Stamped Twice, Spent Once: Wilkins and the Copper-Nickel Cent of 1857
In 1857 Congress killed the big copper cent and Spanish silver, and the hard new Flying Eagle penny chipped moonshiner and blacksmith Dr. G. G. Wilkins's steel punch. From his log cabin in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, with his pet bear Barnaby outside, the old alchemist tells this odd piece of American money history: coin counterstamps, pewter counterfeiters, Civil War copperhead tokens and copper stills patched with pennies. Retired revenue man Captain Donald Vance brings smugglers' tales from Lake Memphremagog, and Wilkins answers a North Carolina distiller's question about the thump keg.
In this episode
- Mint Act of 1857: the end of the large copper cent, the half cent and Spanish silver in America
- Flying Eagle and Indian Head copper-nickel cents, and why their hard alloy chipped steel punches
- Counterstamped advertising coins: how Wilkins struck each small cent twice to fit his mark
- Civil War copperhead tokens, the 1864 bronze cent, the two-cent piece and the ban on private coinage
- A counterfeiter with pewter dollars meets Barnaby the black bear
- Revenue officer stories: a still patched with old cents, a pistareen bribe and a deadly lead worm
- Smugglers' cove on Lake Memphremagog and a Wilkins-stamped penny found there
- Thump keg tips: hickory ashes, red oak shavings, and the silver-coin poison test proven false
Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells how the Mint Act of 1857 ended the big copper cent and the half cent, cut off Spanish silver, and put the hard little copper-nickel Flying Eagle and Indian Head cents in their place. The new cents chipped his steel punches, and he had to strike every small coin twice to fit his mark on it. Retired revenue officer Captain Donald Vance brings four new stories: a still patched with old cents, a cash drawer that smelled of sour mash, a pistareen bribe beside a deadly lead worm, and a Wilkins-stamped penny he found at a smugglers' cove on Lake Memphremagog. Wilkins also answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and knocks down the old belief that a silver coin will warn you of poisoned liquor.
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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! Settle your carcass, you overgrown hearth rug! He ate a whole wheel of cheese and a Grange almanac this morning, and he has been predicting weather out of both ends ever since. Lie down, you sinner, there is company on the wire tonight.
♦ Bear grunts once more, chain drags and goes slack
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, sinners and revenue men, and you know which of you is which. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host, Doctor George G. Wilkins: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, and the man your mother warned you about. Tonight we are talking about money, and the sad day it got smaller. We call the program 'Stamped Twice, Spent Once: Wilkins and the Copper-Nickel Cent of 1857.' Before we get into it, the fellow in the checkered waistcoat has something to say.
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Real craftsmen choose the Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960 and hand-built of heavy pure copper. See it at moonshinestill.com, or at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28. Moonshinestill.com!
♪ Banjo flourish fades
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Now then. Picture me eight years back at this same anvil with a coffee can of large cents at my elbow. You remember the old large cent, friends. It was copper near enough pure, a hundred sixty-eight grains, and as big around as a fat man's thumbnail. You could stop a door with a stack of them, or put a pair on a dead man's eyes and still have a pair left for a cigar. For a man with a steel punch and a name to spread, it was a perfect piece of metal. It was soft and broad and took a stamp the way fresh snow takes a boot.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. One blow and she was marked. Off she went down the turnpike to Barnstead, Epsom and Concord, telling every soul who touched her where to get a tooth pulled, a horse shod, or a jar filled for medicinal purposes.
Wilkins: Then came the twenty-first day of February, 1857, and Congress passed the Mint Act. They killed the large cent in one stroke, and they killed the half cent in the same stroke. The half cent died and nobody wore black, because nobody could find one to bury. It was worth so little the beggars sent it back. Storekeepers kept them in a cigar box as a curiosity, and that is the only honest use I ever saw for one.
