The Great Hay Barn Fire of Chichester: Insurance, Arson Rumors, and an Alibi Nobody Believed
One wet October night after the Civil War, a hay barn in Chichester, New Hampshire burned to the ground, and the whole valley blamed a hidden moonshine still, and Dr. G. G. Wilkins. With a mutual fire insurance agent and an Internal Revenue Assistant Assessor both sniffing the ashes, the 1860s alchemist cleared his name by sifting the ruins for copper still parts and proving that damp hay had set itself afire. It's true-feeling distilling history, frontier dentistry, and Yankee gossip, told from a log cabin with a pet bear named Barnaby outside the window.
In this episode
- How 1860s rural mutual fire insurance worked: premium notes, assessments, and partial coverage
- The increase-of-hazard clause and why a hidden copper still could void a farmer's policy
- Civil War era Revenue Act of 1862: collectors, assessors, and revenue men at fire scenes
- A midnight tooth extraction alibi and a bucket brigade at the Chichester barn fire
- Sifting the ashes for copper: how Wilkins proved no moonshine still was in the barn
- Spontaneous combustion of wet hay explained, a real cause of 19th century barn fires
- Retired revenue officer Captain Donald Vance's fire-scene investigation stories
- Listener voicemail: hickory ash, potash lye, and red oak barrels in the thump keg
Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells how a neighbor's hay barn just over the line in Chichester burned in the middle of the night. Gossip, a mutual fire insurance agent and the Internal Revenue's Assistant Assessor all blamed a hidden still, and Wilkins himself, whose only alibi witnesses were a drunk tooth patient and a bear. He explains how 1860s rural mutual fire insurance worked, how he fought the blaze in a bucket brigade, and how he cleared himself by sifting the ashes for copper and showing that wet hay had set itself afire. Retired revenue officer Captain Donald Vance shares new fire-scene stories, and Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's voicemail about hickory ash and red oak in the thump keg by way of potash lye and leaky red oak barrels.
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Full episode transcript
Segment: Cold Open
♦ 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 hairy carcass down, you four-hundred-pound sack of grievances. Nobody is coming up the turnpike tonight but the moon, and she paid her excise in advance. Lie down. I said LIE DOWN.
♦ Heavy thud, long bearish groan, chain rattles and goes still
Wilkins: There. He has sat on a pine cone and now he blames me for it, which is the whole history of the Republic in one bear.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, sinners, saints, and the fence-sitters who drink with both. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host, your tooth-puller, your blacksmith, and on two documented occasions, the Merrimack County sheriff's favorite disappointment.
Wilkins: Tonight we talk about smoke. The Great Hay Barn Fire of Chichester. Insurance men, arson rumors, revenue men sniffing the ashes like hounds at a hog-killing, and an alibi nobody believed. The alibi was mine. Before the night is out you will hear how I fought that fire with a bucket in one hand and a pair of tooth forceps still in my apron, and how I proved myself innocent with a sieve and an iron rod.
Wilkins: Later I'll be joined by a gentleman who has poked through more burned barns than any undertaker in New England: Captain Donald Vance, retired from the Federal Revenue service. Then we'll answer a voice on the call-in tape from Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, who wants to know whether hickory ashes do a lick of good in a thump keg.
Wilkins: Now the law, which I respect the way a cat respects a closed door. Distilling spirits for drinking without a federal permit breaks the law of these United States. Everything said in this cabin tonight is offered for history and education only. Mind it, or Barnaby will mind it for you.
♦ Barnaby grunts once, approvingly
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Before the smoke rises, remember the Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960, hand-built of pure heavy copper by Moonshine Stills. See it for yourself at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Fiddle flourish fades into crackling hearth
History — Fire, Farms, And The Mutual Insurance Men
♦ Wax crackle, a log shifting in the hearth, wind on the cabin chinking
Wilkins: Chichester. For those of you listening from beyond the hills, Chichester is the next town over, south and west of us across the line. Same Suncook River runs through it, same rocks, same Yankees, only they think themselves more refined because their rocks are slightly flatter.
Wilkins: It was the autumn after the war ended. That was a wet summer. It rained through haying the way a widow cries at a rich man's funeral, steady and with purpose. Every farmer in the valley got his hay in damp, because the choice was damp hay in the mow or no hay at all, and a cow cannot eat your good intentions in February.
