The Cheshire Turnpike Toll Dodge: Back Roads, Bridges, and Barnaby's Free Passage
How did 1860s moonshine runners haul their jugs across New Hampshire without paying a cent at the turnpike gate? Alchemist G. G. Wilkins covers shunpikes, midnight river fords, false-bottomed wagons, and the 'going to meeting' loophole that made Tuesday-night churchgoers out of every whiskey hauler on the pike. You'll also hear the true-ish story of a toll keeper who tried to charge Barnaby the bear as livestock, plus thump keg tips and copper still distilling history from Civil War era Pittsfield.
In this episode
- Turnpike history: the Cheshire Turnpike, the First NH Turnpike, and where the word 'turnpike' comes from
- Shunpiking: how moonshine runners took back roads and farm lanes around toll gates
- The 'going to meeting' charter exemption runners used to dodge tolls
- Low-water river fords on the Suncook and Merrimack, and the dangers of a spring freshet
- False-bottomed wagons, manure loads, and other tricks for smuggling whiskey
- Barnaby the bear gets charged as livestock at a toll bridge and a Pittsfield justice of the peace rules on it
- Wilkes County runner Junior Vance on fords, chain-across-the-lane tolls, and a load of hymnals that weren't all hymnals
- Listener Q&A: hickory ashes and red oak in the thump keg, and why the blue-flame proof test doesn't work
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 charters, and false-bottomed wagons. He also tells how a toll keeper tried to charge Barnaby the bear as livestock, which ended with a bitten backside and a ruling from a Pittsfield justice of the peace. Wilkes County runner Junior Vance comes on with new stories about fords, chain-across-the-lane 'tolls,' and a load of hymnals that weren't all hymnals. Then Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's voicemail about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and he knocks down the blue-flame test.
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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: Barnaby. BARNABY. Settle your carcass down, you overstuffed rug. That's the postman's mule, not your supper, and the Union still needs the mule more than you do. Lie down. Lie DOWN. There, he's gnawing his chain like a widower gnawing a grudge. Good bear. Expensive bear, but a good one.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, sinners, and you three gentlemen from the Internal Revenue I can hear breathing through a speaking-trumpet in my woodpile. Welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from Fort Wilkins, my log fortress on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am Dr. George G. Wilkins, dentist, blacksmith, inventor, alchemist, and, according to two warrants and a county ledger, a public nuisance. I pull teeth, strike copper, and tell the truth, and only the first one ever made a man cry in my chair.
Wilkins: Tonight we talk about the road. The pike, the gate, the bridge, and the toll keeper standing in front of all three with his hand out like a beggar wearing a constable's hat. We'll talk about how a runner moved his jugs across this state without paying a penny to the turnpike corporation, and I'll tell you about the day a toll keeper tried to charge my bear as livestock and what it cost him, which was about a pound of himself. First, a word from the folks who keep my joints tight.
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♪ Banjo sting, brief fiddle flourish
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Segment the first. A history of the gate.
Wilkins: Back in 1796, when my granddaddy still had all his teeth and most of his opinions, the General Court of New Hampshire chartered the First New Hampshire Turnpike, running inland from the Piscataqua toward Concord. After that the legislature handed out turnpike charters like a drunk deacon handing out tracts. There was the Second, the Third, the Fourth, the Cheshire, the Croydon, the Grafton, and a dozen more with names that sounded like a family of Baptists. Each one was a company of gentlemen who put up money, cut a road, set a gate across it, and charged every soul who passed.
Wilkins: You know why it's called a turnpike? At the gate stood a pike, a long pole, sometimes studded with iron, sometimes a plain spruce bar on a pivot. You paid your coin and the keeper turned the pike aside to let you by. Turn the pike, turnpike. That is the whole etymology, and it cost the Republic a great deal more than it ought.
Wilkins: The Cheshire Turnpike ran through the southwest of this state, Cheshire County, out toward the Connecticut River country. It has a charter from the legislature, a gate from a carpenter, and potholes from the Almighty, and the Almighty never asked a penny. Every road like it had a toll board nailed up by the gate. Let me read you one from memory, near enough. Each four-wheeled carriage drawn by two horses, so many cents. Each cart or wagon, so many. Each horse and rider. Each horse led or driven. And then, friends, the per-head livestock: neat cattle, which is the old word for cows and oxen, so much a head; sheep and swine, so much a dozen. A drover moving three hundred hogs to Brighton market paid for every curly tail that squealed through that gate. Remember that list. It comes back to bite somebody, and I mean bite.