Wilkins: In their place the Mint gave us a little cent of copper and nickel, eighty-eight parts copper to twelve of nickel, seventy-two grains, less than half the weight of the old one. The Mint shrank the penny to half its size and kept its value whole, which is the first honest trick Washington ever pulled on a Yankee. It had a flying eagle on its face, so folks called it the Flying Eagle. It had a pale, sickly look, like a clerk who never goes out of doors, so folks also called it a 'nick', or a 'white cent', or a 'nickel', long before any five-cent nickel came along to steal the name.
Wilkins: There was a widow on the turnpike, God rest her late husband, who told me she preferred the old large coppers, because a woman likes something with some heft to it in her hand. I told her that was between her and the Treasury.
♦ Barnaby snorts outside
Wilkins: Now here is the part your schoolmaster never told you. The same Act of 1857 took Spanish silver off the books. Up to then a New England farmer's purse was half Spanish. There was the real, which we Yankees called a ninepence, and the half real, which we called a fourpence or a fourpence-ha'penny. In New York they called the same coins a shilling and a sixpence, which tells you everything you need to know about New York. There was also the pistareen, a lower-grade Spanish two-bit piece worth about twenty cents on a good day and fifteen on an honest one. Most of them were worn so smooth you could not tell King Charles from a boiled potato.
Wilkins: So Congress said: bring us your tired old Spanish silver and your fat coppers, and we will give you shiny new cents. For a spell the Mint took a Spanish quarter for twenty cents, a ninepence for ten, and a fourpence for five. That was a shave, mind you, but a fair one, since half those coins were lighter than a revenue man's conscience. In May of '57 there were crowds outside the Philadelphia Mint with bags, buckets and wheelbarrows, all trading in the old money for the new. You would think they were giving away Communion wine.
Wilkins: Up here it went slower, but it went. By '58 my coffee can was half full of nicks. Folks were swapping their coppers at the store and at the bank in Concord, and the big pennies were getting scarce. My stock changed nearly overnight, and that brings us to my punch.
Wilkins: I cut that punch myself from a good bar of English cast steel. I filed every letter backwards by candlelight, hardened it in brine and drew the temper to a pale straw. Against soft copper it was a king. Then I set a white cent on the anvil, gave it the same honest blow I had given a thousand large ones, and...
♦ dull metallic clink, a tiny ping of a steel chip flying
Wilkins: ...it chipped. My punch went into that copper-nickel cent like a deacon into a dance hall: hesitant, and it came out bent. The nickel makes the alloy hard. Even the Mint in Philadelphia had trouble striking those things cleanly, and they wore out their dies faster than a Pittsfield mill girl wears out a Sunday ribbon. The nick took half my mark and threw the other half back in my face. The W in WILKINS came off, so for a week my coins said 'G. G. ILKINS', and I sounded like a fellow with a head cold.
Wilkins: There was a second trouble. The small cent is barely big enough for a flea to dance on, and my whole line, 'G. G. WILKINS' over 'PITTSFIELD N.H.', did not fit. So I struck the name on one side and the town on the other. That is two blows for one cent, and that is where tonight's title comes from: stamped twice and spent once, like every bridegroom in Merrimack County.
Wilkins: So I went over to Spanish silver while it lasted, and to whatever large cents I could still beg off old women's mantels. I cut a second punch, smaller and tempered softer, a shade toward bronze-color, so it would bend before it broke. Then in '64 the Mint changed its mind again and went to bronze, forty-eight grains and thin as a parson's patience. Bronze is soft again, God bless it, but by then everybody's purse was full of copperhead tokens. Those were private pennies struck by every tavern, sutler and patent-medicine man from here to Ohio. Congress got tired of the competition and in June of '64 forbade any private man to coin a cent or two-cent piece. The same year they gave us a two-cent piece of their own, and you can guess how well that went over in a town that cannot make change for a nickel.
♪ short fiddle sting
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Now, legends and outlaws. Coins draw thieves the way a privy draws flies, and I have had my share of both. Let me tell you about the shover of the queer. For the young folks, that is what we call a fellow who passes bad money. In the summer of '59 a gentleman came up the turnpike in a linen duster, nice as you please, and offered me two Spanish dollars for a gallon of my tooth-rinsing preparation. The light hit those dollars wrong. They had a gray, greasy shine, like the inside of an oyster that went bad. I am a dentist, friends, and I bite things for a living. I put one between my molars and it bent like warm cheese. Pewter! A shover of the queer brought pewter dollars to a tooth-puller, which is like bringing a wooden leg to a woodpecker.
