Radio Moonshine: every episode

Recorded in the 1860s at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. Hosted by real-life dentist, coin counterstamper, and moonshiner Dr. G. G. Wilkins, featuring his pet black bear Barnaby, true tales of being busted by the Merrimack County sheriff, Civil War whiskey tax evasion, and handcrafted pure copper still metallurgy. Every episode below has the full show to listen to and the complete written transcript.

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• The Conscription Riot Rumors: Pittsfield Waits for the Draft Wheel
  Episode 104 · 30 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins remembers the summer of 1863, when the Enrollment Act brought the draft to Pittsfield along with wild riot rumors, $300 commutation arithmetic, and a crowd of men who suddenly wanted their front teeth…
• The Tinsmith's Quarrel: Sheet Copper, Solder, and the Boston Supply Wagon
  Episode 103 · 28 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins follows sheet copper from the Revere rolling mill at Canton and the Lake Superior mines, by Boston rail and Concord wagon, to his anvil in Pittsfield. He tells of his feud with Hezekiah Tubbs, the…
• The Cheshire Turnpike Toll Dodge: Back Roads, Bridges, and Barnaby's Free Passage
  Episode 101 · 32 min
  Alchemist G. G. Wilkins explains how New Hampshire runners in the 1860s got around turnpike gates and toll bridges. They used shunpikes, farm lanes, low-water fords, the 'going to meeting' exemptions written into the…
• Prohibition Is Coming: Wilkins Predicts the 1920s
  Episode 100 · 31 min
  With his boots on the porch rail at Fort Wilkins, Dr. G. G. Wilkins walks through America's whiskey history, from Hamilton's 1791 excise and the Whiskey Rebellion to Dedham's striped pig and Neal Dow's Portland Rum…
• Rubber Plates and Royalty Fights: Vulcanite Dentures and the Dentists' Revolt
  Episode 99 · 34 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells the story of vulcanized rubber dentures from a country tooth-puller's chair: how sulfur-cured rubber put false teeth within a working man's reach, how the Goodyear Dental Vulcanite Company of…
• Iron Rails to Pittsfield: The Suncook Valley Railroad and the End of the Back-Road Runner
  Episode 98 · 28 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins watches the Suncook Valley Railroad steam into Pittsfield and asks what depot platforms, freight waybills, station agents and the telegraph wire mean for runners who lived on slow, muddy back roads.…
• The Ballad of Fort Wilkins
  Episode 97 · 28 min
  In the series finale, Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins tours the whole Fort Wilkins saga. He covers Pittsfield's mill-town beginnings, colonial cider and frost-jacked applejack, a one-legged Concord gauger whose wooden leg…
• The Revenuer Hall of Fame
  Episode 96 · 28 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins does something he swore he never would and opens a Hall of Fame for the cleverest tax men in history. He strikes a commemorative coin on his anvil for each one: Robert Burns the gauger, Thomas Paine…
• The Listener Mailbag: Telegrams, Grievances, and One Uncle's Swamp Medicine
  Episode 95 · 30 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins reads the best wires sent to the 603-471-5597 line. He covers how potash and the first U.S. patent shaped colonial New England, why freeze-jacked applejack gives a man a two-day headache, and the full…
• How Prohibition Made the Modern Cocktail
  Episode 94 · 27 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins argues that every dry law from the Massachusetts Fifteen Gallon Law to the Maine Law left the country with worse liquor and cleverer drinkers, and that this is where the bitters, ice, sugar and lemon…
• Busted, By God! Whiskey, Panic, and Bad Barrels in the Far West
  Episode 93 · 30 min
  Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins traces whiskey's road west, from the Panic of 1857 and the Pike's Peak rush to Uncle Dick Wootton's barrels of Taos Lightning at Cherry Creek and the gimlet-and-peg tricks that ruined freight…
• The Women Behind the Stills
  Episode 92 · 27 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins honors the women who made spirits over the centuries: Mary the Prophetess of Alexandria and her water bath, the stillroom housewives with their limbecks, the alewives and brewsters, and Helen Cumming…
• The General's Rye: George Washington's Distillery at Mount Vernon
  Episode 91 · 31 min
  Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins tells how George Washington marched an army against the Whiskey Rebels in 1794 and three years later went into the whiskey trade himself. By 1799 his Mount Vernon still-house was making…
• Moonshine Names Around the World
  Episode 90 · 23 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins takes a tour of what the world calls its spirit, from Irish poitin and Highland mountain dew to aguardiente, okolehao, kill-devil and Taos lightning, and finds that half the planet calls its liquor…
• Kegs in the Current: Smuggling by River on the Suncook and the Merrimack
  Episode 89 · 31 min
  Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins tells the history of Merrimack River boating, from the Middlesex Canal boatmen who drank from casks through a straw to the salt-weighted kegs that sank and then rose at a set eddy, and the…
• Scotch-Irish Stillmen: The Ulster Men Who Carried the Worm Across the Water
  Episode 88 · 27 min
  Dr. Wilkins tells how the Ulster Scots came to America, starting with the five ships that reached Boston in 1718 and the Londonderry settlement only a day's ride from Pittsfield, and following them to the Whiskey…
• Signal Lanterns on the Ridge
  Episode 87 · 23 min
  Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins explains how the Suncook Valley lantern relay worked, running from the ridgelines above Pittsfield down to Fort Wilkins, and traces it back through Paul Revere's steeple lamps, Albert Myer's…
• The Deputies' Revenge
  Episode 86 · 23 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells about the January night in 1865 when the Merrimack County deputies came back for revenge. They drugged Barnaby with laudanum bread, and a lantern dropped near a leaking still joint nearly burned…
• When the Sheriff Was a Customer
  Episode 85 · 28 min
  Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins tells the law's best-kept secret: in the Suncook Valley, the county sheriff was often the best customer a still-house had. He covers the town liquor agents under New Hampshire's 1855 law, the…
• Brass in the Pocket: Trade Tokens and Local Money in the Suncook Valley
  Episode 84 · 33 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins explains how small New England towns kept trading when hard money ran short. He covers Pine Tree shillings, Spanish bits, Hard Times tokens, country-store book accounts paid in potash and butter, and…
• Copper Prices Then and Now: What a Pound of the Red Metal Bought
  Episode 83 · 26 min
  Wilkins follows the price of a pound of copper from Paul Revere's rolling mill, through the 1857 death of the big copper cent, to the wartime jump of 1864, when a pound of old large cents was worth more melted down than…
• The Canadian Border Run
  Episode 82 · 30 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins explains why a jug of Suncook Valley spirit was worth more north of the line in 1864 and 1865. The reasons are the wartime gold premium on hard Canadian silver, the Dunkin Act's dry townships and the…
• Hiding Barrels in Plain Sight
  Episode 81 · 33 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins covers the old Yankee habit of hiding liquor where everybody can see it: smuggled molasses casks in colonial days, spirit jugs sunk in Bennington pickle crocks, kegs buried in hay wagons, and the…
• The War Ends and the Deputies Stay
  Episode 80 · 31 min
  The guns go quiet at Appomattox, but the federal assessors, collectors and county deputies keep on coming up the Suncook Valley Turnpike, and Dr. G. G. Wilkins explains why the two-dollar whiskey tax outlived the war it…
• Counterstamp Collectors Today
  Episode 79 · 26 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins looks at the new coin-collecting fever of the 1860s. He covers the 1857 Coinage Act, the first collectors' societies, and the gentlemen with magnifying glasses who now hunt his 'G. G. WILKINS /…
• The Large Cent's Last Years
  Episode 78 · 26 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins explains why the big copper large cent died. He covers its weight cut in 1795, the copper shortage that left no cents dated 1815, the Act of February 21, 1857, and the Flying Eagle and bronze Indian…
• The Gospel Penny: Two-Cent Pieces and the Folks Who Spent Them
  Episode 77 · 23 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins digs into the bronze two-cent piece of 1864: Rev. Watkinson's letter, Mr. Longacre's shield, the first 'IN GOD WE TRUST', the drop-letter postage it paid, and the private tokens it drove out. He also…
• The Bounty System