Wilkins: Now, a toll keeper is a highwayman with a charter, a roof over his head, and a pension. And the Yankee farmer, who would sooner give up his wife's company than a copper cent, answered the toll gate the way water answers a dam. He went around it.
Wilkins: Those lanes worn around the gates got a name: the shunpike. A man shunning the pike went shunpiking. You would see it plain as a scar. A quarter mile before the gate a set of ruts peeled off the turnpike, wandered through Deacon Somebody's back pasture, forded a brook, crossed a woodlot, and climbed back onto the pike a quarter mile past the gate, where the keeper could watch it and grind his teeth to powder. I know because I've filled the cavities.
Wilkins: Some farmers who owned those back pastures did a tidy trade letting travelers through at half the turnpike rate. That's a toll too, but a Christian one. Others set a dog on you. One fellow down Epsom way set his mother-in-law on you, and I'd pay double the turnpike rate before I'd face that woman's tongue again.
Wilkins: The charters gave the shunpiker a second weapon, and it was printed in the law itself. Most of these charters let certain local folk pass the gate for free. A man going to public worship. A man going to town meeting. A man going to militia muster. A man taking his grain to the grist mill. All free. And friends, the piety that broke out on New Hampshire turnpikes was a wonder of the age. There were more men going to meeting on that turnpike on a Tuesday than there were in the pews on Sunday, and every one of them was carrying his hymnal in a five-gallon keg. I once met a man going to meeting with a wagon of cider brandy at two in the morning. I asked which church. He said the Church of the Thirsty Brethren, Pittsfield chapter, and I said I'd been a deacon there for years.
Wilkins: Then there's the ford. A toll bridge is a beautiful thing, oak stringers, plank deck, a keeper's shack at one end with a lantern and a cash box. Many crossings on our rivers were private bridges or ferries, and every one wanted its fee. But the Suncook, the Contoocook, even the Merrimack in a dry August have places where a team can splash across if you know the bottom. A good runner knew every ledge and gravel bar from Pittsfield to Pembroke the way I know the inside of a man's jaw. He crossed at night, at low water, with the wheel hubs greased so they wouldn't squeal and the horse's bit wrapped in rag so it wouldn't jingle.
Wilkins: But fords will kill you. I knew a teamster from Barnstead, God rest him, who took the ford below the old dam in a March freshet. The ice let go upstream and came down like a Concord lawyer on an unattended estate. They found the horse at Suncook village, the wagon in Allenstown, and the teamster in three different towns, by my reckoning, because they never did find his left boot, and his left foot was still in it. His widow buried what they had and put a jug on the grave. That's the honest cost of a free crossing. The river collects a toll too, and it doesn't make change.
Wilkins: And then the false-bottomed wagon. A carpenter with a grudge against the government can build you a farm wagon whose bed sits four inches higher than it ought, with a hollow beneath packed with straw and stone jugs. On top you pile manure, honest manure, steaming, flies and all. Not one toll keeper in the history of this state ever got down and put his arm elbow-deep in a load of fresh dung looking for whiskey. Not one. The ones that thought about it smelled the cargo and decided they'd rather be poor. Turnips work too, and cordwood, and a dead hog under canvas if you want the keeper to wave you through with his handkerchief over his nose.
Wilkins: It all got easier as time went on, because the turnpikes were dying. Most of those corporations never paid their gentlemen a decent dividend, and now that the railroad is creeping up every valley, they're giving their roads to the towns to be free highways. They talk of a railroad up the Suncook to Pittsfield before long. Then the toll keepers will need honest work, God help them, and they'll need me too, because a man who bites coins all day has the worst molars in New England.
♪ Short fiddle bridge, minor key
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; distant bear grunt
Wilkins: Segment the second. Outlaws, runners, and the day Barnaby was tolled.
Wilkins: Some summers back I had cause to carry Barnaby by wagon over to a fellow in Loudon who owed me for a set of uppers and two jugs. I'd learned a man pays faster with a bear in his dooryard. Barnaby rode in the wagon bed on his chain, sitting up like a Methodist bishop on a fat circuit. We came to a little toll gate on a bridge road. I won't say which, because the corporation is still alive, barely. The keeper was a long, narrow, pinch-faced specimen I'll call Hezekiah Pound, for the sake of his grandchildren. He had a ledger, a cash box, and the soul of a weasel that had studied bookkeeping.
