Enforcement of Prohibition was set to begin at 12:01 a.m. on Jan. 17, 1920, and non-teetotalers prepared either by wallowing in denial or by partying until the last midnight. They also seized on a loophole in the 18th Amendment, which prohibited selling or transporting alcohol but said nothing about drinking what you already had.

Boozehounds pulled up to businesses eager to offload their soon-to-be-banned stock and filled their limousines with crates of hooch. One woman in California bought the entire contents of a liquor store and had it transported to her basement. Any alcohol that wasn’t secured could be seized by the authorities and destroyed—like these 749 cases of beer, which were found and smashed on November 21, 1923.