Dry Granite: New Hampshire's 1855 Prohibition Law and the Men Who Ignored It
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, retired federal revenue officer Captain Donald Vance of Manchester, trades tales of a deacon's 'cider for the sick' ledger, a posse's barrels of pickled herring, and a Vermont church-steeple still. The episode also covers copper-still craft and safety, plus a call-in question from Rabbit Miller about hickory ashes.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Settle down, Barnaby! Settle down, you great lumbering ham-thief, the folks aren't here for you, they're here for me. Lie down before I send the cider barrel out to you and you fall in it again.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, sinners, and selectmen. Welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host, dentist, blacksmith, inventor, and a longtime friend to the thirsty and the toothless alike. Tonight we are discussing a law that made the whole Granite State dry as an old deacon's sermon and about as well obeyed.
Announcer: Quick word, friends! A good tool lasts a lifetime. The Flame-Flow still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960, is hand built from heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper for essential oils, herbal tinctures, and traditional distillation demonstrations. Learn more at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle
Wilkins: Now, let me start with a little scripture, and the scripture is this. In the year 1851, the State of Maine, a cold, rocky, sensible place full of men who should have known better, passed a law forbidding the sale of intoxicating liquor. A Portland mayor by the name of Neal Dow carried that law around like a preacher carries a hymnal, and it spread across New England the way the grippe spreads through a schoolhouse. They called it the Maine Law. And in 1855, my own beloved New Hampshire, the Granite State, the Live Free or Die state, passed its own prohibition statute.
Wilkins: Live Free or Die. Mind you, the motto came later, but the spirit was already in the granite. And the legislature in Concord looked at that spirit and said, 'Gentlemen, let us forbid it.' And the men of New Hampshire, the farmers and the mill hands and the teamsters on the turnpike, looked back and said, 'We'll consider it.' And then they considered it for the next several years over a jug.
Wilkins: Now, here is the dentist's observation. A law is like a tooth. You can pull it, you can fill it, you can crown it with gold, but if the roots run deep enough into the jaw of the people, the whole thing comes up bloody and in pieces. And the roots of drinking in New England run clear back to cider brandy and rum in the Pilgrim cellars. You do not yank that out with a statute and expect a clean extraction.
Wilkins: The law itself, as I read it, made the sale of strong drink a punishable offense. It authorized the seizing of liquor kept for sale and the bringing of complaints before a magistrate. Fines for the first offense, harsher for the second, and the usual threat of a stay in the county jail. But here is the beauty of the thing, and I say beauty the way a man says it about a rattlesnake's pattern. The law depended on somebody complaining. And in a little town where the man who would complain is the same man who borrowed your oxen last spring and whose wife you pulled a molar for on credit, the complaining gets awful thin.
Wilkins: Some towns enforced it with the zeal of a Baptist at a barn dance. Other towns enforced it with the zeal of a man asked to go back out to the barn in January to check on a cow he already knows is fine. A selectman who votes for temperance at Town Meeting on Tuesday and sends his hired boy around to the back door of my still-house on Thursday is not a hypocrite, friends. He is a New Englander with a consistent schedule.
Wilkins: And that is the uneven part. In some counties the sheriff was a hard man with a long list of grievances and a short supply of humor. In others the sheriff was a man who knew every jug in his district by name and had in some cases helped fill it. Now, I will not say that here in Merrimack County we had the second sort of sheriff. I will say that whenever he came calling at Fort Wilkins, he always seemed to arrive at the exact hour Barnaby had just been fed, was in a fine mood, and wished to say hello. I leave the conclusion to you.
♦ Barnaby grunting, chain clinking
Wilkins: Hush, Barnaby. He's talking about the sheriff, not about you. Though if a certain deputy comes through that door again, you may get a snack.
Wilkins: Now let me tell you how the liquor kept flowing, because that is the true story, and the true story of any law is the story of the holes in it.
Wilkins: First, the farmers. Every New Hampshire farmer who ever raised an apple orchard had cider, and every farmer who had cider knew what cider did when you left it alone in a cold cellar all winter. It got hard. It got harder than the farmer's heart at tax time. And nobody, nobody in the history of the Republic, ever wrote a statute that could reach into a man's own cellar and prove that the barrel in the corner had meant to be vinegar. The law might say a man could not sell. It said less about what a man might serve his guests, and nothing at all about what a hired man was owed as part of his board.
Wilkins: Second, the druggists. Now this is the part I love like a good set of forceps. Statutes of this kind commonly allowed liquor to be sold by licensed agents for medicinal and mechanical purposes. And so every town found itself blessed with a sudden and astonishing epidemic of ailments. Chills. Rheumatism. Weak lungs. The vapors. A bad back that could only be eased by a pint, and a worse back that required two. I tell you, if a man were to read the prescription ledgers of New England in the year 1856, he would conclude that the whole region was one great infirmary full of dying patients, and he would be astonished to find them all so cheerful.
