The Tin Peddler's Cart and the Copper Trade: How Sheet Metal Moved Through Rural New Hampshire
Follow the rattling red tin peddler's cart down the mud roads of Merrimack County, where sheet copper for moonshine stills was bartered for rags, hides and potash in Civil War era New Hampshire. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins shows how to spot fake copper with a file, a thumbnail and Archimedes' water bath, and tells how a peddler's lead-patched kettle earned Barnaby the bear's revenge. Retired revenue officer Captain Donald Vance brings three new stories from the history of distilling and the copper trade.
In this episode
- How Connecticut tinsmiths and Yankee peddlers carried tinware and sheet copper across rural New England
- Bartering rags, goose feathers, hides and potash for copper still metal in Civil War era New Hampshire
- The federal peddler's license under the Revenue Act of 1862 and how it taxed horse and cart
- Paul Revere's copper rolling mill, Keweenaw copper and where 1860s still makers got their sheet copper
- Testing for pure copper with a file, a thumbnail and Archimedes' water bath, plus why the lodestone test fails
- The lead-patched 'solid' kettle swindle, the dangers of lead in a still, and Barnaby the bear's revenge
- Captain Donald Vance's revenue stories: a peddler's cart on a hay scale, tea chest lead poisoning and a widow's kettle ledger
- Listener question: hickory ash and red oak shavings in the thump keg
Dr. G. G. Wilkins follows the rattling tin peddler's cart along the back roads of Merrimack County. He covers the Connecticut tinsmiths who started the trade, bartering rags, hides and potash for sheet copper, the federal peddler's license of 1862, and how to catch false copper with a file, a thumbnail and Archimedes' water bath. The low point is the scoundrel who sold him a 'solid' kettle with a lead patch, and what Barnaby did to that man's coat and backside the next spring. Retired revenue officer Captain Donald Vance tells three new stories: a peddler's cart weighed on a town hay scale, a still patched with lead from tea chests that left a blue line on a man's gums, and a peddler widow's kettle ledger that cost him forty nutmeg graters. Wilkins also answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about putting hickory ash and red oak shavings in the thump keg and knocks down the old lodestone test for pure copper.
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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 down, you great black heap of lard and grievance. That jingling on the turnpike is a tin peddler's harness bells, not your supper. Lie down. The last peddler you got your teeth into tasted of axle grease and regret, and you spent two days passing tin buttons.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across frozen dirt, a heavy body thumps against the log wall
Wilkins: There he goes. Four hundred pounds of bad manners, and he flops down like a Concord alderman after a church supper.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, sinners, and whichever revenue man is crouched in my blackberry canes with his ear to the chinking. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, where the copper is hot, the bear is hungry, and the dentist is in. Tonight we follow the tin peddler's cart, that red, rattling box on wheels that carried sheet metal, scrap, needles, gossip and a great many lies up every mud road in Merrimack County. I owe half my stills to peddlers and half my gray hairs to one particular son of a weasel who sold me a 'solid' kettle with a lead patch on its belly. We will get to him. Barnaby remembers him too. Barnaby remembers him fondly, the way you remember a good ham.
♪ Theme swells, then fades under
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♦ Wax cylinder crackle
The Red Cart On The Mud Road
♪ Short fiddle sting, a little out of tune
Wilkins: Picture it, neighbors. April on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, mud to the hub, and around the bend near Catamount comes a box wagon painted the red of a fresh-pulled tooth socket. Dippers, colanders, milk pans and tin lanterns hang off every side, clanking like a Methodist choir falling down a stairwell. On the back, a great bale of rags. Underneath, a hide or two going ripe. On the seat, a fellow with one eye on the road and the other on your wife's egg money. That is the tin peddler, and in my youth he was the only store most hill farms ever saw.