Wilkins: I said, 'Sir, these are not money,' and he took off at a run past my woodpile. Now, any fool in Pittsfield knows where the end of Barnaby's chain falls, and this was no Pittsfield fool. Barnaby came off that woodpile like a black cannonball. The chain sang, and he caught the gentleman by the seat of his britches. I heard the cloth go first, a long tearing sound like somebody ripping a bedsheet for bandages, and then I heard the gentleman go. He let out a scream like the noon whistle at the Pittsfield cotton mill, only higher, and it went on so long I thought I could have sharpened a scythe by the length of it. When Barnaby let go, he had a strip off that man's backside the size of a pocket Bible. I would wager it was the first scripture that rump ever carried.
Wilkins: Pewter dollars rolled all over my dooryard, and Barnaby gobbled three of them before I could stop him. I took that gentleman inside, laid him face down across my dental chair, and poured a pint of good spirit on the wound. He sang a hymn in a key I did not know a man could reach. Then I sewed up his hindquarters with waxed linen harness thread, eleven stitches, the same as I would mend a saddle. He rode home sidesaddle on a mule for a month, and the mule was the only one of them with any dignity left. Three days later I found my three pewter dollars out in the pasture, polished up by the journey. That is the only counterfeit that ever came back to me with more character than it left.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain rattles proudly
Wilkins: Hush, you, nobody asked for your side of it. Now, those of you who keep score know the Merrimack sheriff has had me in irons twice. What you may not know is that on the first occasion he carried off my coin punch as evidence. Evidence of what, I asked him. 'Of your trade,' says he. So I told him to go ahead and prove that a steel punch is liquor. He kept it six weeks, trying to get it to confess. Then the county had to hand it back to me wrapped in a flour sack, and I struck the next coin with it on the courthouse steps.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Speaking of men of the law, I have one sitting across my anvil tonight. He spent a long career on the government's side of the fence, hunting copper in the hills of this state and in the Green Mountains. He has the decency to be retired, and he has the bad judgment to accept my hospitality. Friends, welcome Captain Donald Vance.
Captain: Thank you, Doctor. I will say this much: your bear looked at me through that window the way a hungry man looks at a ham.
Wilkins: He does that to all federal men, Captain. It is not personal, it is constitutional. Now, tonight we are talking coin, and I am told you have a story about a still that wore money.
Captain: I do, Doctor. This was up in the Pemigewasset country, after the large cents went out. I walked into a cellar hole and found a pot still that had been holed a dozen times by a careless fire. Instead of buying sheet copper, the owner had patched every hole with old large cents. He heated them, hammered them thin and riveted them on as neat as shingles. Every patch still showed a Liberty head. That pot wore forty Ladies Liberty like a Sunday bonnet.
Wilkins: Ha! That is a man after my own heart. Honest copper on honest copper.
Captain: That is exactly what I wrote down. The cents were near pure copper, soft, and they took the rivet without cracking. I asked him why he had not used the new white cents, and he looked at me like I had asked why he did not shingle his roof with cornbread. He said, 'Captain, those nicks crack when you so much as look at them hard.' He was right. That nickel makes the metal brittle under the hammer. I have never seen a copper-nickel patch that held.
Wilkins: Your man knew his metal. Tell me, did you take his still?
Captain: I took the man to the magistrate, Doctor, because the law is the law. But I will confess I took the still apart with more care than the regulations asked for. It seemed a shame to break up the only treasury in Grafton County that balanced.
♦ Wilkins slaps the anvil, laughing
Wilkins: Now I have heard it said that a revenue man's nose is like a deacon's ear: it can find sin in a cash drawer from across the room. Is that so?
