After the L&N pulled its tracks between Blount Springs and Warrior in 1915-16, a push began to convert the old rail bed into a highway. Blount County sent delegates - including E.J. Bryan, W. Melville Drennen (of Drennan Land & Timber), and W.F. Harrell (who owned the quarry at Bangor) - to a July 1916 Forrest Highway association meeting at Clanton to organize the route. It took roughly a decade to get it fully paved, delayed mainly by Blount County’s chronically thin road budget; by the early 1920s, maps show it running Birmingham through Warrior, Blount Springs, and Blountsville under a name that stuck: the Bee Line.
Once Prohibition took effect in 1920, the same hollows and cold springs that had drawn resort visitors to Blount Springs a century earlier drew moonshiners - and Reid’s Gap shows up repeatedly in the federal raid reports. In 1921, agents Jack Horton and T.C. Dewes Jr. destroyed a still near Reid’s Gap and arrested Ward Sanding and Felix A. Thomas of Warrior, finding eight fermenters and copper still connections roughly 150 yards from the men’s homes. In 1922, Prohibition officers Eubanks, Robey, and Sullivan found another still at Reid’s Gap with 500 gallons of fermenting mash - brewed, ingeniously, in a repurposed 60-gallon gasoline tank.
A steel tank found in a cave creek near a spring on Smoke Rise property when the Caudle family arrived in 1975 - alongside a charcoal-filled pit later buried by decades of flooding - is consistent with a still condenser and mash-cooking setup of exactly this kind, on exactly this ground.