Wilkins: The trade came up out of Connecticut. The story goes that two tinsmith brothers named Pattison settled in Berlin, Connecticut along about the 1740s and started knocking out tin pans. The neighbors bought every pan they had, so the brothers loaded up and walked them out to the next town, and the next, and before long half the young men of Connecticut were tramping the country with tinware on their backs. Then came the carts, and the Connecticut man became a legend for sharp trading. You have heard of the wooden nutmeg. I will not swear any peddler ever whittled one, but I will swear that every peddler I ever met could have, and would have charged you extra for the grating.
Wilkins: Now, what is tin? Most of it is not tin at all. Tinplate is thin sheet iron dipped in tin so it will not rust, and in my day the best of it came across the ocean from the mills of South Wales, packed in crates. Your peddler's tinsmith cut it, folded it, soldered it, and there is your milk pan. Copper is a nobler beast. Paul Revere, the very same midnight rider, opened a mill at Canton, Massachusetts in 1801, and he is generally credited with being the first man in this country to roll sheet copper successfully. These days most of our copper comes from the Lake Superior country, the Keweenaw mines in Michigan, which have been pouring it out since the forties. It comes east by lake boat and rail, the merchants in Boston and Portsmouth sell it by the pound, and some of it ends up rolled and bundled under a peddler's seat, headed for Pittsfield.
Wilkins: And how do you pay him? Hard money hides under every mattress in these war years, so mostly you barter. The peddler takes rags, because paper is made of cotton and linen rag, and the paper mills will buy every scrap he hauls. He takes goose feathers for pillows, beeswax, hides, and potash. I have traded that man rags so stained from tooth-pulling that he crossed himself, and then he sold them on to a paper mill, which bleached my patients' sorrows white as a bride and turned them into somebody's love letters. Somewhere in Massachusetts a young lady is pouring out her heart on the ghost of a deputy's abscess.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain rattles once
Wilkins: Yes, Barnaby, I traded your old bedding too. It went for half a pound of solder. It smelled bad enough to have been worth more.
Wilkins: Now, why does a still-maker kiss the peddler's hand? Three reasons. First, metal. A man cannot walk into Concord and ask for forty pounds of sheet copper and a coil of tubing without the clerk looking at him the way a hen looks at a fox. The peddler asks no questions, or rather he asks all of them and answers none. Second, gossip. A tin peddler is a newspaper with a horse, except the newspaper only lies about the war, and the peddler lies about everything, including the horse. But he knows which deputy just bought his wife a new teapot and who paid for it. He knows which farmer in Chichester has a new copper boiler and no cows. He knows which revenue man stopped in Barnstead for pie. Third, and mind this one: the peddler can sink you. He will sell a widow a dipper, sell her neighbor the story of the dipper, and sell the parson the story of the neighbor, and charge all three for postage.
Wilkins: Washington knows his value too. Under that same Revenue Act of 1862, peddlers have to buy a federal license, and the fee goes up with how they travel: so much on foot, more with one horse, more with two, and so on. So Mr. Lincoln taxes my whiskey and the peddler's mare both. I am told he has not yet taxed the peddler's tin horn, which is the longest thing on the cart and the most often bragged about, and like most things men brag on, it mostly makes noise.
♪ Banjo transition, brisk
Gossip On Wheels, And A Man Who Weighed It
Wilkins: You may know I have been hauled in front of the Merrimack County bench twice for selling spirits. I will tell you a thing I have not told on this program. That first arrest came by peddler. I had bought sheet copper from a fellow, a talker, red whiskers, a laugh like a hinge, and he went straight down the turnpike to Epsom bragging at the tavern that Doc Wilkins paid him in coin and a jar. The deputy had only to follow his wheel ruts back up the hill. I have been arrested twice, and both times the sheriff knew where to find me because a peddler told him, and both times the peddler then sold the sheriff a new tin cup to drink my evidence out of. That is enterprise. I hate it and I admire it.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: But the peddler giveth as he taketh away. You know I strike my name on copper cents at this anvil: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. Why do you suppose those cents turn up in Gilmanton, Loudon, Northwood and clear over in Strafford County? Peddlers. I pay them in stamped cents, they make change with them at every farmhouse door, and every one of those coins is my advertisement riding free. My counterstamped cents have ridden on more peddler carts than I ever have. My name has slept in more farmhouses in Merrimack County than any bachelor's, and with a far cleaner reputation.