Wilkins: The druggists were not all rascals. Some were upright, some were frightened, and some honestly kept to the letter. But there were enough who stretched the word medicine until it wept, and the people knew it, and the people kept a list of which apothecary would write a man up for a bottle of 'bitters' with no questions asked.
Wilkins: Third, and my favorite, the back-road distillers. The men up in the hill farms behind the turnpike, in the folds of the land where a plume of smoke looks like a cook fire and nobody asks why that cook fire runs all night. Pot stills, copper if the man had been prudent, tin if he had been poor, and a worm of coiled tube running through a spring-fed trough. A little corn, a little rye, a little cider, whatever the land gave. They sold to neighbors, to teamsters, and to men who came down from the lumber camps up toward the White Mountains with their pay in their pockets and a hole in their throats.
Wilkins: And a law that is hard to enforce and easy to evade has a particular effect on a market, friends. It does not stop the trade. It raises the price and promotes the cunning. It makes the careful man rich and the careless man a guest of the county. It turns the honest cider-seller into a smuggler and the smuggler into a folk hero. It gives the preacher a sermon and the lawyer a living. And it teaches an entire generation of young men that the statute book is a suggestion written by gentlemen who have never been cold or thirsty or in debt.
Wilkins: There was another matter, too, and a heavy one. The seizures. The law said that liquor kept for sale could be seized, and the question of how a constable might go about the seizing, whether he needed a warrant, whether he could poke through a man's barn and cellar, set off fights in courtrooms across the country. Because a man's property, said the lawyers, is a man's property, and a constable with a crowbar is not the same as a judge with a warrant. Those arguments ran from the town hall up to the higher courts, and they set old and serious questions about the reach of the state into a man's house. Some folks cheered. Some folks wept. And a good many folks hid the jugs in the hay.
Wilkins: Now, the Civil War is coming. You can hear it in the distance like thunder over the Belknap Mountains. And when it comes, it brings a surprise. The federal government, hungry for money to feed an army, does not try to dry the nation out. It does the opposite. It decides that all that thirst is a resource. And in 1862 Mr. Lincoln signs the Revenue Act that creates the Bureau of Internal Revenue and lays the first federal excise taxes on distilled spirits. So here is the great comedy of the age, friends. First the state says, 'Do not make it.' Then the federal government says, 'Go ahead and make it, but pay us.' And a fellow in my situation looks at both of them and wonders which one wants the bigger cut. We will talk about that tax another time, and the cold fury it caused in the Granite State.
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle
Wilkins: Now, I have kept you long enough with law books. I have a visitor tonight, a man who comes to us from Manchester, just down the valley, and I confess my knees knocked a little when I read his name on the calling card. He is a retired Captain of the federal revenue service, an officer of the alcohol unit, who spent twenty-eight years hunting copper stills through the White Mountains and the Green Mountains. In short, friends, he is exactly the sort of man I have spent my whole life arranging to be out when he calls. Please welcome Captain Donald Vance.
Captain: Thank you kindly, Doctor. Glad to be here. Though I will tell you, your bear out yonder just looked me over through the window like he was deciding between supper and a light snack.
Wilkins: He does that to every guest. It is a form of appraisal. Barnaby has never been wrong about a man's weight yet. Now, Captain, a revenue man at my table, and I have not even hidden the jug, which I trust you will note as a gesture of good faith. Tell the folks, what sort of a man spends twenty-eight years chasing other men's copper up a mountain?
Captain: A stubborn one, Doctor. And I will say this plain, since your listeners ought to hear it. I never had a quarrel with the old fellow who hammered out a clean copper still and ran it honest. I respected that work. It was the radiator outfits I went after, the men who cobbled a rig out of scrap and lead solder and poisoned their own neighbors. Those I shut down, and I slept fine after.
Wilkins: A sermon from a federal man! Barnaby, mark the date. Now, you have spent your years in ledgers and in barns. What is the finest bit of paper you ever turned up?
Captain: That would be an 1856 ledger out of Hillsborough County, kept by a deacon of the church, mind you, a man who sat in the front pew. Every week, regular as Sunday, an entry in a tidy hand: cider for the sick. Barrels of it. By my count that deacon was tending enough invalids to fill a hospital the size of Boston, and not a one of them ever got a day better.
Wilkins: A deacon! A man of the cloth with a whole parish of consumptives who never once missed the collection plate! Captain, that is the most miraculous congregation in the history of New England. They were dying every week and dancing every Saturday. Did you arrest the poor fellow?
Captain: He had been in the churchyard a good while by the time I found the book, Doctor. I just closed it and tipped my hat to him. Some things you leave be.