  Episode 76 · 29 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins explains the Civil War bounty system: the 1863 Enrollment Act, the $300 commutation fee, town quotas, substitute brokers, and the bounty jumpers who enlisted and deserted again and again under new…
• Letters from the Front
  Episode 75 · 26 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins opens a cigar box of Civil War letters and reads one from a Pittsfield private, written after Burnside's Mud March, begging for a flask. He explains the Soldier's Letter postage rule, the army…
• Fort Wilkins and the Union Quartermaster
  Episode 74 · 28 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells how, in the summer of 1863, a Union Army purchasing captain came up the Suncook Valley Turnpike and nearly signed Fort Wilkins to a contract for six hundred copper camp kettles and hospital…
• Lincoln's Tax Collectors
  Episode 73 · 24 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins takes apart the new federal tax machine of 1862: the district assessors, assistant assessors, collectors, and gaugers sent out by the Bureau of Internal Revenue. He also tells the bloody tale of the…
• A Pittsfield Funeral: The Wake, the Tall Tales, and the Missing Jug
  Episode 72 · 27 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins describes a Suncook Valley wake for old Asa Pettigrew, a Pittsfield cooper. He covers New England's habit of drinking at funerals, the coins laid on the eyes, the tolling bell, and the young embalming…
• Medicine, Real and Imaginary
  Episode 71 · 28 min
  Dr. Wilkins sorts real 1860s medicine from humbug, covering whiskey's listing in the U.S. Pharmacopoeia as Spiritus Frumenti, the Union army's whiskey-and-quinine ration, Surgeon General Hammond's war on calomel, and…
• Church Bells and Hangovers
  Episode 70 · 26 min
  Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins takes on the Sunday morning problem. He covers the colonial tithingman's staff, rum-soaked ordination feasts, applejack's apple palsy, and why a bronze church bell sounds worse after a…
• The Peddler Who Sold Everything
  Episode 69 · 28 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins covers the history of the Yankee peddler, from the Connecticut tin carts and the wooden nutmeg legend to Mr. Lincoln's 1862 license tax on peddlers. He then tells how Ezra Pickett of Berlin,…
• The Town Drunk's Defense
  Episode 68 · 26 min
  Dr. Wilkins tells how Absalom Pease, Pittsfield's best-known drunk, argued his own case before a justice of the peace in the back of a store and beat the constable with logic from the bar stool. He sets that against the…
• Courting by Lantern Light
  Episode 67 · 32 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins covers how New England's young folks courted around their parents in the 1860s: Sunday-night sparking, the courting candle, the whispering rod, husking-bee red ears, kissing bridges and lamp signals in…
• The Barn Dance Brawl of '64
  Episode 66 · 33 min
  Dr. Wilkins tells how a September 1864 husking dance in the widow Sanborn's barn turned into the biggest brawl in Suncook Valley memory. There are fiddles, a bitten-off earlobe, eleven teeth swept off the threshing…
• Tooth Pulling Tales: The Worst Molar, the Biggest Farmer, and the Whiskey Bill
  Episode 65 · 26 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells how he wrestled a rotten, hook-rooted molar out of Absalom Thorne, the biggest farmer in the Suncook Valley. The job broke a chair, split a ceiling beam and ended with a whiskey bill fifteen…
• Flavoring the Rough Stuff
  Episode 64 · 33 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins covers the history of flavored spirits in 1860s America: peach brandy, cherry bounce, honey spirits and the city rectifiers who dressed up raw spirit with burnt sugar, prune juice, plug tobacco and red…
• Blending by Ear and Nose
  Episode 63 · 24 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins lines up his numbered jars and gives listeners his eight tasting and blending rules, none of them scientific, then corrects each one with sound craft: how heads and tails smell, why a nose gets tired,…
• Spring Planting and Summer Drinking
  Episode 62 · 19 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins goes through a Suncook Valley farmer's year, from planting corn by squirrel-ear oak leaves to the haying-field switchel jug and the cider barrel that turns hard by May, with a still kept honest on the…
• Selling by the Gallon
  Episode 61 · 23 min
  Wilkins covers the gallons nobody agreed on: Queen Anne's wine gallon, the ale gallon, the corn gallon and the British imperial gallon, the town sealer of weights and measures, the gauger's rod, thick-bottomed jugs, and…