Wilkins: Now, I have a guest tonight who spent more years than I care to count chasing copper through the White Mountains and the Green: a retired federal revenue officer out of Manchester, a man who knows a peddler's cart better than the peddler's own mother. Captain Donald Vance, welcome to Fort Wilkins. Mind the bear. He is chained, but his opinions are not.
Captain: Thank you, Doctor. I mind the bear. He looked at me through the window just now like I was a pork roast that owed him money.
Wilkins: He does that to all lawmen. Captain, you have the look of a man who has arrested his own reflection twice and fined it once.
Captain: And you, Wilkins, have the look of a man who has been fined so often the county clerk keeps a pen just for your name. I have smelled your still-house from the Epsom line, and I would not call that evidence so much as weather.
Wilkins: Ha! Then we understand each other. Tonight is peddlers and copper. Tell me about one you caught.
Captain: There was a fellow worked the Connecticut River towns on the Vermont side, oh, some years back. Pleasant man. Cart full of pie tins, dippers, lantern frames, all hung up proper. And I passed him three times on the road before it struck me what was wrong. His cart did not rattle. Doctor, you have heard a tin cart. It sounds like a blacksmith's shop falling down a well. This one went by as quiet as a hearse.
Wilkins: A silent tin peddler. That is like a quiet Baptist at a barn dance. Something is being hidden.
Captain: So I followed him to a toll bridge where the town kept a hay scale for weighing loads. I told him, friendly as a deacon, that the selectmen wanted carts weighed that week. A lie, God forgive me. He drove on, and the beam said near fourteen hundred pounds. Fourteen hundred pounds of pie tins, Doctor. You could bake for the whole Army of the Potomac. Well, he had lashed every piece of tinware with wool yarn so it would not clank, and under a false floor he had bundles of sheet copper and a coil of worm tubing, all bound for stills in the hills above Bradford.
Wilkins: Wool on the tin. That is craftsmanship. I would have shaken his hand before I hanged him.
Captain: I did shake his hand. Then I took his copper. He said the wool was for his wife's knitting. I said his wife must be knitting a stocking for a church steeple.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks
Wilkins: Barnaby approves. He hates a quiet cart. He cannot hear his supper coming. Captain, tell me a darker one. My listeners like their stories with a little blood in them, and I do not mean the kind I spit in the basin.
Captain: Darker. All right. Grafton County, back in the hills off the Baker River. A man there could not get copper, or would not pay for it, so he patched an old kettle with lead. Where did he get the lead? Tea chests. You know tea comes from China in wooden chests lined with thin lead foil against the damp. He had a stack of empty chests from a store in Plymouth, peeled out the foil, melted it into his seams and patched his kettle with it. Ran his wash right through it, hot and sour.
Wilkins: Oh, Lord. Lead in a hot, sour wash. That is not a still. That is a slow coffin with a spout.
Captain: That it was. I came up the path with two men to smash the thing, and his wife met me at the door. I expected a broom across the skull. Instead she grabbed my sleeve and says, 'Thank God, Captain. Look at his mouth.' And the man pulled back his lip, and Doctor, his gums had a blue-black line all along the edge of the teeth, like somebody had drawn it with a pencil.
Wilkins: The lead line. Captain, I have seen it twice with these forceps in my hand. You pull back the lip to get at a bad molar and there is that dark stripe along the gum, and you know the poison has been in him a long while. It is the most honest thing about a lead-patched still: it signs its name on the drinker's teeth.
Captain: We broke that kettle in front of him. He cried like a child. His wife baked us a pie. The pie was better than the whiskey ever was, and it had not tried to kill anybody.