Wilkins: There was a man over the line named Hezekiah Dow. Big barn, sixty feet long, new shingles, two horses, six cows, a yoke of oxen, and better than thirty tons of hay piled up to the ridgepole. Hezekiah was a pinch-faced deacon of a man who could squeeze a copper cent till the Indian on it hollered for mercy.
Wilkins: About two in the morning one October night, that barn went up like Judgment. You could see the glow from my window here on the turnpike. The whole sky over Chichester turned the color of a fresh-pulled tooth socket, red and wet-looking and angry.
♦ Distant crackle and roar of a large fire, faint shouting
Wilkins: Before I tell you what I did, you need to understand what came after that fire, because three kinds of vulture landed on Hezekiah Dow's ashes. The insurance man, the revenue man, and the gossip. Of the three, the gossip has the sharpest beak.
Wilkins: The insurance first. Most farmers in this county in the sixties don't buy their fire coverage from a fine city company with marble steps. They join a mutual. A mutual fire insurance company is a pack of farmers all agreeing to be robbed by each other in a slow and orderly fashion. You sign what they call a premium note, a deposit note, promising to pay. You put a little cash down. Then whenever any member's barn burns, the company assesses every member his share of the loss, and you pay it or they come after your note.
Wilkins: Mutual insurance means every farmer in the county is your partner the minute your barn burns, and your stranger the minute you ask for a loan.
Wilkins: Here is the clever part. Those mutuals won't insure a building for its full value. Two-thirds, maybe three-quarters, rarely more. Why? So no man can make a profit by burning his own barn. If your barn is worth six hundred dollars and the company pays four hundred, you lose two hundred dollars plus a winter's hay, and only a fool or a drunk would strike that match on purpose. Mind you, Chichester has its share of both.
Wilkins: Then there's the clause every farmer signs and nobody reads, the increase-of-hazard clause. If you bring a dangerous trade onto the insured property without the company's say-so, your coverage can go up the chimney with your barn. And what is the most dangerous trade a man can hide in a hay barn? A still. Open fire under a copper pot, alcohol vapor wandering the floor, and a man tending it at midnight with a lantern and a jug. So when a barn burns in this valley, the very first word out of every mouth is 'still.' If it was a still, the company owes nothing.
Wilkins: And if it was a still, Uncle Sam smells money. Since Mr. Lincoln's Revenue Act of '62, this state has been carved into collection districts, each with a Collector and an Assessor, and under them come the Assistant Assessors and the deputies, men paid to walk onto your farm and count what you've made. An untaxed still in a burned barn means back taxes, penalties, and a seizure. So the revenue man comes to a fire the way a fly comes to a cow pie, quick and certain of a meal.
Wilkins: The insurance agent came up from Concord the next afternoon in a clean collar, which is how you know a man has never fought a fire, only priced one.
Wilkins: Then the gossip. Gossip travels faster than fire in Merrimack County, because fire at least has to stop for wet wood. By sunup the story in every kitchen from Epsom to Barnstead was that Hezekiah Dow had a still in his hay mow. By breakfast the story said Dow bought the still from me. By dinner it said I'd been running it for him on shares. By supper I'd set the fire myself to cover my tracks, and in some versions I had ridden the bear there to do it.
♦ Barnaby huffs outside the window
Wilkins: Don't flatter yourself, Barnaby. Nobody's ridden you since that tinker in '61, and we buried most of him.
♪ Short banjo sting
Legends, Outlaws, And Runners — The Alibi Nobody Believed
♦ Wax crackle, slow drip into the jar
Wilkins: Now my alibi. Where was Dr. G. G. Wilkins at two in the morning when the Dow barn caught? I was right here at Fort Wilkins with my knee on the chest of Amos Tuttle, a cooper from up the road, pulling a lower molar the size and temper of a wolverine. That tooth had rotted so deep his breath could peel a fence. He came at midnight because the pain had driven him clean out of his wits, and he'd already poured enough courage down his neck to float a gundalow.
Wilkins: I got the forceps on it, I set my boot against the bench, and I pulled. That root came out curved like a pig's tail, with a sound like a wet boot coming out of a cranberry bog. Amos screamed, then passed out, then woke up and asked me who'd won the war.
Wilkins: That was my alibi. It had two witnesses: a cooper too drunk to remember his own name, and a bear who will not testify without a ham. That, friends, is the alibi nobody believed.
