If you’re fascinated by North Carolina’s moonshine history like I am, this sounds like a great exhibit at UNC Chapel Hill.

Photographs of law enforcement officers raiding and dynamiting illegal distilleries are among items in the new exhibit “Satan in a Bottle: A History of the Production and Control of Alcoholic Beverages in North Carolina.”

The free public exhibit will be open from today (June 16) through Aug. 31 in the North Carolina Collection Gallery of Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The display tells the story behind a statewide alcohol ban begun in 1909, put into effect by North Carolina voters. The ban dried up the state’s successful legal market and stimulated illegal production – a decade before national prohibition was established by ratification of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution in 1919.

Now if we could just get the state out of the alcohol business and leave it up to private industry, we’d be a lot better off.