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Technically, it did.

That was the day the Twenty-First Amendment was ratified, repealing the Eighteenth Amendment and ending nearly fourteen years of national Prohibition.

But there is an interesting footnote to that story.

Prohibition never completely disappeared.

There are still places in the United States where you cannot legally walk into a store and buy a bottle of whiskey—or, in some cases, a six-pack of beer.

We call them dry counties.

And the story behind them goes back much farther than national Prohibition.

America Was Going Dry Before Prohibition

The temperance movement had been active in the United States since at least the 1830s. Alcohol was blamed for poverty, crime, family violence and a long list of other social problems.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, some states were experimenting with statewide prohibition. Others adopted something that would ultimately prove much more durable: local option.

Under local option, the state didn’t necessarily prohibit alcohol everywhere. Instead, voters in a county, city, township or other local jurisdiction could decide whether alcohol could legally be sold there.

Congress’s own historical review notes that some states were experimenting with local-option laws as early as the 1820s and that at least fourteen states had enacted some form of prohibition law by 1855.

The movement grew dramatically after the Civil War.

Organizations such as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League pushed the issue from town to town, county to county and eventually state to state.

The Library of Congress describes the movement as particularly successful in rural Southern and Western states. By the early twentieth century, prohibition was no longer simply a scattered collection of local movements. It had become a national political force.

So when national Prohibition finally arrived in 1920, much of America had already been dry for years.

Then America Tried It Nationwide

The Eighteenth Amendment was ratified in January 1919 and took effect one year later.

It prohibited the manufacture, sale and transportation of intoxicating liquor for beverage purposes.

It did not work out quite as its supporters envisioned.

Illegal liquor remained readily available. Bootlegging became an industry. Speakeasies flourished. Organized crime became heavily involved in supplying something millions of Americans still wanted to buy.

The Smithsonian notes that alcohol became more expensive and generally poorer in quality during Prohibition, while a large black market developed around its production and distribution.

By the early 1930s, public support for national Prohibition had collapsed.

The Twenty-First Amendment was ratified on December 5, 1933.

For the first and so far only time in American history, one constitutional amendment repealed another.

But Section 2 of the Twenty-First Amendment left broad authority over alcohol with the states. States, in turn, could allow local communities to make their own decisions.

In other words, America ended national Prohibition and went right back to local option.

That is why dry counties still exist.

But What Exactly Is a Dry County?

This is where it gets complicated.

There is no single nationwide definition that works perfectly.

Generally speaking:

A wet county allows alcohol sales under normal licensing rules.

A dry county prohibits at least some categories of alcohol sales.

And then there is everything in between—often called moist, partially wet or, in Arkansas data, sometimes damp.

A county might prohibit liquor stores while allowing beer.

It might allow alcohol in restaurants but not package sales.

A dry county might contain a wet city.

A wet county can contain a dry township.

A restaurant in a dry county might legally serve alcohol under a private-club permit.

A distillery might even legally manufacture whiskey in a county where an ordinary liquor store cannot operate.

That makes answering the apparently simple question “How many dry counties are left in America?” surprisingly difficult.

So How Many Are There?

A national survey published in August 2026 used a fairly strict definition and identified 47 remaining dry counties.

Under that count, 29 were in Arkansas, six in Kentucky, five in Mississippi, three in Texas, and one each in Florida, North Carolina, South Dakota and Tennessee.

That sounds straightforward.

It isn’t.

Take Mississippi.

The Mississippi Department of Revenue currently says that 34 of its 82 counties are dry for hard liquor and 36 are dry for beer and light wine.

Yet many of those counties contain municipalities or special areas where alcohol can legally be sold.

Under the stricter national survey, only five Mississippi counties were counted as completely dry.

Texas presents the same problem from the other direction.

Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission records say that as of March 2025 only three Texas counties were completely dry. But only 60 were completely wet.

The other counties fall somewhere between the two, with different rules for different alcoholic beverages and different jurisdictions inside the same county.

So there really isn’t one magic national number.

It depends upon what you mean by dry.

And Then There Is Arkansas

This is where the subject becomes especially interesting for those of us in Arkansas.

Arkansas has one of the most complicated wet-dry systems in the country.

The state’s current GIS database doesn’t just map counties. It includes counties, old township boundaries, cities, wards and other areas whose alcohol status was established by elections sometimes held generations ago.

Arkansas initially became wet after national Prohibition ended. Then voters approved Initiated Act 1 in 1942, creating the modern local-option system.

Over the following decades, counties and other areas voted themselves dry.

And changing that decision isn’t easy.

Arkansas law currently requires signatures from 38 percent of registered voters in the affected area to call a local-option election. That is not 38 percent of the people who voted in the last election. It is 38 percent of registered voters.

That helps explain why a wet-or-dry decision made decades ago can remain in place even if public opinion has changed considerably.

But “dry” doesn’t mean alcohol has disappeared.

Arkansas Alcoholic Beverage Control issues private-club permits in dry counties, allowing qualifying restaurants and other establishments to serve alcohol under state rules. The state is still issuing new dry-county private-club permits in 2026.