Wilkins: When I saw the glow over Chichester, I didn't run from it. I ran to it. Hitched the mare, threw two leather buckets and an axe in the wagon, and drove down the turnpike so hard my forceps were still swinging in my apron pocket. I left Amos snoring on the floor with a rag in his jaw and Barnaby watching him like a pie on a windowsill.
♦ Hoofbeats, wagon wheels on gravel, rising fire roar
Wilkins: By the time I got there the barn was past saving. Thirty tons of hay don't burn, they roar. The heat hit you thirty yards off like a slap from a blacksmith's wife. Rafters were coming down in long sparking sheets, and the shingles were lifting off the roof, burning, and sailing over the dooryard like flaming crows.
Wilkins: There's no fire engine in Chichester and there's none in Pittsfield either. What we had was neighbors and buckets. We formed a line from Dow's well to the house, and we gave up the barn and saved the house, the woodshed, and the corn crib. You wet down the roof of what you can still save, and you let God and the insurance company argue over the rest.
Wilkins: The animals. The oxen had sense and stood in the pasture bawling. The cows came out when the boy opened the tie-up. But the horses, friends, a horse will run back into a burning barn. Back to the stall it knows, straight into hell, because that stall is home. Dow's gray mare broke loose from the boy and went right back for the door. I tore off my coat, got it over her head so she couldn't see the fire, and led her out blind, talking to her the way I talk to a patient before I go after a wisdom tooth. Low and sweet and lying.
Wilkins: She thanked me by kicking me so square in the haunch I could read her shoe nails in the mirror for a week.
♦ Crash of a falling beam, crowd gasps
Wilkins: Now here's how I proved my innocence. Two days later, the Assistant Assessor from the district came out with a deputy, a long-nosed young fellow with a ledger under his arm, and stood in the ashes looking at me like I was a cracked tooth he was itching to pull. The Concord insurance agent stood beside him. And at the back of the crowd stood Gideon Pettengill, the tavern mouth of Chichester. That man's mouth is so big he could whisper in Chichester and wake the dead in Barnstead. He swore to all and sundry that he'd smelled whiskey in the smoke.
Wilkins: I said, gentlemen, I'm a blacksmith before I'm anything else, and I know copper better than I know my own wife, and copper is more faithful. If there was a still in this barn, it's still here. Copper doesn't melt till you get it near two thousand degrees. A hay fire might soften a pot, warp it, slump it, maybe puddle a seam. But copper doesn't vanish into Heaven like a Christian soul. There'd be sheet, or rivets, or lumps, or a green and black stain on the foundation stones where it lay. Fetch me a sieve.
Wilkins: So we sifted. Me, the deputy, and Dow's hired boy, on our knees in the warm ash with handkerchiefs over our faces. We found horseshoes. A scythe blade with the temper burned out of it. Strap hinges. A lantern frame. Forty-one nails I counted for the joy of it, a hay knife, and the brass buckle off a harness. We found no copper, not a rivet, not a bead, not a green stain on any stone.
Wilkins: Then I asked the boy, son, was that mow steaming in the mornings? He went white and said yes sir, it steamed like a kettle every morning since August, and it smelled sweet, like Pa's pipe tobacco and burnt molasses. I said, there's your arsonist, gentlemen. Wet hay.
Wilkins: Hay put up green and damp doesn't just sit there. It cooks. The little living things in it go to work like yeast in a mash, and it heats, and heats more, until deep in the middle of the mow it chars, and one dark night it catches. No match, no still, no Wilkins. I took an iron rod and drove it into what was left of the bottom of the mow at the far end, where the fire hadn't eaten through, left it a quarter hour, pulled it out, and handed it to the insurance agent. He grabbed it and dropped it so fast he invented three new words in the process, none of them Episcopalian.
Wilkins: And when we raked the rest open, the middle of the old mow was a black cave, charred from the inside out like a charcoal kiln. That's not a fire that walked in from a still on the floor. That's a fire born in the belly of the hay.
Wilkins: The Assistant Assessor wrote 'no evidence of distillation' in his ledger. The insurance agent wrote 'spontaneous combustion of hay' in his. Dow got his two-thirds and grumbled about the other third like a man whose wife only half left him. And then the mutual assessed every member to pay the loss, including yours truly, since I'm on the books of the same company. Eighty-seven cents. The first time in my life I've been billed for my own slander.
