Aurora, Oregon Is Shaken, But Not Stirred

It’s a story with all the workings of a well hidden caper. That’s because under the cover of night, this true event featured an elaborate undercover operation…with a secret hideout near Boones Ferry Road on the outskirts of Aurora, Oregon, including a unique transportation hub to evade detection. The stakes are also high and law enforcement is hot on the heels of criminals and actively working to track them down. Except this is one story you’ve never heard before.

The Setting: 1930’s Aurora, Oregon
It’s the evening of October 3, 1936 and federal authorities are readying a criminal takedown. But this isn’t a misdemeanor sting on a few two bit punks. The men on these outskirts of Aurora, Oregon, are smugglers, with their center of operation a short strip of land between current day Charbonneau and nearby Boones Ferry Landing. It’s the length of maybe a few football fields. From there, they move their contraband across the Willamette River, north to Wilsonville and on to greater Portland.

Law Enforcement: On The Case
The information given to law enforcement involves a liquor distillery on the periphery of Aurora, with that liquor traveling across the Willamette River to Wilsonville. With this tip, officers begin their surveillance from the Wilsonville side of the river. Their surveillance pays off big-time, as the lawmen notice a heavily loaded truck cross the ferry to Aurora’s backyard known as French Prairie on the north end of Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

French Prairie
Located south of the Willamette River, the area was settled in the 1800’s by French-Canadian frontiersmen and trappers. It became a strategic crossroad for smuggling contraband. That’s because roads and rivers have long been plentiful around Aurora. The old Pacific Highway — now called Highway 99E — passes through town, connecting Portland to Salem. Boones Ferry Road has also long connected both of those major cities. As for waterways, both the Pudding and Willamette rivers meander past Aurora. Each route gives moonshiners options to evade government detection. For lawmen trying to intercept illegal hooch, it becomes a ‘cat and mouse’ game.

Getting the Lay of the Land
After a few nights of watching, law enforcement spots the same truck again crossing from Wilsonville on Boones Ferry Road. It then takes Boones Ferry across the Willamette River. Officials follow it to the old Wagner farm, now part of present day Charbonneau, but then the site of a distillery and storage facility.

Hide & Seek
As officers watch from a nearby field, one early distillery giveaway is the smell of fermenting mash. Sounds emanating from a water pump also revealed what was for that time a state-of-the-art mechanized well. Law enforcement then observes trucks leaving with lights off. It’s then a short drive from the distillery to Boones Ferry Landing, then across the Willamette River, back to Boones Ferry Road on the Wilsonville side and north to Portland. Minimal road exposure means little risk of being spotted by passing lawmen on a main highway. And by operating without lights, it’s clear the smugglers know their way around…even in the dark. 

Secret Sauce
Over multiple nights, officers observe even more heavily loaded trucks, plus a car driving in and out of the Wagner farm property. Further surveillance finds men unloading bulky items at the distillery, then loading what appear to be containers of liquor. The crooks are clever to avoid detection on the road…and in hiding their distillery, too. That’s because their distillery is located within a separate enclosure, surrounded by a high fence of chicken wire. It also has an early warning system, plus a yard gate, approachable only through the Wagner residence.

Law Enforcement Takedown
Fast forward To the night of October 3,1936, when just before the bust, federal officials hear the perpetrators comment “We’ll run the mash tomorrow night,” with mash a key ingredient for making moonshine liquor. One officer then notices a still and related paraphernalia, including an industrial size 25 pound package of yeast, another component of home brewing. But to these federal officials, most noteworthy is the bottle containing an amber colored fluid, classic for whiskey, with no revenue stamps attached. This is the felony act.The entire operation is soon disrupted for good. Federal agents move in with their raid when one defendant walks out of the building to retrieve yeast, returns to the building and is arrested while entering his car. Several other men on the Wagner farm are then arrested.

White Lightning
What’s significant isn’t so much that this arrest happened, but WHEN. That’s because it occurred AFTER Prohibition, once alcohol use had again been legalized. That irony is deep as the nearby Willamette River. So what gives? One word: Taxes. So the men running liquor through the hinterlands of Aurora weren’t violating Prohibition laws. Instead, given their possession of four gallons of moonshine whiskey, they were violating federal tax law, the liquor tax act. The actual charge was the removal, concealment and transportation of non-tax paid liquor, the same kind of federal tax beef that sealed mafia kingpin Al Capone’s fate when government couldn’t make his other mob-related charges stick.

Prohibition Over
The case is decided years after Prohibition’s 1933 repeal. By then, the public had largely moved on from arguments about alcohol. Bootlegging arrests began as front-page news during the 1920’s, because that was part of a national discussion on Prohibition. Yet by 1937, that argument was settled. This meant that a moonshine bust around Aurora was now more of a tax evasion case, not a referendum on drinking alcohol.

What Happened To The Distilling Defendants?
District Judge James Fee renders his decision on March 22, 1937, giving the ringleader four years of hard labor at McNeil Penitentiary in Washington State. His associates were given lesser sentences and the farmowner received a suspended sentence, but required to pay a hefty fine for the unpaid tax value of all the liquor accounted for.

Sentence Appealed
The main character’s four year sentence is later appealed on Fourth Amendment grounds about unwarranted search and seizure, but that challenge fails, finding officials had sufficient probable cause for search and seizure of alcohol without the payment of required federal tax. History lives on. That’s because the Wagner farm was later annexed into Wilsonville’s Charbonneau neighborhood on the Willamette River’s south bank. The district traces its name to Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, a son of Sacagawea who traveled with his mother on the Lewis and Clark Expedition as an infant. 

The Site Today
Even now you can observe an existing remnant at the center of this distillery drama near the former Wagner farm site. Passing through Charbonneau’s northern section on the appropriately named French Prairie Road, you’ll see a tall wooden structure. That’s the old Wagner farm well location, sitting on the same land where a hidden distillery operated behind a chicken wire fence, as trucks ran without lights on their way to Boones Ferry Landing…and where federal officers smelled fermenting mash, as they monitored the scene from a neighboring pasture. Ironically, those same grounds are now part of a posh golf community.

Part of that same Wagner farm was once owned by someone with a storied Boone connection, since it was once part of the Boone family’s long held land claim. So Chloe Boone, great granddaughter of Daniel Boone, married Oregon’s last territorial governor, George Curry. Part of that Curry House land later became the Wagner farm where the takedown occurred. So the next time you’re driving on the outskirts of Aurora near Charbonneau, consider taking a pleasant detour and observe what remains of this interesting local history. You can also learn about the origins of Aurora, Oregon’s historic Boones Ferry in the video below.