Captain: It is more true than you would like, Doctor. A storekeeper in Woodstock, over in Vermont, wrote to my office to complain about one particular customer. This fellow came in every Saturday and paid for his molasses, his cornmeal and a sack of malt, always in brand-new white cents. Bright as fish scales, every one, and never an old copper or a ninepence among them. The storekeeper wanted to know where a hill farmer gets fresh Mint money every week of the year. So I went down, opened his cash drawer and smelled it.
Wilkins: And?
Captain: Sour mash, Doctor. Every coin in that man's pile smelled like a pig trough on a hot August day. He had been doing his business in white cents because his buyers were town men who got their change fresh from the bank. I followed that little trail of shiny pennies from store to store. A ferryman, a harness shop, then a widow who sold him eggs. It led me straight up a cow path to a still built under the floor of a sugarhouse. He had cut the sugarhouse chimney so the smoke from the still went up with the sap steam, and nobody looked twice.
Wilkins: Clever devil. And it was the pennies that betrayed him.
Captain: The pennies and his own nose. A man who works over a mash tub every day cannot smell himself, any more than a fish knows he is wet.
Wilkins: Now, Captain, you are known in these hills for treating a good craftsman fair and coming down hard on a dangerous one. Tell the folks about a bad outfit.
Captain: I will, and it is no laughing matter, though the bribe was. In the Connecticut River valley I found a man running his spirit through a worm he had made from old lead pipe salvaged off a cider mill press. Lead, Doctor. Gray and soft, with the joints daubed in more lead. Everything that ran through that worm carried poison in it. When I put my hand on it, he reached in his vest and offered me a pistareen.
Wilkins: A pistareen! Twenty cents!
Captain: On a good day. It was worn slick, so call it fifteen. I said, 'Sir, I have been insulted for more, but never so cheaply.' Then I went back to my wagon, got the sledge, and beat that lead worm flat as a griddle cake right in front of him. I told him he had come within a few jars of killing his neighbors. He could pay his fine, he could keep his pistareen, but he would never run another drop through lead while I was alive to come back.
Wilkins: Good. Lead has no place in a still, friends. Not in the worm, not in the joints, not in the solder. The Captain did that man a kindness with a hammer, the same as I do a man a kindness with forceps, and neither one of us gets thanked.
Captain: Now Doctor, I have brought you something.
♦ A heavy coin set down on the wooden anvil-stump with a solid clack
Wilkins: Well, I will be...
Captain: Read it out.
Wilkins: 'G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H.' One of my large cents, struck before the nicks came in. You can see by the depth of it, that was a young man's blow. Where in the name of Moses did you find it?
Captain: Lake Memphremagog, Doctor, on the Canada line. We raided a smugglers' cove on the east shore. The boatmen were running spirits north and woolens south, and they had no papers and did not want any. A man who wanted passage on the night boat showed the boatman one particular coin, and the boatman knew he was a friend. That coin was the password. They had a dozen of your coppers in a tobacco tin, and every one of them was the ticket across the lake. Your penny got around better than most congressmen.
Wilkins: Captain, I do not know whether to be proud or to be arrested.
Captain: Be proud tonight. The statute on that one ran out years ago. I believe a man ought to have his own coin back.
Wilkins: Then I shall spend it on you, Captain, at once, as soon as I find a tavern fool enough to let a revenue man in. Stay with us, friends. After this word we will talk copper and the craft, and the Captain will keep his seat.
♪ Brisk patent-medicine wagon calliope and banjo vamp
Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen! Lean in close and mind your pockets, because tonight I bring you the finest copper this side of the Mint! If you appreciate authentic American craftsmanship, look no further than Moonshine Stills, proud home of the Flame-Flow Still, the flagship of the line, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960! This is no tinker's kettle and no patched-up pot! The Flame-Flow is engineered from heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper, refined until it shines like a new cent and rings like a church bell. It is joined with precision CNC-machined brass unions, cut true by machine, so it fits tight and seals clean with no leaky joints and no guesswork. It is designed to maximize convective circulation, so the heat rolls evenly through the vessel and delivers unmatched purity for essential oils, herbal tinctures, and traditional distillation demonstrations. Your own Flame-Flow is just eight hundred ninety-nine dollars, built to outlast your grandchildren's grandchildren! Go to moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com, at the page https://moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still. Or come see her gleaming in person at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, where the bear will greet you and the Doctor will not bite. Don't settle for scrap, friends! Order the Flame-Flow today at moonshinestill.com!