Wilkins: I paid it in coppers, every one counterstamped fresh at my anvil, so the company would remember who saved their barnyard.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That's how I paid.
Wilkins: Now, Gideon Pettengill. Pettengill wouldn't let it lie. A week after the fire he decided to come up to Fort Wilkins by moonlight to find proof of my still, so he could carry it back to the tavern like a cat with a dead rat. He crept along the back of the woodshed and came around the corner by the still-house window. He'd heard about Barnaby, but he'd heard it from himself, and he never believed a word he said either.
♦ Chain snaps taut, a thunderous roar
Wilkins: Barnaby didn't bite him at first. He hooked him. One paw, five claws, each one the size of a cobbler's awl, caught him in the seat of the britches and pulled. You'd think cloth tears clean. It doesn't. It goes like a sail splitting in a gale, and then you hear the second sound, which is the man underneath the cloth. Barnaby came away with half the britches and a slab of Gideon Pettengill's left buttock about the size and thickness of a pork chop. Pettengill made a noise like a bagpipe being backed over by a wagon. He ran straight into my rain barrel, bounced off it, and bled into his own boots till they squelched like a cow pasture in April.
Wilkins: Barnaby sniffed that slab of rump, looked at me with a terrible disappointment, and dropped it in the dirt. Even a bear has standards, and Pettengill was mostly gristle and lies.
Wilkins: I sewed him up on the anvil block with harness thread and a sail needle, eleven stitches, and he hollered so loud the deacon in Pittsfield village took it for the Second Coming and paid his tithe early. Pettengill left Fort Wilkins with half a britches and two-thirds of a backside, which by mutual insurance rules is the most he could ever have collected. I charged him a dollar for the stitching. He paid in Chichester shinbone tobacco and a promise to keep his mouth shut, and he has kept the tobacco.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks
Wilkins: Now, nobody in New England knows a fire scene the way my guest does. Thirty years ago a revenue man would've hung me from Dow's well sweep on Pettengill's say-so. This one would've fetched a sieve. Please welcome a man stern as a granite post and warm as a soapstone in a sleigh, retired from the Federal Revenue service out of Manchester, Captain Donald Vance.
♪ Brief fiddle welcome
Captain: Evening, Doctor. Evening to your listeners. And evening to that bear, who I notice is staring at the seat of my trousers with a professional interest.
Wilkins: He's measuring you, Captain. Pettengill spoiled his appetite for liars, so you're safe. Now Captain, you have the face of a man who has read every confession in New England, and the belly of a man who confiscated the evidence.
Captain: And you, Doctor, have the hands of a man who's pulled a thousand teeth, and the reputation of a man who's pulled a thousand fast ones. I'll say this for your sieve, though. That was proper work. A fire is a confession, Wilkins. It talks if you'll kneel down in the ashes and listen. Most men just stand there and shout at it.
Wilkins: You've knelt in a few.
Captain: More than I'd like. Here's one. Up in Haverhill, maybe ten years past, a sugar house burned in March, middle of the run. Before the coals were cold, every tongue in the valley swore the sugarmaker had a still out back of the arch and his own whiskey burned him out. I went up with a deputy and a sieve, the same as you. No copper. Not a rivet. What we found was his big iron evaporator pan, warped up like a saddle and scorched black on the bottom. That fellow had boiled sap two days straight, sat down by the arch to rest his eyes, and slept while the sap boiled dry. The pan got hot enough to light the floorboards. He wasn't a moonshiner. He was a sleeper.
Wilkins: And did you tell the gossips?
Captain: I told them at the meeting house after the service. It didn't take. One old woman told me she'd still pray for his soul on account of the whiskey he'd surely have made, given time.
Wilkins: A revenue man at a fire is like a crow at a wedding, Captain. Nobody invited him, and he's still the best-dressed fellow there.
Captain: [laughs, deep] That may be, Doctor, but the crow is the only one who remembers what was on the table. Now here's the other side of the coin. A fellow over in Vermont, I won't say which town because his grandchildren still farm it, had a woodshed insured for more than any woodshed deserves to be. It burned one night in November, and he came to me himself, hat in his hand, to report that a stranger had been running a still in it without his knowledge, and the stranger's still had burned his shed. He wanted me to put it in writing, you see, so the company would believe it was somebody else's hazard and not his own match.
Wilkins: The cheek of a Vermonter.
