Carrie Nation

People's recollections of Carrie Nation range from a female evangelical prophetess, to raving lunatic. Carry Amelia Moore was born into a family that operated a sharecropping plantation, that was in central Kentucky, on November 25, 1846. As a young woman she was unusually tall and not very pretty. She married a young man who, she discovered, was a free mason, a smoker, and an alcoholic. He left her at the age of twenty-one, and from then on she vowed to fight the demon liquor that had taken her man from her. She re-married, with several other women in her community, helped to form the Wormen's Christian Temperance Union, which is still in existence today. Yet Nation now took her crusade a step further, beginning a campaign of "hatchetation". Over the course of ten years, she led groups of women into saloons, wielding an ax, and smashed each place to bits. She made headlines all over the country, and was even the subject of at least four short films, where she was often portrayed in a comic light, by a male actor in women's clothes. Her fame soon got the better of her and she soon drifted into obscurity. She died in a mental health facility on Friday, June 9th, 1911, never living to see the result of her cause: the 18th Ammendment. Several years after the enactment of Prohibition, it was reported that an illegal liquor still has been discovered, on the grounds of Carry Nation's birthplace.