Wilkins: Now, I paid for the wagon. I paid for the horse. Then Hezekiah ran his finger down the board, licked his pencil, and said: And the animal. Livestock, driven. One head. I said, Hezekiah, he's not driven, he's riding, he's a passenger, he paid in dignity. He said a beast is a beast, and the board was the board. I said find a bear on that board and I'll pay double. He looked. Neat cattle. Sheep. Swine. No bear. So he decided Barnaby was neat cattle. Neat cattle, friends! Barnaby had at that moment a squirrel tail hanging from his lip and a smell about him like a tannery that had died.
Wilkins: Hezekiah counted coins like a miser and counted bears like a fool, and only one of those habits cost him a buttock. He made his mistake. He reached up and took hold of Barnaby's chain to hold the beast at the gate till I paid. You do not touch the chain. The chain is Barnaby's necktie, his purse, and his honor, all at once. Barnaby turned his big head slow, like a church door swinging, looked at that hand, and then looked lower.
♦ Bear roar, chain rattling hard
Wilkins: Hezekiah turned to run. That was his second mistake, because it put the broadest part of Hezekiah toward the bear. Barnaby leaned off the wagon and took a mouthful of Hezekiah's hindquarters that made a sound like a wet flannel shirt torn on a nail, and Hezekiah made a sound like a church organ falling down the stairs. The trouser seat came away entire, with a fair portion of the upholstery under it. Hezekiah went over the rail into eighteen inches of brook with his bare moon shining at the heavens and a red stripe coming off him in the current like a barber's pole. Barnaby sat back down, chewed thoughtfully on the wool, spat out a brass button, and ate the rest. Then he reached into the toll shack, took Hezekiah's dinner pail, cold beans and two pickled eggs, and ate that too, pail and all, or near enough. I picked the bail handle out of the dooryard a week later, in a condition I won't describe on a family program.
Wilkins: Well, I'm a doctor, of the dental persuasion, and a Christian of the irregular persuasion. I fished Hezekiah out, laid him face down across a saw-buck, poured a half-pint of my best over the wound, and he screamed loud enough to wake Loudon. I stitched his backside with silk thread and a curved needle, eleven stitches, and I charged him for the tooth-pulling rate, because by God there were tooth marks in it. He refused to pay. So did I. And that's how the matter came before a justice of the peace in Pittsfield.
Wilkins: The justice was an old fellow with spectacles on a ribbon and a gravy stain on his waistcoat that had been there since Jackson. Hezekiah stood throughout, for reasons the court understood. His complaint was toll evaded, one head of livestock, plus damages to trousers, dinner pail, and person. I answered that a bear is not on the board, and a charter is a contract, and you cannot collect a fee that was never written. The justice sent for the corporation's printed charter and read the toll list aloud, slow as molasses in January. Horses. Neat cattle. Sheep. Swine. He set it down, looked over his spectacles, and ruled that a bear is not neat cattle. Having seen Barnaby eat, I can testify he is not neat anything.
Wilkins: Then he ruled that a man who lays hands on another man's chained animal does so at his own peril, and that a toll keeper's backside is not a public way under the laws of New Hampshire. Case dismissed. He fined me fifty cents for the stitches, being as I had no license to practice upon the lower half of anybody, and Hezekiah paid me a dollar for the doctoring, so I came out fifty cents ahead and Barnaby came out a pair of trousers ahead. Barnaby rode free across that bridge ever after. Hezekiah would see us coming and swing the gate open from forty yards off with a pole he rigged for the purpose. They called it Barnaby's Free Passage. The only free passage that corporation ever granted that wasn't for church.
♦ Bear grunt, satisfied
Wilkins: Now, tonight I have a visitor from a far country: the Brushy Mountains of North Carolina, a land of steep roads and steeper fellows. They tell me he's run more jugs down more mountains than a Methodist has run sinners into the creek. Mr. Junior Vance, of Wilkes County. Welcome to Fort Wilkins. Mind the bear, he's had a cheese.
Junior: Doctor, I've been run by sheriffs, revenuers, and one preacher's wife with a hoe, but I never been sniffed through a window by a bear. He's got breath on him like a hog lot in August.
Wilkins: That's his manners. He's breathing on you to see if you're a friend or a ham. Now Junior, tonight is about the road and the toll and the getting around both. You folks down there had fords and bridges same as us?
