

Story and photos by Van Smith

Berkeley Springs has been attracting water lovers for hundreds of years.

here’s a spot in West Virginia, about eight miles upstream of the Potomac River on Warm Springs Run, where clear water emerges from mineral-laden ground year-round at 74 degrees, pooling in natural rock formations. The “terroir” of the spring water here—its earthly provenance, as it steeps over time in geophysical forces that impart placespecific qualities—has drawn people for ages: the Native Americans first, then frontier-conquering colonists such as George Washington, and henceforth all who have come to immerse themselves in Berkeley Springs, the cultural center born of these waters that calls itself America’s “first spa town.” For 31 years running, it also has attracted entrants, judges, and fans of a worldfamous event, the Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting, whose winners earn the rights to label their bottled or municipal waters among the world’s best to drink.

What started in 1991 as a novel way to promote the town has become, as the event’s co-founder and producer Jill Klein Rone likes to say, “the largest and longest-running water tasting

in the world.” Entrants come not from familiar supermarket brands like Dasani or Fiji, but from water-producing locales that are striving for recognition in the $30-billion-and-growing global bottled water economy. In the world of distinctive “Adam’s ale” (a temperance-movement moniker for the only drink available to the biblical first man), this has become ground zero.

I first started frequenting the Berkeley Springs area in the years leading up to 2005, when I purchased a run-down cabin on a steep, overgrown acre by the nearby Cacapon River, believed to be the source of Berkeley Springs’ mineral water. My wife and I got married by that river, whose name is derived from a Shawnee word meaning “healing waters.” We lodged at the wedding suite at the Country Inn, the town’s centerpiece hotel, which hosts the annual water tasting. We live in Baltimore, raising two daughters, but one could say our “terroir” as a family has been forged by our experiences together down by the river and in town. And that includes the first time I was a judge at the water tasting, in February 2019, when the four of us stayed at a bed-and-breakfast and made the most of our two-night stay.

As I approached my first stint as a judge, I maintained a festive skepticism about the water tasting. I found it hard to believe that evaluating the taste of bottled waters could be a rational, sensible, systematic endeavor—surely, they’d be hard to tell apart from one another? Yet I was totally down to party with a globe-spanning Tasting glassware is set up at the judges’ tables.

The Cacapon River is the likely source for the warm springs that give Berkeley Springs its name.

group of hydrophiles in a celebration of drinking water. After all, who am I to judge? That I might be worthy to evaluate the waters at the tasting seemed a stretch. I need reading glasses to assay water’s clarity; years of coffee and spirits (and tobacco, until I finally quit) have desensitized my olfactory and gustatory receptors; and my wants in water are rather pedestrian: clear, cool, and crisp, preferably with bubbles. To me, noting the character of a water’s “terroir” would more likely come down to sensing whether it had been conveyed via a garden hose than whether it emerged, say, through beds of complex minerals in the foothills of the Italian Alps.

I kept my doubts to myself and surrendered to the judges’ training, overseen by the tasting’s water master, Arthur von Weisenberger, a California-based, Europe-trained bon vivant who’s been in the water-tasting business since the 1970s. We’d use a weighted ratings scale and attach numbers to six characteristics: appearance, odor, flavor, aftertaste, mouthfeel, and overall impression. The scores entered by the nine judges would then be tabulated, and the waters with the highest scores in each category—municipal water, bottled water, sparkling water, and purified water—would be the winners.

I proceeded to dutifully judge all the waters at that year’s tasting, and learned to my surprise that differences can be noted, and that some waters I actually did like better than others—and that buying the bottled waters that I ranked highest in the 2019 tasting would be an expensive undertaking, because they’re all from Tasmania. This detail convinced me that there really is something to this business of judging the taste of waters, since I’d blindly tasted scores and scores of waters from all over the world, and the ones I liked best turned out to be from the same tiny corner of the globe.

So I came back the next year, 2020, but not as a judge—instead, I came as a fan, and attended the water-related seminars that are always held the Friday afternoon before Saturday’s main event. Among the presenters this time were the tasting’s co-founder Jeanne Mozier, a cultural force for Berkeley Springs since she first arrived in 1975, who held forth the healing history of the warm spring waters; a professor from Frostburg State University, Jonathan Flood, who discussed chemical analyses he’d conducted of Greece’s ancient healing springs; and Scott Shipe, a Marylandbased water advocate who rang alarm bells over ubiquitous “forever chemicals” that are increasingly found in tap waters around the

Above: Drinking water expert and Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting perennial Bob Hidell ranks the waters at this year’s tasting in June. Below: A display of some of the entries.

world. Clearly, having gained an official watertasting certificate for learning at von Weisenberger’s knee, I was becoming a certifiable water geek.

In late 2020, about the time I’d normally start making plans to attend the tasting in February, my Facebook feed (which includes plenty of Berkeley Springs fare) delivered tragic news: Mozier had passed away at 75 years old. Jill Klein Rone and her daughter, Jules Happy Rone, soldiered on without her, postponing the event until June. Weeks before, Rone reached out to ask if I’d be available again to join the eight other judges (all of them, as always, members of the media). I jumped at the opportunity.

First thing in the morning at the cabin on June 5, the day of the tasting, I got into a pair of swim trunks while the coffee was brewing, drank a cup, and then took a refill to drink while soaking in the Cacapon. It was a cloudless, windless morning, with sunlight slicing here and there through the shade of the steep mountainside forest. I finished with the coffee and kayaked upstream to Edes Fort, a majestic promontory of rock rising about a hundred feet above the river. I glided quietly back downstream, watching a mother duck teach her ducklings to scoot away into the partially submerged branches of downed trees on the riverbank.

After disembarking and drying off, I donned a coat and tie, hopped into the pickup truck, and headed east on Route 9 through the little railroad town of Great Cacapon and up to the Panorama Overlook. I pulled over to take a look. Laid out below was an idyllic peaked landscape spanning three states—West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania—cut through by the Potomac and Cacapon rivers. Route 9 curved in hairpins through Cacapon Mountain for three more miles into Berkeley Springs. 