Wilkins: Hear that, neighbors? A blue gum line is the Devil's receipt. If you ever see one in your own mirror, stop drinking from whatever kettle you are drinking from and go see a doctor. One more, Captain. The ledger. I heard a rumor of a ledger.
Captain: You hear a great many rumors, Wilkins. Yes, a ledger. Up in the Green Mountains there was a peddler's widow. Her husband died on the road, and she took over the cart and drove it herself for twenty years. Sharp as a tack and twice as pointed. She kept a ledger, a fat calfskin book, of every copper kettle, boiler and coil she ever sold, in three counties, with names and dates and what she was paid in. Butter, hides, cash, whatever.
Wilkins: A map of every still in three counties, written in a widow's hand. Captain, that book was worth more than the county seat.
Captain: It was, and she knew it. I asked to see it. She said she did not show her books to gentlemen who were not buying. So I bought. I bought a dipper. She said that was a beginning. I bought a colander. She said that was an improvement. By the time she opened the book I had bought her whole stock of nutmeg graters. I own forty nutmeg graters, Doctor. To this day.
Wilkins: Forty! Captain Vance is the best-armed revenue man in the Green Mountains against an uprising of nutmegs.
Captain: Mock me if you like. Here is the end of it. I read that ledger and I found the outfits worth worrying about, the ones buying cheap copper-washed sheet, odd scraps and solder by the pound. The old men who bought good heavy copper and paid for it honest, I mostly let be. You can tell a good deal about a man by what he will pay for his metal.
Wilkins: And so you can, Captain. Will you stay through the next part and keep me honest on copper?
Captain: Somebody has to. Lord knows the bear won't.
♪ Fiddle flourish into a bright patent-medicine march
Ad Break
♦ A sharp, steady hiss of escaping steam, then a drip
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♦ Hiss abruptly stops. A single satisfied drip into a jar
♪ March ends with a banjo strum
Copper And The Craft: False Metal, And The Kettle Of Lemuel Crouch
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a coal shifting in the forge
Wilkins: Now to the alchemy, and to a confession. I am a man who reads metal the way a parson reads Leviticus, carefully and with a little horror. And still I was cheated. There was a peddler on the Gilmanton road, call him Lemuel Crouch, because that is near enough his name and a good deal kinder than what I call him. He had a teeth-out grin and a voice like warm molasses, and he sold me a ten-gallon kettle swearing on his mother's grave it was solid copper. I later learned his mother was alive and living in Belmont, so that oath was worth what it cost him. Lemuel Crouch's kettle was solid copper the way a Gilmanton horse trade is solid gospel.
Captain: Where was the patch?
Wilkins: Low on the belly, where the fire hits. He had let in a lead patch the size of my palm, smoothed it neat as a coffin lid, then rubbed the whole thing over with copper bronze powder in varnish so it glowed the same rosy color as the rest. I found it on the first firing. The fire touched that belly, and in the soot I saw a dull, sweaty gray spot coming through the color like a bald man's scalp through a bad wig. I put out the fire, took my thumbnail to it, and it gouged like cheese. Copper does not gouge under your thumbnail. Lead does.
Captain: And lead melts long before copper is even warm.
Wilkins: Just so. Copper does not melt until close to two thousand degrees by Fahrenheit's scale. Lead lets go at about six hundred and twenty. Put a lead patch where the fire licks and it will sag, weep and run, and long before it runs, your hot, sour wash is eating at it. That is the tea-chest man's blue gums in the making. So here are Wilkins's tests for false copper, and every one of them you can do on the peddler's tailboard before you hand over a single rag.
Wilkins: First, the color and the file. True copper is the pink-red of a healthy gum. Brass, which is copper with zinc in it, runs yellow like a sick man's eye. Ask the peddler, sweetly, if you might take your file to the inside of the rim, where it will not show. If he refuses, you have your answer. If he agrees, file a bright spot. Copper stays copper all the way through. Copper-washed iron shows gray under a skin thin as a lie.