• Vinegar, Ashes, and Elbow Grease: Cleaning a Still at Fort Wilkins
  Episode 60 · 29 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins covers how New Englanders have cleaned copper, from the old potash trade and the farmhouse ash hopper to the vinegar run, and tells how Barnaby caught a Merrimack deputy who came to Fort Wilkins…
• The Dog Who Hated the Tax Man
  Episode 59 · 30 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells the story of Brandywine, a lop-eared Suncook foxhound he won in a card game who could smell a federal assessor through a closed barn door. He also explains the new Internal Revenue machinery, the…
• Black Coal and Clear Spirit: Charcoal Filtering, Maple, Hickory, and the Stuff That Goes Wrong
  Episode 58 · 31 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins covers the history of charcoal filtering, from the apothecary Lowitz and the bone-char sugar refiners to the New Hampshire charcoal pits and the sugar-maple leaching tubs of Tennessee, then explains…
• Fire Control: Keeping the Still Hot Without Losing Your Eyebrows
  Episode 57 · 22 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins spends the night on fire, the oldest killer of still-houses: how the old firebox was built, why hardwood beats pine, and how alcohol vapor creeps along the floor looking for a flame. He tells of the…
• Yeast Before Science
  Episode 56 · 34 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins talks about the strange history of yeast before anyone understood it, from the old English brewers who called it God-is-good to Liebig's rude cartoon of yeast animals pissing out spirit, and walks…
• The Thump Keg Mystery
  Episode 55 · 24 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins explains why a second chamber knocking between the pot and the worm turns one run into nearly two, going back to the old Pennsylvania rye men and Samuel M'Harry's 1809 distilling book. He tells how a…
• The Cellar Door That Wouldn't Stay Shut
  Episode 54 · 28 min
  Every night at midnight the bulkhead door under the Fort Wilkins still-house bangs open. Dr. Wilkins weighs three explanations: the ghost of a drowned tin peddler, an old unpaid debt, and a plain draft. Along the way he…
• Fort Wilkins After Dark
  Episode 53 · 27 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins opens his nighttime ledger of Fort Wilkins: who came after dark, who left in a hurry, and the wall of hats that visitors left behind. He starts with where the word moonshine came from and the deadly…
• The Bear Who Wouldn't Leave the Still
  Episode 52 · 24 min
  In the winter of 1864-65, a cold snap and three barrels of frozen cider drive Barnaby into the boiler room at Fort Wilkins, and he refuses to leave until spring. A deputy who mistakes him for a buffalo robe in the dark…
• Letters to Mrs. Wilkins
  Episode 51 · 30 min
  With Mrs. Wilkins away at her sister's in Barnstead, the Alchemist opens her cedar letter box on the air. He reads her letters from his jail days, her demand to the Merrimack sheriff for the return of her best kettle,…
• Wilkins Versus the Mosquito
  Episode 50 · 29 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells the story of the Suncook Valley's worst mosquito summer, when the swarms came off the flooded marsh and he swore the bites made his mash ferment faster. He covers the old 'fever and ague' cures,…
• The Telegraph Arrives in Pittsfield
  Episode 49 · 22 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells how the lightning wire came up the Suncook Valley, and how a tooth-pulling dentist who could read Morse by ear heard the Merrimack sheriff's raid plans clicking through a wall before the deputies…
• The Lightning Strike on the Copper Coil
  Episode 48 · 25 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells the story of the July night in 1863 when a thunderhead rolled off Catamount Hill and put a bolt into his copper worm coil. The strike lit a pale blue fire in the heads jar, made every hair on…
• Whiskey Rebellion Ghosts
  Episode 47 · 24 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells the story of the 1791 excise and the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794: tarred collectors, Tom the Tinker, the siege of Bower Hill, Washington leading thirteen thousand militia, and why that grudge…
• From Copper Pots to Mason Jars
  Episode 46 · 26 min
  Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins follows the spirit trade from barrel, stoneware jug and Stoddard amber bottle to Mr. Mason's patent screw-top jar, explains how the change in container changed the running trade, and tells…