Junior: Doctor, Wilkes County is nothing but creeks pretending to be roads and roads pretending to be creeks. When I was green, sixteen maybe, there was a bridge on the main road crossing one of the creeks that comes into the Yadkin, and the law liked to sit right there at the end of it, 'cause anything coming off the mountain had to cross it. But a half mile down there was a shallow place with a gravel bottom. My cousin Lonnie painted the fence posts along that ford white, only on the downstream side, so from the road you saw nothing but gray posts. Coming the other way, at night, no lights, you'd see white posts glowing like teeth in a dark mouth, and you steered between 'em. Lonnie painted 'em by moonlight with whitewash and a corn-shuck brush.
Wilkins: Teeth in a dark mouth. Now you speak my language. Did you ever miss a post?
Junior: One time. A cow had leaned on one and pushed it over. I went off the bar into water up to the doors, and my Ford started floating downstream like a drowned preacher.
Wilkins: Hold on, Junior. Where I come from a ford is a place you cross a river. Where you come from it seems to be a thing that crosses the river for you, and drunk.
Junior: Doctor, that's the most accurate thing anybody's said about my whole life. I got her out, though. Hitched a mule to her. The mule didn't want to and said so, loud, right in my ear the whole way.
Wilkins: A mule's the only honest critic in the South. Now tell me about tolls. Did anybody try to charge you to pass?
Junior: Not the government. A farmer. Old fellow up the Brushies had the best back lane off the mountain, cut around the whole main road. Sharp as a briar. He strung a log chain across his lane between two locust posts and sat there in a cane-bottom chair. A quart a pass, he said. Every runner paid him. So I paid him too, one fresh quart every trip, clear as you please.
Wilkins: You paid the man in moonshine.
Junior: I paid the man in spring water, Doctor. Right out of the branch behind my granny's house, into a jar, lid on tight. For a month he lined them jars up on his porch like trophies. Then his brother-in-law died, and he carried two of my quarts to the funeral to set the mourners up proper. He took a pull in front of the whole church and the widow, and he lit out of that graveyard looking for me with a corn knife.
Wilkins: Paying a toll in spring water is the most honest thing a moonshiner ever did, and that farmer never forgave you for it. What happened?
Junior: I paid him back double, the real thing, and he made me sit on his porch and drink the first one with him so he'd know it wasn't water. Then he raised my rate. Two quarts a pass. Said the first one was interest.
Wilkins: Ha! A businessman. He'd have run the Cheshire Turnpike at a profit, which nobody else ever did. Now Junior, I told our listeners about false-bottomed wagons. You ever carry anything under something else?
Junior: Doctor, I hauled hymnals.
Wilkins: Hymnals.
Junior: A little church down the mountain needed new hymnals, and the deacon, a fine man, worked on the side for the same fellow I hauled for. So we got the hymnals in big wooden crates. Top layer was hymnals. Underneath, packed in sawdust, was jars. Well, I come down the mountain and there's a roadblock. The officer says open the crate. Deacon's riding with me in his Sunday coat. He gets out, opens the crate slow as Judgment Day, picks up the top hymnal, opens it, and starts singing 'Amazing Grace' at that officer. Not just reading it, Doctor. Singing it. Two full verses, with a tremble on 'wretch like me' you could've hung a coat on.
Wilkins: And the officer?
Junior: Took his hat off. Stood there with his eyes wet. Then he said, Go on, Deacon, God bless you. And the deacon said, He does, son, he surely does, and climbed back in. Neither of us said a word for ten miles. Then the deacon said, Junior, I believe I was saved a second time back there, and passed me a jar.
Wilkins: There's theology in that. Grace was certainly amazing, and so was the proof. One more, Junior. The tight spot. A bridge, the law at one end, no ford, no back lane. What did you do?
Junior: There was a one-lane bridge, an old iron one, rattling, and one evening an officer was parked square at the head of it. No other way across for twelve miles. I pulled off in the laurel and waited. 'Bout an hour later, here come a fellow driving hogs to market. Forty head, give or take. I eased in right behind 'em, slow, and the hogs closed in around my machine like I was their mama. That officer watched forty hogs and one runner squeal across that bridge, and he would not step down into that herd to look. Hogs were rooting at his boots, one of 'em sat on his foot. He just waved the whole sorry parade on through.
Wilkins: Forty hogs and one runner, and the revenue man couldn't tell which was which. I've met revenue men who couldn't tell it in daylight. Junior, that's the same trick as our Yankee drovers. Hide in the herd. The toll keepers here charged by the head, so a drover's man would try to walk across bent over in the middle of the sheep and get counted as wool.