♪ Calliope flourish ends with a cymbal clash
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, slow drip into jar
Wilkins: Copper and the craft, friends. I will say first, as I always do, that making distilled spirits to drink without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and everything on this program is for history and education. The Captain is nodding, so you know I said it right.
Captain: You said it right, Doctor.
Wilkins: Tonight's lesson grows out of my punch trouble, so let me start with the metal. A still pot is raised from sheet copper with a hammer, blow by blow, over a stake. As you hammer copper it grows hard and springy. Coppersmiths call that work-hardening, and keep at it and she will crack on you. So you heat her to a dull glow in the forge. Here is the trick that fools every blacksmith who works mostly iron: copper softens whether you quench it in the trough or let it cool on the bench. Steel you must handle careful, but copper forgives you. Anneal, hammer, anneal, hammer, a hundred times for one good pot. That is why I liked the old large cents. They were soft copper, already annealed by the Mint, and they took a punch kindly. The copper-nickel cent is a different beast. The nickel stiffens the copper the way starch stiffens a collar, and no amount of heat in my little forge would make it as kind as plain copper.
Captain: The man with the penny patches knew that by instinct.
Wilkins: He did. Now the mash, step by step, the way it was done in this valley. First, take cracked corn, about a peck for every five gallons of water, and bring it to near boiling. Stir it like you owe it money until it goes thick as porridge, so the starch opens up. Second, let it cool down to a little hotter than you would bathe a baby in, about a hundred and fifty degrees. Then stir in a good measure of malted barley, a sixth or a fifth part of the grain. The malt has a virtue in it that turns the corn starch to sugar, but only in that warm range. Too hot kills it, and too cool makes it lazy. Hold it there an hour or two, covered, and it will go from paste to sweet gruel. Third, cool it to blood warm, about eighty degrees, before you pitch your yeast. Hot mash kills yeast the way hot soup kills a dinner party. Fourth, let it work four to seven days in a warm room with air moving through it. That mash breathes off a gas that will lay a man down dead in a closed cellar, so keep the door open. When the bubbling stops and the cap falls, you have a wash, a weak, sour beer.
Wilkins: Now the still. Strain the wash so the solids do not scorch. Fill the pot no more than three quarters full, because a still that boils over is a fire looking for a barn. Fire low, always. Heat it slow and steady, never a roaring blaze, and never with a lamp or a pipe anywhere near the joints. That vapor will burn, and if it leaks it will burn you and the house both.
Wilkins: When she starts to run, catch it in small jars, one after the other, and number them like a clerk. The first splash is the foreshots. Throw it out. Do not drink it, do not rinse your mouth with it, do not give it to your mother-in-law, however tempting. Then come the heads, sharp and solvent-smelling, like a paint shop. Those get thrown out too, or saved for cleaning, never for drinking. And be generous with that cut. Here is a thing most of the old-timers had wrong. Wood alcohol boils at about a hundred forty-eight degrees and good spirit at about a hundred seventy-three, but the poison does not all jump out in one tidy first spoonful. It smears out across the early run. And if your mash was apple pomace or other fruit, there is more of it, because the pectin in fruit skins and pulp breeds wood alcohol where plain corn does not. So when in doubt, cut it out. Then the hearts, sweet and clean. That is what you keep. Last come the tails, oily and dull, smelling like a wet dog in a woodshed. Set those aside to run again.
Wilkins: The copper does more than hold the stuff. Bright copper takes the stinking sulfur out of the vapor, which is why a copper still makes sweeter spirit. But only bright copper does it, so scrub your still after every run.
