KNOX COUNTY — Walter Blevins disliked having company arrive after the fire had gone down. At his place in a hollow off Beaver Creek, this included revenue agents, who made 61 visits between 1921 and 1931 and found a cup waiting on the same stump each time.
“Mother said he could tell their car by the sound of it at the creek crossing,” said his great-granddaughter, June Miller, 71. “Whoever was driving always gave it too much gas, and he’d fuss about it, they were wearing the bank out. He’d say that and then go put another piece on the fire.”
A misfiled archive box contains the reports. Each says the agents arrived “to find the still still warm.” None of them mention Blevins. The copper cap and worm are described the same way every time, including a dent in the cap, and considerable federal attention was paid to that dent.
Blevins kept the cup upside down on the stump until he heard the car. His wife, Ethel, objected to leaving it out overnight because she had already lost one good kitchen cup that way.
“She let him have the one with the chip,” Miller said. “You could drink out of the other side, I did when I was little.”
The reports got shorter as the decade went on. An early agent gave half a page to the approach through the hollow. By 1927 the creek crossing took four words. A Bureau of Prohibition clerk reviewing a report in 1929 wrote “again” in the margin.
The cup sat by the stump so the agents never had to walk up to the house, where Ethel would have wanted to know why they hadn’t wiped their feet. Blevins also kept a board beside the stump for muddy weather. It was later used to patch the chicken house.
“I do wish we’d kept that cup, because it was a good size for buttermilk,” Miller said.