Captain: So I sifted. And there was no copper at all. Doctor, if a still had burned in there, I'd have found something. A man doesn't carry his still away from a fire that's supposed to have surprised him. So I took a walk around his place with a lantern, and in his root cellar, under two bushels of seed potatoes, sat a fine little copper pot, cool as a spring frog and dry as a sermon. He had carried it out before he lit the match.
Wilkins: He hid his still under the seed potatoes. That's the first thing I ever heard of that a Vermonter planted and didn't expect to sell.
Captain: He got nothing from the insurance, and he got to know me very well.
Wilkins: Now tell me, Captain, have you seen a still fire actually go?
Captain: I have, and it's a thing to see, or rather not to see. In Bethlehem one summer I came up on a fellow at high noon whose pot had boiled over and run hot spirit onto his firebox. In daylight, Doctor, a spirit flame is nearly invisible. Just a shimmer, a pale blue ghost over the ground, and a heat on your face you can't account for. This fellow was slapping at the air with his hat like a man fighting bees, because he could feel it but couldn't see it. Then his beard caught. A long beard he'd been growing since President Polk, and it went up like a candle wick.
Wilkins: Lord.
Captain: I grabbed him by the collar and the belt and put his whole head in the horse trough. He came up sputtering, with half a beard and all of his eyebrows gone, and the first thing he said to me was, 'I suppose this means you've seen the still.'
Wilkins: He beat at that invisible flame like a parson beating at sin: plenty of enthusiasm, no aim, and in the end it was his own whiskers that went up. Did you cite him?
Captain: I did. But I wrote it down gentle. A man who's just lost his beard has been punished by Providence already. The government only needed to send the bill.
Wilkins: Now, my gossip Pettengill swore he smelled whiskey in the Dow smoke. You ever have one of those?
Captain: Every fire has one. Over in Rumney, a barn burned, and a neighbor woman swore on her mother's Bible she smelled whiskey in the smoke, strong as a tavern floor. So I went and looked. No copper, no mash barrels, no slop. But in the loft we found the remains of a big stone crock with a lid, and inside it, burned black as Satan's boots, were about a dozen fruitcakes. The deacon's wife had been soaking her Christmas cakes in rum since September and hiding them in the loft so the deacon wouldn't know how much rum went in.
Wilkins: A smell of whiskey at a fire in Rumney is like a smell of sin at a revival. Everybody swears they smelled it, and it always turns out to belong to the deacon's family.
Captain: I didn't put the cakes in the report. Some things a man of the law keeps behind his teeth, Doctor, and you'd know all about teeth.
Wilkins: I'd know about yours. You've got a bicuspid on the upper left that's been talking to me this whole interview. Come back to the bench after the broadcast and I'll pull it for nothing.
Captain: Doctor, I spent thirty years trying to get you to pay the government, and now you're offering to take something off me for free. That's the most dangerous thing anyone's said to me since Bethlehem.
Wilkins: Captain Donald Vance, ladies and gentlemen. A man who'll fetch a sieve before he fetches a rope. Stay by the fire, Captain. We've got a word from our sponsor.
♪ Patent-medicine wagon calliope flourish, banjo vamp underneath
Segment: Ad Break
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♪ Calliope flourish ends on a cymbal tap
Copper And The Craft — Fire In The Still House
♦ Wax crackle, coals settling under a copper pot, low hiss of vapor
Wilkins: The Dow barn didn't burn from a still, but plenty of barns have. A still house is the only room where a man can be roasted, pickled, and preserved in one afternoon, and buried by Sunday. So tonight's craft lesson is the craft with the fire in it. I'll walk you through the whole thing the way an honest alchemist would, and I'll tell you where the Devil hides at each step.
Wilkins: First, the mash. A plain New England corn mash, the kind a demonstration still is made to show. Take eight pounds of cracked corn to five gallons of water. Bring it up to a boil and cook it, stirring, an hour or better, till it thickens like a porridge you'd feed a sick deacon. Corn starch isn't sugar, and yeast can't eat starch any more than Barnaby can eat a church pew, though he's tried. So you let it cool to about a hundred and fifty degrees. Your thermometer is your friend. If you've got none, it's hot enough to hurt your finger fast but not scald it. Then you stir in two pounds of crushed malted barley. The malt carries the enzymes that turn corn starch into sugar. Hold it warm an hour or so, and it'll go from paste to sweet, thin soup.