Wilkins: Second, the thumbnail and the paper. Press your thumbnail hard into any patch, seam or lump of solder. Lead takes the mark. Then rub that spot on a scrap of paper. Lead leaves a gray streak like a pencil. Copper leaves nothing but your good opinion.
Wilkins: Third, and this is the alchemist's test, Archimedes. You know the old tale. The King of Syracuse suspected his goldsmith had cut his golden crown with silver, and Archimedes, sitting in his bath, saw the water rise and understood that every metal has its own weight against an equal bulk of water. He leapt out shouting that he had found it, and ran through the streets naked. If I jumped out of my bath on the Suncook Turnpike, the county would find it too, and fine me for it. But the principle holds. Copper weighs about eight and nine-tenths times as much as the same bulk of water. Lead is heavier, over eleven times. Iron is lighter, near eight. Brass is a touch lighter than copper. Weigh a scrap in air, weigh it again hanging in a bucket of water, divide the first weight by what it lost, and the number will tell you what the peddler would not.
Captain: I have done that on a farmer's kitchen scale, Doctor. His wife thought I was baptizing a bolt.
Wilkins: Fourth, the ring. Hang a sound copper kettle from a string and strike it with a knuckle and it hums a long while. A kettle with a lead patch gives a dead clunk, like knocking on a coffin with somebody in it. That one is a hint, not a proof, but a hint is worth something.
♦ Barnaby growls low, chain pulls taut
Wilkins: Now, Barnaby is growling because he knows what comes next. Lemuel Crouch came back up the turnpike the next spring, bold as a tomcat, ringing his bells and expecting to sell me a coffeepot. I had told the story of his kettle in every tavern from here to Concord, but nobody had told Barnaby to forgive him. Crouch pulled up close by the still-house window, where he had parked the year before, which tells you a peddler learns nothing. He climbed down. Barnaby rose up off the dirt like a black thundercloud with breakfast on its mind, and in two bounds he was at the end of his chain. The chain was long enough. I may have let it out a link or three that morning. I was oiling it, you understand.
Captain: You were oiling it.
Wilkins: Oiling it, Captain, as God is my witness and the magistrate is not. Barnaby caught Crouch by the tail of his frock coat, and the sound of that wool tearing was like a sail splitting in a gale, a long, wet rrrrip. Crouch lunged for the wagon seat, and Barnaby, missing the coat, took the next thing he could reach, which was the seat of Crouch's trousers and a mouthful of what was inside them. Neighbors, there is a noise a man makes when a bear has his hindquarter, and it is not a scream. It is a high, thin squeal, like a pig caught under a gate, and it went on for a full minute. Barnaby shook his head the way a dog shakes a rat, and the whole cart rocked, and every tin cup, dipper and colander on it came raining down onto the turnpike in a din like Judgment Day in a hardware store.
Captain: Good Lord.
Wilkins: The mule had had enough. It snapped a trace and went down the turnpike toward Barnstead at a dead run with the cart bouncing behind and Crouch flat on his belly across the seat, coat in ribbons, trousers flapping open like barn doors in a March wind, his bare arse bleeding a red streak along the road from here to the bridge. That mule did not stop running until the Barnstead line, and I am told it joined the Free Will Baptists out of sheer gratitude. Barnaby stood in the road chewing a wad of broadcloth and something pinker, then spat out a brass button and looked at me as if to say the man tasted of lead.
Captain: And Crouch?
Wilkins: Crawled back up that evening, holding his britches together with one hand, because there is no other doctor nearer than Pittsfield village, and the doctor at Fort Wilkins pulls teeth, sets bones and sews hides, man or hog. Barnaby had taken a slice off his hindquarter about the size of a silver dollar. I washed it with spirit while he howled, stitched it closed with eleven stitches of waxed linen, and charged him exactly what he had charged me for that kettle, to the penny. So the transaction came out square, though Crouch did not, and he has sat a little crooked on his wagon seat ever since. Barnaby is the only creature in New Hampshire who has eaten more peddlers' goods than he ever paid for, and he still writes a better contract than Lemuel Crouch.