So a visitor can sit down at a restaurant, order a steak, and legally have a beer or glass of wine in a county where that same visitor cannot stop at a liquor store and buy a bottle to take home.

Welcome to local option.

The Jack Daniel’s Problem

Maybe the best illustration of how strange these laws can become is Lynchburg, Tennessee.

Lynchburg is home to the Jack Daniel’s Distillery.

Moore County has historically been dry for ordinary retail liquor sales.

Yes.

One of the world’s most famous whiskey distilleries operates in a dry county.

Tennessee law allows licensed distilleries to sell their own products at the distillery and provide samples under specific rules. Jack Daniel’s itself has described the odd situation, noting that Moore County chose to remain dry while state law gradually created exceptions allowing bottle sales and sampling at the distillery.

If you were looking for proof that “dry county” does not necessarily mean “no alcohol,” there it is.

Do Dry Counties Accomplish Anything?

That question is harder than either side sometimes makes it sound.

Some studies have found benefits from limiting alcohol availability.

A Kentucky study published in 1993 found fewer alcohol-related automobile crashes and DUI arrests in dry counties.

A later Texas study found that changes in alcohol availability affected highway safety differently depending upon what kinds of alcohol became available. Beer and wine availability did not produce the same results as access to higher-alcohol spirits.

But another Kentucky study found evidence of something else.

People living in dry counties sometimes drive into wet counties to drink or purchase alcohol. Researchers found that alcohol-related crashes involving dry-county residents tended to occur farther from their homes, providing evidence that some residents were traveling to wet areas and then driving back.

Economics enters the argument too.

Communities that remain dry surrender some retail sales and tax revenue to neighboring wet jurisdictions. University of Arkansas researchers studying several Arkansas counties concluded that legalizing retail alcohol sales could produce measurable local economic benefits, including increased sales and tax collections.

None of that proves that every county should be wet or every county should be dry.

It does show that the question is considerably more complicated than “alcohol good” versus “alcohol bad.”

Why Do Dry Counties Still Exist?

Part of the answer is religion and culture.

The strongest surviving concentration of dry counties is in the South, particularly in areas where the nineteenth- and twentieth-century temperance movements had deep roots.

Part is simply history.

Once an area becomes dry, changing its status can require petitions, elections and organized campaigns. If the population isn’t particularly concerned about the issue, an old decision can survive almost indefinitely.

There can also be economic interests on both sides.

Restaurants, retailers and economic-development groups may favor expanded sales.

Existing liquor stores just outside a dry jurisdiction may have every reason to like things exactly as they are.

And some residents simply believe their community is better off restricting alcohol sales.

That is, after all, the entire point of local option.

Prohibition Ended. Local Option Didn’t.

The saloons did not simply reopen everywhere in America on December 6, 1933.

What really happened was more interesting.

The United States abandoned one national answer to the alcohol question and returned to thousands of local answers.

Over the generations, most dry communities have gradually become wet or partially wet.

The completely dry county has become increasingly rare.

But it hasn’t disappeared.

More than ninety years after the repeal of Prohibition, the legal status of a six-pack of beer or a bottle of whiskey can still change when you cross an invisible county, city or township line.

Some of those lines were drawn by voters who have been dead for generations.

And nowhere is that legacy more visible than here in Arkansas.

National Prohibition ended in 1933.

Local Prohibition is still very much with us.

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Sometimes a photograph just grabs me.

That one did.

Dorothea Lange took the original black-and-white photograph in California’s southern San Joaquin Valley in November 1936. The Library of Congress caption doesn’t give us much:

“Cotton picker. Southern San Joaquin Valley, California.”

No name. No age. No story about who she was or what became of her.

But we have her face.

She was standing in a cotton field with a picking sack wrapped around her waist. Part of an old automobile is visible beside her. Cotton stretches across the field behind her.

And she was smiling.

That is probably what caught my attention.

We are accustomed to Dorothea Lange’s photographs from the Great Depression showing hardship. Her most famous photograph, “Migrant Mother,” has practically become a symbol of the Depression.

This woman gives us something different.

That doesn’t mean her life was easy. Lange’s photographs from the same San Joaquin Valley cotton harvest show that pickers were paid about $1.00 to $1.25 for every hundred pounds of cotton they picked.

Think about that sack around her waist for a minute.

One hundred pounds of cotton for a dollar.

Lange was also photographing Mexican and Mexican-American workers in these same California cotton fields. I initially thought this woman was identified as Mexican, too. After digging through the Library of Congress records, however, I couldn’t document that. The original caption for this particular negative identifies her only as a “cotton picker.”

So that’s where I’ll leave it.

The image above isn’t the original photograph. I restored the nearly 90-year-old photograph first, then used it as the basis for this Norman Rockwell-style interpretation. I wanted to keep the woman, her smile, the cotton sack, the automobile, and the field, while seeing what the scene might have looked like in color through an illustrator’s eyes.

I like the result.

But I keep coming back to what interested me in the original.

We know Dorothea Lange photographed her in November 1936. We know where she was. We know what she was doing. We even have a pretty good idea of what she was being paid.

What we don’t know is her name.