Wilkins: Then cool it to about eighty degrees before you pitch the yeast. Pitch hot and you'll kill the yeast. Pitch hot and stingy, and the yeast will live but starve and sulk, and a sulking yeast makes a stink. A starved or overheated yeast gives off hydrogen sulfide, the rotten-egg reek, more than a well-fed one. Feed your yeast and keep it comfortable, like a good dentist's patient, and it'll repay you. Cover it loose, keep the room aired, and let it work a week, till the bubbling stops and the cap falls. What you've got then is a wash, a beer of sorts, maybe eight or ten parts in a hundred alcohol.
Wilkins: Now the fire. Listen hard, because this is the part that burns barns. Alcohol vapor is heavier than air. It doesn't rise politely to the rafters like woodsmoke. It pours out of a leaking joint and slides along the floor like a snake looking for a henhouse, and if it finds your open firebox, it lights, and then it lights back to the leak, and then it lights you. So before you ever charge a still, you test every joint with plain water and a low fire. Your unions must be tight. Mechanical unions or silver solder, never lead.
Wilkins: The rules of a still house, as I teach them. One: never leave a running still, not for a jug, not for a privy call, not for a pretty widow at the door. Two: keep your condenser outlet and your receiving jars well away from the fire, upwind if you can, because the spirit coming off the worm is the strongest, most flammable thing in the room. Three: keep a bucket of sand and a tight lid by the pot. If spirit burns, you smother it. Sand, a lid, or a wet blanket. Throw water carelessly on burning high-proof spirit and you may scatter it and spread the fire across your floor. Four: in daylight a spirit fire can hardly be seen, as the Captain told you, so if you feel heat where there should be none, believe your face before you believe your eyes. Five: no hay, no straw, no oily rags within a long spit of the still. That's not superstition, that's arithmetic.
Wilkins: Fire under the pot low and steady. Haste runs a still the way haste pulls a tooth: you get it done fast, and you get half the jaw with it.
Wilkins: Now the copper, the alchemy. Most men think the pot is where the copper earns its keep. Partly. But the real work happens in the vapor path: the head, the cap, the lyne arm, the first turns of the worm. That's where hot vapor scrubs against bright copper on its way to the cold, and that's where copper grabs the sulfur stinks out of the spirit and holds them. So if you're building on the cheap, don't skimp on the copper above the liquid. And for the worm tub, run your coldest water in at the bottom where the spirit comes out, and let the warm water spill off the top, since hot water rises the same as a sheriff's temper.
♦ Slow, steady drip into glass jar
Wilkins: Now the cuts, the honest part. Ethanol boils at about a hundred seventy-three degrees. Methanol, the poison that blinds a man, boils lower, near a hundred forty-eight, and the light, nasty stuff comes off early in the run. So the first of the run, the foreshots, go in the ground or the lamp, never in a man. Be generous with it. A gill and better for every five gallons of wash, and when in doubt, more. The ground has never yet complained, and it's swallowed worse from Concord.
Wilkins: After the foreshots come the heads. They smell of glue and solvent and a cheap barber's shop. You set those aside, you don't drink them. Then the hearts, sweet and clean, smelling of the grain. That's the part a distiller works for. Then the tails, oily and wet-dog smelling, as the proof drops off. Those you set aside to run again. Catch your run in a row of small jars, numbered in order, and let them rest the night. In the morning, smell each one with a clear head and decide where heads end and tails begin. A man who makes his cuts by guessing in the dark at midnight, drunk on the head of his own run, is the man whose barn burns and whose neighbors go blind.
Wilkins: And again, for the ledger: distilling spirits for drinking without a federal permit breaks the law of the United States. This lesson is for history, for demonstration, and for the instruction of the curious.
♪ Banjo bridge, slow and warm
Myths, Slang, And The Listener Line
♦ Wax crackle, clunk of a cylinder being set on the machine, a hiss of playback
Wilkins: Now to the call-in tape. This one came a long way, from the hills of North Carolina, where they make liquor like they make sermons, loud and long and all night.
♦ Recorded playback, faint and scratchy
Wilkins: Here's what Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina wants to know: '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?'
♦ Playback clicks off
Wilkins: Rabbit, God bless you and your uncle both, and let's take them one at a time, the ash first, and the chemistry of it, because there's a little truth in it and a big lie.
