Prohibition began on January 17, 1920, when the 18th Amendment went into effect. It ended on December 5th, 1933.
When Nick Drummond and Patrick Bakker heard the tall tales about the former owner of the house they were buying, they brushed it off as hearsay.
They were in the process of purchasing a 1915 American Foursquare just on the edge of the village of Ames, Montgomery County, NY and a few people had mentioned the home was rumored to have once belonged to a bootlegger in the 1920s.
“It was sort of the local urban legend that it was built by a bootlegger,” Drummond said. “We went with it, but we also knew that this was totally made up.”
And the story still seemed fictional, at least until October when Drummond ripped off the rotting, wooden skirting on the home’s mudroom and something tumbled out at his feet.