Captain: Doctor, in all my years I never once found a man poisoned by spirit that had been cut honest out of a clean copper pot. Every grave I stood beside came from lead, from greed, or from a man too lazy to throw out his heads.
Wilkins: Amen, Captain. Greed and laziness, which also describes the county assessor's office.
♪ Fiddle reel, brief
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Now to the listener line. We have a talking cylinder sent all the way up from North Carolina, so let us wind the crank and hear it.
♦ Phonograph crank turning, needle hiss, distant 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?
♦ Needle lifts, crackle stops
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Rabbit, God bless you and the whole Yadkin River valley, where they make spirit the way we make excuses, in great volume and with real devotion. Here is your answer, and I will give your uncle half a point before I take the rest away.
Wilkins: Hickory ash is mostly potash, the same stuff your grandmother leached in a barrel to make lye for soap. It is an alkali. Put an alkali into sour low wines and it will grab some of the sour acids and hold them in the pot as salts, so they do not ride over with the spirit. That is the grain of truth. A man who tried it once and got a less sour jar would swear by it for life. But Rabbit, wood alcohol is not an acid. The ash does not grab it, does not cook it out, and does not cleanse it. That poison rides right on through. Your uncle's hickory ash is like a sheriff at a barn dance: it does settle down some of the sour ones, but it never catches the real villain. The only cure for bad heads is to cut them off and throw them away.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Oak gives up color and tannin and a woody taste, so the spirit comes out of a doubler stuffed with shavings looking older than it is. That is not cleaning, that is dressing up. And red oak in particular? Every cooper in New England will laugh at you. Red oak has open pores right through the grain. You can blow pipe smoke through a stick of it like a straw. That is why tight coopers use white oak for liquor barrels. Red oak will hold whiskey the way a Pittsfield politician holds a secret: through every pore at once. So Rabbit, your uncle was half chemist and half swamp doctor, and that is a better average than most doctors I know. Give him my regards, and a pair of good shears for making cuts.
♦ Barnaby grunts approvingly
Wilkins: Now while we are in the myth business, let us knock one down that fits tonight's coins. I have heard men all up and down this turnpike say: drop a silver coin in your jug, and if the liquor is poison, the silver will turn black. I have watched grown men do it with a Spanish dollar, with a ninepence, even with a silver spoon off the Sunday table.
♦ A silver coin plinks into a glass jar
Wilkins: Friends, it is bunkum. Silver blackens from sulfur. That is why your spoon goes dark after boiled eggs and why your grandmother's tea set turns gray in a coal-smoke parlor. A silver coin in your jug will tell you whether you have eaten eggs, and very little else, which makes it about as useful as a Merrimack selectman. It will not show you wood alcohol, and it will not show you lead. A jug can kill you clean and leave the coin as bright as a bride. My sister-in-law tested her husband's whiskey with a silver spoon for twenty years, and the spoon outlived him.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: The same goes for biting. Biting a coin tells you if it is gold, and biting your liquor tells you if you are a fool. The only test that keeps you alive is the one you do at the still: honest cuts, clean copper, and no lead anywhere in the works.
Captain: I have pulled more silver coins out of bad jugs than I can count, Doctor, and every one of them was shining.
Wilkins: There you have it from the federal government itself, friends, which is the first time the federal government ever told you anything useful for free.
♪ Banjo theme rises softly
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! The Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, heavy pure copper for real craftsmen. Go to moonshinestill.com today, or visit the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield. That's moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: That about pulls the last tooth for tonight. Captain Donald Vance, thank you for sitting at my anvil, for not arresting me, and for bringing me my penny home from Canada.
Captain: The pleasure was mine, Doctor. Keep that bear on a short chain.
Wilkins: Shorter than the county's memory, Captain. Friends, if you want to learn the craft the right way, sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I will teach you mashing, cuts, copper care, fire safety and the history behind all of it, with every lesson following the law of the land. Ask after it at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield, or at moonshinestill.com. Rabbit Miller down in Wilkesboro, this one is for you and your uncle. Barnaby, say goodnight to the people.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks
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 into wax cylinder crackle