• The Bribe That Backfired
  Episode 45 · 32 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells how a Barnstead cider-brandy man bribed a Merrimack County deputy with a smoked ham meant to buy a raid on Fort Wilkins. Barnaby smelled the ham grease on the deputy, the ham turned out to be…
• Women Who Ran the Hills
  Episode 44 · 16 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells the history of the sisters, widows and grandmothers of New England and the mountain South who kept the household stills going: colonial tavern-widows, kitchen cordial-makers, and wartime farm…
• The Lake Winnipesaukee Ice Run
  Episode 43 · 29 min
  Dr. Wilkins tells how winter keg sleds ran from Pittsfield up through Barnstead to Alton Bay and out across the frozen Lake Winnipesaukee. He covers sharp-shod horses, the practice of choking out a horse that falls…
• Hollow Axle Hauling
  Episode 42 · 29 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells how Suncook Valley teamsters bored out wooden cart axle-trees with pump-log augers and carried spirits past the county gaugers inside them. He also tells how the deputies finally caught on,…
• How to Spot a Wilkins Counterstamp
  Episode 41 · 26 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins opens his coin box and teaches collectors how to tell a genuine 'G. G. WILKINS / PITTSFIELD N.H.' hand-punched mark from a forgery. He covers the bulge on the back of the coin, toning inside the…
• Hard Times Tokens
  Episode 40 · 27 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells the story of the Hard Times tokens of 1833 to 1844: the copper store cards and political satire pieces that merchants struck during Jackson's Bank War and the Panic of 1837, and how they turned a…
• Substitutes and Bounty Jumpers
  Episode 39 · 27 min
  Alchemist G. G. Wilkins grins his way through the draft economy of 1863: the Enrollment Act, the $300 commutation fee, substitute brokers, stacked town bounties, and the bounty jumpers who enlisted, collected and ran…
• The Shinplaster Panic
  Episode 38 · 26 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins covers the Shinplaster Panic of 1862 to 1865: postage stamps used as change, John Gault's brass-cased stamps, the government's postage and fractional paper currency, merchants' copper tokens, and the…
• Contraband Letters Home
  Episode 37 · 24 min
  Dr. Wilkins covers the soldier's mail of the Civil War: the 'Soldier's Letter' postage privilege, flag-of-truce letters read by inspectors, boxes from home searched by the provost guard, and the Suncook Valley private…
• The General Store Gossip Chair
  Episode 36 · 30 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells the history of the seat beside the box stove in a New England general store: who sat in it, what it cost in tobacco, gossip, and pulled teeth to move them, and how the man in that chair warned…
• What the Surgeon's Saw Really Cost
  Episode 35 · 27 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells what whiskey actually did in the Civil War field hospitals: surgeons mostly used chloroform and ether to put a man under, and whiskey was mostly given as a 'stimulant' afterward. He covers the…
• A Dentist's Guide to Bad Breath and Worse Neighbors
  Episode 34 · 26 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins opens up his daytime tooth-pulling trade: the 1860s war on foul breath with chalk and charcoal tooth powders, oil of cloves, battlefield teeth, the vulcanite patent men, and the 1862 federal license…
• Mud Season
  Episode 33 · 27 min
  Dr. Wilkins covers New Hampshire's mud season, the two weeks when the frost goes out, the turnpike turns to porridge, and smugglers and revenue men are stuck alike. He explains the night-crust trick and the spring…
• Sunday Dinner Etiquette for Heathens
  Episode 32 · 29 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins gives a lecture on 1860s Sabbath table manners, though he has none of his own. He covers Saturday-night beans, the New England boiled dinner, eating off the knife, goose-quill toothpicks and the new…
• Patent Medicine Swindlers: The Professor Who Watered the Doctor's Whiskey
  Episode 31 · 19 min
  Wilkins covers the patent-medicine racket of the 1860s: bitters bottles that were mostly alcohol, the 1862 stamp tax on proprietary remedies, and the medicine-show 'Professor' who watered down Fort Wilkins spirit, sold…
• Barrels from the Cooper's Yard