♦ Barnaby grunts contentedly
Wilkins: Now, the craft proper, for this is a program of instruction as well as slander. First, the law: making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and all I tell you is history and education. Second, a man must know the work to understand the history. So.
Wilkins: Build your pot of good, heavy copper and nothing else where the wash or vapor touches. No lead patches, no tea-chest foil, no pewter, no soft solder in the joints. Rivet your seams and braze them, or make tight mechanical joints, and test them with water before you ever light a fire. A leak of liquor vapor near an open flame is how still-houses become bonfires and still-makers become a short notice in the Concord paper.
Wilkins: The mash: crack your corn coarse and cook it in clean water till it thickens like porridge. Let it cool to about blood-warm, then stir in a good share of ground barley malt, because malt carries the ferment, the diastase, that turns starch into sugar. Let it rest and sweeten. Cool it further, pitch your yeast, cover it loosely, and keep it in a warm, airy place where the gas can get out, not in a shut-up cellar where it can gather and kill a man. In four days to a week the bubbling slows and you have a sour, beery wash. Strain off the solids, because grain left in the pot scorches and stinks.
Wilkins: The run: fire low and patient. The copper does its alchemy here. The sulfur stink in the vapor is caught on the bright metal and stays there instead of going into your jar, and that is why you scrub your copper after every run. Then the cuts. The very first that comes over, the foreshots, you throw out. Every drop, no exceptions, no matter how bad the year. Then come the heads, which smell sharp and hot, like the glue pot or the varnish pot. If your whiskey smells like the glue pot, you are drinking the furniture. Set the heads aside, never in the drinking jar. Then the hearts come, sweet and clean, and those are what you keep. Last come the tails, which turn oily, flat and doggy, and you set those aside too. My own trick is to catch the run in a long row of small jars, number every one, and go down the row with my nose in good light before I blend a single drop. Your nose is the best instrument God gave you, and unlike your thermometer, the peddler cannot sell you a false one.
Captain: That's sound, Doctor. I never once raided a man who made honest cuts in clean copper and found anybody sick. The sick ones were always the scrap-and-lead outfits.
Wilkins: And that, neighbors, is why you buy your metal from an honest peddler, or better, test the one you have.
♪ Banjo turnaround, slower
Myths, Slang, And A Wax Cylinder From Carolina
Wilkins: Captain, stay a minute. We have a call-in tape. Now, for those of you new to Fort Wilkins, the call-in line is a wax cylinder, mailed to us by a listener, and this one has come all the way up from Wilkesboro, North Carolina, which means it has crossed more state lines than a Connecticut peddler running from his creditors. Let us hear it.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle intensifies, a hollow hiss, a distant voice
Wilkins: Here it is. Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro asks: '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 crackle fades
Wilkins: Rabbit, God bless you and your uncle both, and bless the Wilkesboro postmaster who carried a cylinder of moonshine questions without opening it, which shows more restraint than any postmaster in Merrimack County. Now, the truth. Let us take the ash and the oak apart, the way I would take apart a bad molar, root by root.
Wilkins: Hickory ash first. Hardwood ash is mostly potash, which is a salt of the lye kind. In my grandfather's day, New England farmers burned whole forests to ashes, boiled the ashes down in great iron kettles and sold the potash for hard cash to make soap, glass and saltpeter. It was such a prize that the very first patent the United States ever granted, in 1790, went to a man named Samuel Hopkins for a better way of making potash. So your uncle comes by his faith in ash honestly. Ash is strong stuff. Leach water through it and you get lye that will make soap out of hog fat and take the skin off your knuckles. But throw it in a thump keg and what do you get? A lye-water broth that the vapor bubbles through, a muddy keg, and spirit no cleaner. It does not catch the bad volatiles of the heads. Those come over first because they boil early, and the only thing that keeps them out of your jar is your own hand moving the jar at the right time.