Wilkins: That is a gentleman. Now, you have the old records. Tell me, in the days of the Granite State's own prohibition, did the posses ever catch anything worth the trouble?
Captain: Ha! There was a raid in the 1850s I read about in the town papers. A posse seized a dozen sealed barrels, hauled them to the green with a crowd looking on, and proudly stove in the first head. Pickled herring. Every barrel, pickled herring. The whole town smelled of fish for a week, and the posse never lived it down.
Wilkins: Pickled herring! Oh, friends, I wish I had been there, with Barnaby, who would have wept for joy. The smuggler sits home laughing while the constable stands in a puddle of brine. Whoever packed those barrels deserves a medal and a pension. And I suppose you, Captain, have a story of your own to match?
Captain: One. I got a tip once over in Vermont that a church was doing more than saving souls. I climbed that steeple myself, creaking stairs the whole way up, and found a still in the bell tower. The cast-iron bell had been silent for years, and folks in town thought it was cracked. Turned out the rope was tied round a coil of copper. We could smell a smoking pine-knot fire three miles upwind on a November morning, and that's how we knew where to look.
Wilkins: A bell-tower still! The Lord's own condenser! Captain, that is the finest piece of work I have heard since a man in Epsom drove a flock of geese across a bridge to cover the noise of a cart. They rang no bell and said no prayer, and the whole congregation was running on spirits. Tell me truly, did the folks hold it against you?
Captain: Some did, some laughed. The minister, God bless him, had a sense of humor. Said it was the first time the bell ever did honest work. And the coil, I will say, was a fine piece of copper. Clean joints. Not a drop of lead.
Wilkins: There it is, friends. There is the truth of this entire program. A deacon with a hospital's worth of cider, a posse with a dozen barrels of herring, and a bell tower with a still. A law written by gentlemen in Concord, and a people with more wit than all of them together. Captain Donald Vance of Manchester, it is an honor to have had you at my table, and I will thank you not to look at my cellar on your way out. Barnaby sends his regards, which is to say he is eating your hat.
Captain: Well, it was government issue anyway. Let him have it.
Wilkins: We will be right back after a word from a gentleman with something worth your coin.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle sting
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♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle
Wilkins: Thank you, thank you, sir, you could sell a snowbank to a Laplander. Now, friends, let us talk copper and the craft itself, because I know the sort of audience I keep, and half of you are pretending to listen to the history while really waiting for the metallurgy.
Wilkins: Understand first what a still is. A still is a patient device. You have a pot, a head, and a condenser, which in my day we call the worm, a coil of tube sitting in cold water. You heat a fermented liquid, what we call the wash, and because alcohol boils at a lower temperature than water, it rises first as vapor, travels up through the head, down through the cooled coil, and comes out the far end as liquid. That is distillation. It is not magic, it is not witchcraft, and it is not alchemy, although I do enjoy telling the tax man it is.
Wilkins: Now, why copper? I will tell you as a blacksmith and a man who has bent more metal than he has pulled teeth. Copper conducts heat beautifully, so the whole pot warms evenly and does not scorch the bottom. It is easy to hammer and shape, which is why old coppersmiths made the finest stills in the world. And here is the quiet miracle. Copper reacts with sulfur compounds that form during fermentation and cooking. Those sulfur compounds smell like rotten eggs and taste like a wet match in a ditch. The copper grabs them and binds them, leaving them behind in the pot. This is catalytic sulfur reduction, in the dictionary language of the learned, and it is the reason a copper still turns out a cleaner product than a tin kettle ever could. The copper cleans the vapor as it passes, and over time you will see a green crust form inside. That is the sulfur compounds settling in. You scrub it out between runs, and you do it with vinegar and salt or with a good hard rinse, because that crust will foul the next batch.
Wilkins: Now, let me speak plainly about the cuts, because this is the part that separates the careful from the dead. When a still runs, what comes out is not all the same. It comes in stages. First comes the foreshots, the very first few spoonfuls. Those carry methanol and harsh volatile compounds, and they are poison. Not unpleasant. Poison. They are thrown out, never drunk, never used as a rinse for your mouth, never used for anything but the fire. Then come the heads, still carrying harsh compounds that taste like solvent and will give a man a head that feels like a mule kicked it. Those too are set aside. Then, finally, the hearts, the clean middle of the run, which is the good part. And at last the tails, which turn oily and weak and taste of wet cardboard. Those are set aside too. Foreshots, heads, hearts, and tails. Memorize them like you memorize your own children's names.
Wilkins: And let me say a word about fire, because a still is a vessel of hot vapor, and vapor that finds a flame will make a very short and very final speech. Never run a still in a closed room. Never leave it untended. Never let the vapor leak near an open flame. A man in Gilmanton once lost his barn, his hired man's eyebrows, and a good deal of his dignity to a careless run.