  Episode 30 · 28 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins visits the cooper's yard by the Suncook falls to cover riven white-oak staves, hoop-poles, firing and charring, and why a root cellar can't be hurried. He tells how a revenue gauger got a rod full of…
• Winter Without Whiskey: Cider, Spite, and the Long Merrimack January
  Episode 29 · 26 min
  In January 1865 the new $2.00 whiskey tax hits and the Suncook freezes solid, so Dr. G. G. Wilkins explains how Merrimack County got through the winter on hard cider, red-hot flip irons, freeze-jacked barrels and plain…
• The Ledger Wilkins Never Showed the Tax Man
  Episode 28 · 19 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins opens his secret account book, which he keeps bound inside a hymnal cover, and goes through who owed him, who paid in coin and who paid in chickens. Along the way he covers how country daybooks and…
• Proofing Without a Hydrometer
  Episode 27 · 27 min
  Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins covers the three old ways to judge proof without an instrument: the bead, the gunpowder and the fire test. He explains why each one could fool, burn or blind a man, and tells a new tall tale…
• Why Your Still Weeps
  Episode 26 · 26 min
  Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins covers stills that weep and leak, from the oatmeal-paste habits of old-country distillers and the sheet copper Paul Revere first rolled at Canton to the flour-paste seal Wilkins swears by.…
• Water Is Half the Whiskey
  Episode 25 · 28 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins makes the case for cold granite spring water over the mill-fouled Suncook River, covering John Snow's cholera pump, Kentucky limestone, iron-and-oak ink, Epsom salts, and how water serves in the mash,…
• Corn, Rye or Apple? The Mash Bill Brawl
  Episode 24 · 26 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins sets New Hampshire's three great mash makings against each other: flint corn, thin-soil rye and the seedling orchard apple. He covers what each one cost a Granite State farmer to grow, how each one…
• Heads, Hearts and Tails: The Cuts of a Run
  Episode 23 · 16 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins explains the cuts of a run (foreshots, heads, hearts and tails) in plain words that work for a hay-pitching farmhand and a Concord banker alike, using the jar-by-jar method, the Revenue gauger's…
• Barnaby and the Traveling Preacher
  Episode 22 · 33 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells how Barnaby the bear pulled his chain staple, crashed a canvas revival on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, mauled a Concord informer and was declared saved by a hellfire itinerant who then had to…
• The Midnight Stagecoach to Concord
  Episode 21 · 25 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells the tall tale of running a keg of double-run apple spirit on the midnight stage from Pittsfield to Concord. Along the way he gets past three toll gates, with a temperance-preaching cousin of the…
• The Night the Still Sang
  Episode 20 · 24 min
  Dr. Wilkins tells the Fort Wilkins legend of the October night a loose copper worm hummed across the Suncook Valley. Half of Merrimack County blamed ghosts, and a Concord spirit medium came to talk to them, which went…
• Hair of the Dog, Literally: 1860s Hangover Cures
  Episode 19 · 31 min
  Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins covers the cures a Suncook Valley man tried the morning after a frolic, from sensible haymaker's switchel to raw eggs, river plunges and the mercury purge he refuses to give anyone. He tries…
• The Widow Pettingill's Cider That Wasn't Cider
  Episode 18 · 30 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells how the Widow Hepzibah Pettingill's 'harvest cider' turned the Pittsfield meeting-house supper into a scandal. Reverend Thorne asked for thirds, the deacon ended up in the bean pot, and Barnaby…
• Thirty Gallons of Courage: Whiskey at Gettysburg
  Episode 17 · 25 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins covers how New Hampshire soldiers sneaked whiskey past their officers in the run-up to Gettysburg. He tells his tall tale of thirty gallons shipped south in crates marked as dental plaster, and walks…
• Why Copper and Not Iron: A Distiller's Argument
  Episode 16 · 27 min
  Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins argues that copper beats iron in a still. He covers how each metal carries heat, iron-gall ink, New England's iron potash kettles, the 1723 Massachusetts law against lead still parts, and…
• Heads, Tails, and Heads Again: The Counterfeit Cent Racket