Nearly 90 years later, we can still see her smile.

Sometimes a photograph preserves the face better than history preserves the person.

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The Past, Reimagined Like Rockwell #17

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Southwest American, Sat, Jul 09, 1966 ·Page 1

Near Russellville

RUSSELLVILLE, Ark. (Special) — Just the “bear” facts.

Those words just might fit the Newspaper days of Dean A. J. Crabaugh of Arkansas Tech, but he, his wife, and daughter and son-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Don Russell of Richmond, Va., had the “bear facts” in person when an 80-pound male black bear took a liking to their company.

The four were spending the Fourth of July holiday at the Crabaugh’s cabin 30 miles northwest of Russellville and were relaxing in their cabin when a “shadow clouded the window.”

“I looked up and there was a bear climbing through the window,” Dean Crabaugh reports. “I yelled at him and slapped him, but he climbed on through, so I let him have the bunk I was on and started to pick up a broom and one of our dogs.

“My wife and daughter each grabbed the other two dogs and climbed up on a divan while the bear ambled across the room to rummage around in a vanity case.

“About that time, Don picked up a board and hit the bear which reared up on its hind legs and started toward him, but then went out the front door.

“I really think the bear was just lonesome, because after rummaging around to find something to eat, he stayed in the area in a relatively playful mood.”

He said the bear followed them around and even went swimming.

“Actually, I would say the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission’s efforts to restock the area in bears were successful,” the dean said.

Russell is a former head of the State Rehabilitation service and now holds the same position in Virginia.

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The image I started with was a badly damaged street scene (below) identified as Jefferson Street, Russellville, Arkansas. It had most of the common problems of photographs that have survived for more than a century: tears, stains, creases, fading, missing emulsion, and a large damaged area across the sky and upper center of the picture.

But beneath it all was a remarkable view of downtown Russellville and what is today Commerce Avenue.

The goal was not to create a prettier version of Russellville. It was to recover as much of the original photograph as possible.

That distinction matters.

AI image tools are very good at creating something that looks historically believable. They are much less reliable when the job is to re-create the exact details of a particular historic photograph. If part of a building is damaged, the software tends to “help” by inventing what it thinks ought to be there. The same thing happens with automobiles, windows, signs, people, rooflines, and especially lettering.

So I gave re-creation instructions much more specific than “fix all the damage”:

Remove the tears.

Remove the stains.

Repair the damaged sky.

Recover the contrast.

Preserve the buildings, vehicles, people, signs, and proportions.

And, most importantly: don’t invent anything that isn’t supported by the photograph.

That last instruction is easier to write than it is to enforce.

The first version was impressive at a glance. The street suddenly had depth again. Brickwork emerged. Automobiles became recognizable. Storefronts buried under damage looked almost new. The large tear through the upper portion of the photograph disappeared.

But then came the part that matters in historical work: looking closely.

The re-creation had created a wonderfully crisp sign on the large building on the left.

Unfortunately, it said:

“THANORWOOD WHOLESALE GROCERS.”

That was not what the sign said.

The original photograph was damaged and hard to read, and the AI did exactly what AI tends to do with uncertain text. It produced something that looked convincing enough to pass at first glance.

Convincing is not the same thing as correct.

The business was W. H. Norwood Wholesale Grocery Co.

Once that was established, I went back to the re-created image and made another pass with a much narrower instruction: change only the sign on that building. Leave the rest of the re-creation alone.

The corrected version now reads:

H. Norwood Wholesale Grocery Co.

That little correction illustrates the entire problem with re-creating historical photographs using modern image tools.

The technology is extraordinary. It can remove a century of physical damage in seconds. It can reconstruct missing sky, strengthen fading architectural details, clarify automobiles and pedestrians, and recover the visual depth of a scene that had nearly disappeared.

But you cannot treat it as an authority.

The original photograph remains the authority.

The re-creation is an interpretation of that evidence.

In some ways, the process is not very different from other historical research. You start with incomplete evidence. You make the best reconstruction you can. Then you compare the result with what you actually know. When something does not fit, you correct it.

Sometimes the mistake sits there in six-inch-high letters.

What finally emerged is not a newly imagined Russellville street scene. It is an attempt to recover the photograph that was already there: Jefferson Street lined with commercial buildings, early automobiles in the roadway, people gathered beneath the awnings, and W. H. Norwood Wholesale Grocery Co. occupying a prominent place on the block.

I would still never use the re-created image as evidence for a detail that cannot be confirmed elsewhere.

But as a way of seeing the old photograph again?

That is where this technology becomes fascinating.

For a moment, the tears, stains, and missing emulsion are gone, and Jefferson Street looks a little more like it did when someone stood in the road, pointed a camera down the block, and made the original photograph.

Further developments

Rita Goodman identified that the flagpole was missing from the re-created image. It stood at the junction of Main Street and Jefferson Avenue.

John Paul Leonard, Jr. (Beatnik Angel) shared a version of the postcard that shifted to the left. It shows more of the building on the left and less of that on the right. He asked whether we could incorporate that into the image.

Below is a re-creation that incorporates the flagpole and the added material on the left.

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