Most Americans probably think Prohibition ended on December 5, 1933.
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.
Odds & Ends 046