  Episode 15 · 26 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins explains the counterfeit-cent racket of the 1850s: cast brass and lead 'coney' coppers, the 1857 law that ended the big copper cent, and the ring, weight and file tests that decided which coins were…
• Barnaby Gets Loose on Town Meeting Day
  Episode 14 · 26 min
  Dr. Wilkins tells how Barnaby, just out of his winter sleep and hungry, snapped his chain on the second Tuesday of March and walked into the Pittsfield town meeting. With a 400-pound bear in the hall, the voters threw…
• How to Read a Revenue Man's Boots
  Episode 13 · 29 min
  Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins gives his field guide to spotting a federal revenue deputy on the Suncook Valley Turnpike: the boots, the mud on them, the hired horse, the hydrometer in his coat, and his sudden interest in…
• The Great Pittsfield Mash Flood of 1866
  Episode 12 · 25 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells how a rusted hoop on his biggest fermenting vat burst in April of 1866. Six hundred gallons of sour mash ran down Pittsfield's Main Street, a Concord tax assessor slid into Barnaby's reach, and…
• The Tax Man Cometh
  Episode 11 · 13 min
  Dr. Wilkins explains how the Revenue Act of 1862 sent assessors and collectors with ledgers into rural Granite State towns, taxing everything from carriages to billiard tables, and how neighbors answered a government…
• Dry Granite: New Hampshire's 1855 Prohibition Law and the Men Who Ignored It
  Episode 10 · 26 min
  Alchemist G. G. Wilkins explains how New Hampshire's 1855 prohibition law was riddled with holes, from hard cider and generous druggists to back-road stills, before the federal excise tax arrives in 1862. His guest,…
• Hammer, Rivet, and Worm: How a Copper Still Was Built in 1860s New England
  Episode 9 · 18 min
  Alchemist G. G. Wilkins walks listeners through building a copper still in 1860s New England, covering raising the pot, riveting and soldering seams, the cap, and the worm. Guest Junior Vance, a retired Wilkes County…
• Where Did the Pennies Go? Coin Hoarding, Shinplasters, and the 1862 Small-Change Crisis
  Episode 8 · 22 min
  Alchemist G. G. Wilkins explores the 1862 small-change crisis, from coin hoarding and postage stamps to shinplasters and his own counterstamped coppers. Guest Clara Higgins, a Blue Ridge mountain herbalist and old-time…
• The Coos County Sugar Sleds: Winter Smuggling Across the White Mountains
  Episode 7 · 18 min
  Alchemist G. G. Wilkins tells the tale of the 1864 Coos County sugar sleds hauling cane sugar over Crawford Notch, then welcomes master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister of Pittsfield. Silas shares a false-bottomed…
• Barnaby's Sweet Tooth: Fermenting Corn Mash and a 400-Pound Watchdog
  Episode 6 · 18 min
  Alchemist G. G. Wilkins tells the tale of Barnaby, his 400-pound bear who guards the woodpile on a diet of cooled spent grain, and lays out the basics of copper stills, cuts, and fermentation safety. His guest is…
• The Flame-Flow Copper Heat Invention: 1860s Metallurgy at Fort Wilkins
  Episode 5 · 18 min
  Alchemist G. G. Wilkins explains why hand-hammered electrolytic copper makes a cleaner spirit by capturing sulfur compounds, then walks through the four cuts of a run, with firm safety and legal warnings. Guest Junior…
• The Second Arrest of Dr. Wilkins: Why the Merrimack Magistrate Settled for $20
  Episode 4 · 25 min
  Dr. Wilkins recounts his second arrest and the sheriff who drank the evidence, then explains how the Merrimack magistrate settled on a $20 fine. Guest Clara Higgins, a Blue Ridge mountain herbalist and slang historian,…
• Pulling Molars with Forceps and Pouring Double-Run Rye: The Country Dentist
  Episode 3 · 19 min
  Alchemist G. G. Wilkins tells of the country dentist's trade, from pulling an abscessed molar with forceps to the safe and unsafe uses of spirits, and walks through the craft of the cuts, copper, fire, and the double…
• Lincoln's Two Dollars and the Granite Rebellion
  Episode 2 · 22 min
  Dr. Wilkins traces the 1862 Revenue Act and Lincoln's two-dollar-a-gallon whiskey tax, which turned honest Yankee farmers into midnight moonshiners. His guest, retired federal revenue officer Captain Donald Vance of…
• The Day Barnaby the Bear Chased Merrimack Deputies into the Suncook River
  Episode 1 · 19 min
  Dr. G. G. Wilkins recounts the legendary day in 1861 when his 400-pound chained black bear Barnaby sent four Merrimack County revenue deputies fleeing into the cold Suncook River, their search warrants lost in the mud.…