Junior: Doctor, I would pay good money to see one of your Yankee fellas bent over pretending to be a sheep.
Wilkins: You'd see it any Saturday night at the Pittsfield tavern, Junior, and you'd hear it too. Mr. Junior Vance of Wilkes County, North Carolina, ladies and gentlemen, as fast a hand on a mountain road as I ever had in my parlor, and a good deal politer than the bear. Stay by the stove, Junior. Barnaby's taken a liking to you. He's stopped drooling on your hat.
Junior: Doctor, that ain't drool on my hat. I believe he's been crying.
Wilkins: He gets sentimental about hymns.
♪ Banjo bridge, jaunty
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; brass bell rung twice
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♪ Banjo flourish and fiddle sting
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; low fire crackling under a pot
Wilkins: Segment the third. Copper and the craft. Before a word of it, I'll say what this program always says, and mean it. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is illegal under United States law, and everything on this program is for historical and educational purposes only. Now hear the old alchemist.
Wilkins: A still is nothing but a teakettle with ambitions. You have the pot, where the wash is heated. You have the cap or helmet atop it, where the vapor gathers. You have the arm, the lyne arm some call it, carrying vapor off sideways. Then you have the worm, a coil of copper sitting in a barrel of cold water, where the vapor gives up its heat and turns back to liquid and drips out the end into your jar. That's all a still is. A teakettle with a ruinous habit.
Wilkins: But first, the mash. You don't distill corn. You distill what yeast has made of corn. Cracked corn is cooked in water till it goes soft and starchy as a minister's handshake, and a little malted grain is stirred in so its enzymes turn the starch to sugar. Cool it to blood-warm or the heat kills your yeast. Pitch the yeast, cover it from flies, and let it work in a warm, airy place for some days till the bubbling quits and it tastes sour and dry. Now you have the wash, a weak sour beer of a few parts in a hundred alcohol. Strain off the solids and the wash goes into the pot.
Wilkins: Why does a still work at all? Because spirit boils cooler than water. Water boils at two hundred and twelve degrees by Mr. Fahrenheit's scale. Spirit of wine, ethanol the chemists call it, boils near one hundred seventy-three. Heat the wash gently and the vapor coming off is richer in spirit than the wash it came from. Low heat, steady heat. A roaring fire pushes everything over at once, good and bad, and puts a man's barn at risk, which brings me to fire.
Wilkins: What drips from the worm burns. It burns hotter and quicker than lamp oil and with a flame you can scarcely see by daylight. I've watched a man's sleeve go up from a dribble on his cuff and not know it till the smell of himself reached his nose. Never walk away from a running still. Keep the collecting jar well away from the firebox. Keep fresh air moving through the still-house so vapor never pools. Keep a bucket of sand and a wet blanket by the door. The pike charges a toll in coin. Fire charges it in skin.
Wilkins: Now the cuts, and this is where men live or die. As the run begins, the first drips are the foreshots, sharp-smelling stuff, like varnish or a ladies' nail-lacquer from a Paris catalog. Throw it out. Do not taste it, do not drink it, do not rub it on a toothache. That's the fraction most loaded with the poisonous light volatiles. The methanol is the devil among them, and it blinds and kills. Many careful old hands discard a full gill or more for every five gallons of wash, and they're generous about it, because methanol doesn't march out in one tidy rank at the start. Being stingy at the cut is how the graveyard fills. After the foreshots come the heads, still harsh, smelling of solvent and green apple. Set them aside and don't drink them.
Wilkins: Then come the hearts, sweet and clean, the part worth the trouble. You judge them by nose, by taste on the fingertip once you're well past the heads, and by watching the strength. Then, as the run wears on, the tails creep in: oily, wet-dog, cereal-smelling, and heavier. Stop collecting hearts there. Tails can be saved and run again with the next charge. A good distiller cuts early and honest. A greedy one cuts late, and his customers wake up with a head like a toll gate slammed on it, or don't wake up at all.
Wilkins: Why copper? Copper does chemistry. As the vapor rises and runs through the worm, the hot copper grabs hold of the sulfurous stinks and locks them down onto its own skin, so the spirit comes off sweeter. That only works on bright metal, so you scrub after every run. And the copper must be pure. Never a still from a salvaged boiler, never a joint of lead solder. Lead poisons quiet and slow, then all at once. Silver solder or a proper mechanical union, and nothing else. My own still was a gift of the hammer and this anvil.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That's me marking a cent, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., so whoever's been cheating me knows exactly whose copper they've stolen.