Wilkins: And a note about materials, because I have seen men do stupid things for cheap. Do not use lead solder anywhere near a still. Do not use salvaged radiators or any scrap metal of unknown origin. Lead is a poison, and it will sicken you and those you serve. Clean copper, clean joints, clean hands. If you cannot afford to do it clean, you cannot afford to do it.
Wilkins: And as the fine print the lawyers tell me to speak each week, making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is illegal under the law of the United States, and everything I say on this program is for historical and educational purposes only. Good. That is spoken, the sheriff is satisfied, and Barnaby has eaten the last of the evidence.
♦ Barnaby grunting, chain clinking
Wilkins: Time now for the postcard hour, which here at Fort Wilkins is a voicemail hour, because we have been blessed with a speaking horn that carries a man's voice across the wires. We have a call from a listener in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, a gentleman by the name of Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller. Let us hear him.
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, distant voice through a horn
Wilkins: Mr. Miller says, and I quote him with accuracy: 'Alchemist, my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?'
Wilkins: Well, Rabbit, first, any man who calls his own kin's advice swamp medicine will always have a family dinner to look forward to. But I will answer you straight. There is a grain of truth in your uncle's tale, and the grain is wrapped in a great deal of chaff.
Wilkins: Here is the grain. Hickory and oak are hardwoods, and wood that has been burned to charcoal will adsorb certain harsh compounds. Charcoal, friends, is a sponge on the smallest scale, and old distillers knew that running spirits through a column of charcoal made them smoother. That is the grain, and it is why folks have sworn by wood, in one form or another, for a very long time.
Wilkins: Here is the chaff. Tossing ashes or raw shavings into the thump keg, or into a boiling still charge, does not do what your uncle thinks. It does not remove methanol. Methanol boils at a lower temperature, it comes over in the early part of the run, and the only honest way to get rid of it is to cut it away. The foreshots and the heads, set aside and discarded. Ash in the keg is like perfume on a corpse. It may change the smell, but it does not change the nature of the thing. A man who relies on hickory ashes to make a dangerous run safe is the same man who relies on a lucky rabbit's foot to keep his barn from burning. It does no harm to believe in it, but plenty of men have died relying on it.
Wilkins: And a further word, Cletus. Ash is lye, or near enough to it, and lye in a hot still is a way to foul the charge, make it foam, and send a surge of boiling mash up the neck of your pot. I have seen what that does to a man's forearm, and I have pulled the teeth of a man who was standing too near. So keep your ashes in the stove, keep your shavings for the smokehouse, and keep your cuts honest. That is the whole of the advice.
Wilkins: Now, as a mark of thanks to Mr. Miller of Wilkesboro, let me do what I do for all who write in with a worthy question. I take a coin from my drawer, I lay it on the anvil, and I stamp it with my own punch.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There. G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. That one is yours, Rabbit, and if you ever pass through Merrimack County, show it at the door of Fort Wilkins, and Barnaby will let you in with only a mild sniffing. I did this stamping during the hard-money years of the war, when coins were hoarded and a man could not buy a loaf with a promise. A stamped cent became a small advertisement for a dentist, a smith, and an honest eccentric, and I am not ashamed of it.
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! Whether you are a hobbyist, a tinkerer, or a student of old crafts, the Flame-Flow still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, built of heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper, is waiting for you at moonshinestill.com. Visit the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28, or order direct. That is moonshinestill.com!
Wilkins: Now, friends, we draw toward the end of the hour, and I will gather the whole story into a single bundle for you.
Wilkins: In 1855 New Hampshire tried to dry up a thirst that was older than the state itself. It failed, not because the lawmakers were fools, though I have my opinions, but because a law that depends on the cooperation of the people it forbids is a law written on the surface of a pond. The farmer had his cider. The druggist had his prescriptions. The back-road man had his copper. The sheriff had his conscience, or had a brother-in-law, depending on the county. And in between them all ran a river of liquor that no statute ever quite dammed.
Wilkins: And then came the war, and the federal government, which had been watching all this from a distance, looked at that river and saw not a crime but a treasury. And in 1862 it set up a toll booth. But that, friends, is a tale for another night.
Wilkins: If you wish to learn the craft of distillation properly, the history, the metallurgy, the cuts, the safety, and the law, I invite you to enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course, offered here at Fort Wilkins. You will learn from a man who has pulled teeth, bent copper, and outlasted two sheriffs, and you will go home with knowledge worth more than a bushel of seed corn. Inquire at the showroom or write to the fort.
Wilkins: My thanks to Captain Donald Vance of Manchester, who has come a long way up a very crooked road to sit in my parlor and has not once asked to see the cellar. And my thanks to you, the listeners, in your kitchens and barns and parlors, for keeping an old alchemist company.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme fades out with antique warmth