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Here your uncle is half right, and half right is more than most uncles manage. Oak soaked in spirit gives up tannin and color and a woody sweetness. That is what a barrel does over a year or two. So a fellow who puts oak shavings in his doubler may well get a jar that looks more like store whiskey and tastes a bit more of the woods. But it is a coat of paint, not a new house. It does not take out the heads. It does not take out the methanol. Rabbit, your uncle tossing red oak shavings in his thump keg is like a man combing his hair before he falls off a barn roof. It improves his appearance, not his outcome. So it is not swamp medicine exactly. It is swamp seasoning. Make the cuts, throw away the foreshots, set aside the heads, and then flavor with oak all you like.
Captain: I'll vouch for that, son. I have found more ash in more thump kegs than I can count, and I never once found it doing a lick of good, only making a mess for the fellow who had to scrub it.
Wilkins: Rabbit, for writing all this way, I am striking a cent for you. Listen close, Wilkesboro.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There. G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., one bright copper cent, posted south to Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller. Put it in your uncle's thump keg. It will do exactly as much good as the ash, and it is prettier.
Wilkins: Now, a myth, and it is a peddler's myth, so it belongs in tonight's show. I have heard men all over this valley say the way to know pure copper is to touch it with a lodestone, a magnet. 'Won't take the magnet,' says the peddler, 'so it's pure copper, sir.' Rot.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: A lodestone will not cling to copper. True. It also will not cling to lead. Or tin. Or brass. Or zinc. Or a solid gold watch, or a peddler's conscience. All a magnet tells you is that a thing is not iron, and that is a short sermon. Lemuel Crouch's lead patch would have passed the lodestone test with honors. A lodestone tells you a kettle isn't iron, the same way a sheriff's handshake tells you he isn't a bear: true enough, and not near enough comfort.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And one more for good measure, while my arm is warm. There is the old saying that a kettle gone green all over is a sign of fine old copper, seasoned like a pipe. No, sir. Green means neglect and a dirty pot, and you scrub it bright before any wash goes in. Captain, any peddler's slang for the listeners before we close?
Captain: A few. In the Green Mountains, a 'quiet cart' was a smuggler's wagon, after that fellow with the wool. A 'Sunday kettle' was a pot that looked fine in church light and leaked by Monday. And a 'tea-chest man' was a still-maker who patched with whatever he found, and nobody wanted to drink his work.
Wilkins: Tea-chest man. I will use that on Lemuel Crouch till my dying day. Captain Donald Vance, retired revenue officer, keeper of forty nutmeg graters and enemy to quiet carts, thank you for coming up the turnpike and for not arresting me in my own parlor.
Captain: The night is young, Wilkins. Thank you, Doctor. And thank Barnaby for not eating me. Tell him he is the best-guarded woodpile I never raided.
♦ Barnaby grunts once, deeply
Wilkins: He says you are welcome, and he would have, too.
♪ Theme returns softly beneath
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Segment: Sign-Off
Wilkins: Neighbors, if tonight taught you anything, let it be this. Know your metal, know your peddler, and know that a smile on a wagon seat is not proof of copper. And if you want to learn this old art the right way, as history and science, with your eyes open and your thumbnail sharp, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. It covers copper and how to test it, mash and ferment, the cuts made honestly from the foreshots to the tails, fire and safety, and every lesson I learned the hard way so you need not learn them with a bear and a needle and thread. And remember, making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is unlawful in these United States, and this program is history and education, nothing more.
Wilkins: Thanks to Captain Donald Vance, to Rabbit Miller down in Wilkesboro, to every honest peddler on every mud road in New England, and to none of the dishonest ones, least of all Lemuel Crouch, who I hope is reading this over a cushion.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle deepens
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 into cylinder hiss