♪ Fiddle bridge, wistful
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; telephone-like ringing of a small brass bell, then the hiss of a recorded cylinder
Wilkins: Segment the fourth. Myths, slang, and the mailbag. Tonight it's a voice on a cylinder, all the way from Wilkesboro, North Carolina, which Junior tells me is so close to his own country that the dogs bark in the same accent. Spin it up, boy.
♦ Recorded voicemail crackle
Cletus: 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?
♦ Cylinder clicks off
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro! Rabbit, I'm guessing they call you Rabbit because you're quick, and not because of your family's private habits. Your uncle's question is an old one, so let me give you some new angles on it.
Wilkins: First, the hickory ash. Wood ash is lye in its Sunday clothes. Every farm wife in Merrimack County pours water through a barrel of hardwood ash to leach out the potash and boils it up with fat to make soft soap. Ash is alkaline, sharp enough to burn a child's hand. Throw a fistful in a thump keg of hot liquor and you get a gray, gritty, slippery brew that foams. A foaming keg can puke that froth up into the vapor line and foul it, and a fouled line under a fire is a mighty poor thing to own. What it will not do is take out the methanol or any bad heads. Those boil off before and during the run. Ash in a keg doesn't sort them out any more than a jail sorts out a sheriff. The only cleaner of bad heads is your own two hands making the cut and pouring that jar on the ground. Rabbit, ash in a thump keg is how you make soap, and the only thing it ever washed clean was your uncle's reputation.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Here your uncle has his toe on a true thing. Oak gives spirit color, tannin, and a woody taste. That's what a barrel does. Some old-timers chucked a handful of charred or toasted shavings into the finished jug, let it sit a season, and called it aged. But that's flavoring the spirit, not purifying it. It won't make a poisonous run safe. All it does is dress the poison in brown. And red oak is a leaky, porous wood; coopers want white oak for whiskey barrels for good reason. A few shavings in the jug, fine. A bushel in the thump keg is a waste of the woodpile.
Wilkins: So, Rabbit: partly true, mostly swamp medicine, and all of it served with love. Your uncle may keep his traditions as long as he keeps his cuts. Thank you for writing, Rabbit, and greetings to Wilkesboro and to that uncle of yours. Tell him a New Hampshire tooth-puller said his heart is right and his chemistry is wrong.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now let me knock down an old myth while I've got the punch hot. The blue flame. Every tavern from Pittsfield to Portsmouth has a fellow who pours a spoonful of liquor, puts a match to it, and pronounces judgment. Burns blue, it's good. Burns yellow or red, it's poison. Hogwash. Methanol, the blinding poison, burns with a pale bluish flame too, near enough the same as good spirit. The spoon can't tell you which you've got. A man can watch a beautiful blue flame dance in his spoon and then go blind by Thursday. If a blue flame proved good liquor, every swamp in New Hampshire would be a distillery and every will-o'-the-wisp a bartender. The only honest test of a jar is how it was made: clean copper, no lead, and the foreshots and heads thrown out.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That coin is for Rabbit. If he ever comes up the Suncook Valley Turnpike, it's waiting on my anvil with his name scratched on the back. I'd mail it, but the postmaster's still angry about the bear.
♪ Fiddle and banjo, gentle reprise of theme
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: That brings us to the end of the road, friends, and there's no toll on this one. If you want to learn the craft from a man who has done it, been caught at it, and laughed in the magistrate's face, there's the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. You'll learn copper and fire, mash and yeast, cuts and safety. Clean metal, honest heads, and how never to burn your barn down. My credentials as a teacher are two arrests, one bear, and a set of forceps, which is two more qualifications than the professors at Dartmouth have. Ask after the course at Fort Wilkins on Route 28, Pittsfield, or through the folks at moonshinestill.com. And remember, every word of it is history and education, and the law is the law, even when the law has a bear-bitten backside.
Announcer: Quick word before the lamp goes out! Seal every joint the right way with Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets from Moonshine Stills: stainless clamps, food-grade gaskets, airtight for life, just thirty-four ninety-five. Visit moonshinestill.com tonight! That's moonshinestill.com!
Wilkins: My thanks to Junior Vance of Wilkes County, who paid a toll in spring water and sang his way through a roadblock. To Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, mind your uncle. To Hezekiah Pound, wherever you sit, and I imagine you sit careful, no hard feelings. And to Barnaby, still the only creature in New Hampshire who's crossed a toll bridge free by order of the court.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme fades under wax cylinder crackle to silence