Wilkins: Hickory ash is no mere dirt. Soak hardwood ash in water and you leach out lye, which they call potash. In the early days this state burned whole forests just to boil down that lye into potash and pearlash and sell it to the soap makers and glassmakers across the sea. Potash was cash money in New Hampshire before there was any cash money. So when your uncle throws hickory ash into a thump keg, he's putting lye into hot liquid. Lye is the enemy of sourness. It'll knock back some acid, so a sour run might taste a mite less sour and the old-timers called that cleaning.
Wilkins: But lye does nothing whatsoever to methanol. Not one drop. The methanol and the bad heads come off early in the run whether there's ash in the keg or a hymnal. And strong lye will burn the hide off your hands and blind you if it splashes your eyes. Make lye from hickory ash and drink it, and you won't need a dentist. You'll have no gums left to pull from.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now red oak. Here's a thing every cooper knows and few drinkers do. Red oak is full of open pores, running end to end like little stovepipes. Take a stick of red oak a foot long, put one end in a glass of water, blow in the other, and you'll make bubbles. That's why no cooper worth his adze makes a whiskey barrel of red oak. It leaks like a Chichester gossip. White oak has its pores plugged up by nature, and that's why spirits keep in white oak.
Wilkins: But red oak shavings steeped in hot spirit do give up tannin and color. Your uncle's run comes out tawny, with a little bite, looking for all the world like it's aged a year. Rabbit, your uncle's red oak is the same as a politician's promise: it adds a lovely color and holds nothing. Pretty doesn't mean safe. The only thing that cleans out bad heads is cutting them off and throwing them away.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now while my anvil's warm, two myths of my own. First, the blue flame myth. You'll hear it said, set a spoonful alight, and if it burns blue it's safe to drink. Hogwash. Clean ethanol burns blue, and so does methanol, the blinding poison. A blue flame proves your spirit is honest the way a blue coat proves a soldier is sober. The only safety is in the cuts.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Second, and this is the myth that nearly hanged me over the Dow fire: 'Hay can't set itself afire. If a barn burns, somebody burned it.' Wrong. Hay put up wet heats like a dung heap and can catch flame with no man within a mile. Drive an iron rod into your mow, leave it a while, pull it out and grip it. If you can't hold it, you've got trouble cooking. Don't go ripping the mow wide open with a pitchfork in a panic, either. A smoldering mow can burst into flame the minute it gets a big gulp of air. Get help and get water close, and get the stock out first.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Rabbit Miller, of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, this coin I just struck is yours. 'G. G. WILKINS / PITTSFIELD N.H.' on one side and an old Liberty head on the other, a bit flattened about the nose from my enthusiasm. Tell your uncle I respect his tradition, and he should keep the hickory ash for his soap kettle and the red oak for his woodpile. Thank you for calling the line, son. You're welcome at Fort Wilkins anytime, as long as you come up the front road and not around the back of the woodshed like Pettengill.
♦ Barnaby grunts, long and low
♪ Fiddle reprise, softening
Segment: Sign-Off
Announcer: A quick word before the Doctor bids you goodnight! When you're ready for copper that's built right, there's the Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper. Order today at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
Wilkins: Thank you, friend. And thanks to Captain Donald Vance, who has promised to sit still for that bicuspid after the broadcast and has not yet noticed I've locked the door.
Captain: I noticed, Doctor. I have the window picked out already.
Wilkins: That window's got Barnaby under it, Captain. Choose your poison.
Captain: Then I'll take the forceps. Goodnight, folks.
Wilkins: Now, if tonight's tale of fire and copper lit a spark in you, and I hope it lit no other kind, sign on for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you the history of the craft, how copper is worked and joined, how to make honest cuts, and the still-house safety I learned from forty years of singed eyebrows and burned neighbors. All within the law, all for knowledge, and every lesson comes with my personal promise not to pull any of your teeth unless you ask nicely.
Wilkins: Remember Hezekiah Dow's barn. Remember that a rumor travels faster than a fire, and a fire travels faster than a fool. Check your hay with an iron rod and your conscience with a sieve, and when the neighbors' barn lights the sky, ride toward it with a bucket. Not one of those gossips carried water that night, and every one of them carried a story.
Wilkins: Barnaby's fur is the most fireproof thing on this property, because nothing on God's earth wants to touch it. So he'll keep the watch tonight.
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 with antique warmth, fading into wax cylinder surface crackle