The Amoskeag Mills Pay Window: How Manchester Wages Reached Pittsfield Pockets
Follow 1860s mill wages from the Amoskeag Mills pay window in Manchester, New Hampshire, up the Suncook Valley Turnpike to a moonshiner's counter in Pittsfield, where Alchemist G. G. Wilkins weighs every coin on a brass balance scale before the customer finishes talking. This episode digs into Civil War era money history: greenbacks, postage currency, copper merchant tokens, and company scrip, and how payday weekends kept the copper still running. Appalachian slang historian Clara Higgins shares stories of tokens traded at a discount and the old names for payday whiskey, and the call-in segment covers thump keg distilling tips.
In this episode
- How Amoskeag Mills wages traveled from Manchester to Pittsfield, New Hampshire farms in the Civil War years
- Greenbacks, the 1862 Legal Tender Act, postage currency, and fractional currency explained
- Civil War merchant tokens, copper store cards, and company scrip, and why Congress banned them in 1864
- Weighing silver half dollars, bronze cents, and large cents on a balance scale to catch counterfeits
- Mill girls, the cotton famine, and Amoskeag's Springfield rifle-musket contracts
- Clara Higgins on discounted tokens, whiskey priced by purse weight, and old Appalachian payday whiskey slang
- Call-in: hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and why the blue-flame moonshine test is a myth
- Payday weekend moonshine trade on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, with Barnaby the pet bear
Dr. G. G. Wilkins follows mill wages from the Amoskeag counting-room window in Manchester out to the farms of the Suncook Valley during the war years. He covers greenbacks, postage currency, private copper tokens and scrip, and his habit of putting a customer's coins on the balance scale before the customer stops talking. Appalachian slang historian Clara Higgins tells new stories about trading tokens at a discount, a great-uncle who priced his jugs by the weight of the buyer's purse, and the old names for payday whiskey. In the call-in segment Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and he knocks down the blue-flame test at the anvil.
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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 down, you four-hundred-pound sack of fleas and bad intentions. It is not payday for bears. Payday for bears is when a revenue man trips over your chain, and that has not happened since the frost went out of the ground.
♦ Barnaby huffs, chain drags across frozen mud, a heavy thump as he flops down
Wilkins: There. Lie down and lick whatever it is you lick. Lord knows nobody else will.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, mill hands, farm wives, and whatever deputy is crouched in my lilac bush tonight writing notes with a stub of pencil. Welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. I am your host, tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor, and the man your mother warned you about after she finished buying from him.
Wilkins: Tonight we talk about money. Not the money the Treasury prints, and not the money the parson says is the root of all evil. I mean Manchester money. The wages that came out of the Amoskeag Mills pay window in a brown envelope, rode up the turnpike in a farm girl's apron pocket, and ended up, by the grace of God and a good balance scale, on my counter in Pittsfield.
♪ Theme fades under crackle
Announcer: A quick word, friends! The Flame-Flow Still, protected by United States Patent 10,561,960, is heavy-gauge pure copper made by hand for honest craftsmen. See it at moonshinestill.com, that's moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax crackle swells, then settles
♪ Brief fiddle sting, segment one
Wilkins: Now. To understand why a Pittsfield man got rich in the war years, if he got rich at all, you have to look twenty-odd miles south, down where the Merrimack River throws itself over the Amoskeag Falls like a drunk going down the cellar stairs.
Wilkins: The Amoskeag Manufacturing Company was incorporated in 1831. Those Boston gentlemen did not just build a mill. They built a whole town to fit it, the way a tailor cuts a coat to fit a fat alderman. They laid out the streets, the canals, the long brick mills, and rows upon rows of company boardinghouses. Manchester is a company town wearing a city's Sunday hat.
Wilkins: And who worked those looms? For years it was our own daughters. Farm girls from Pittsfield, Barnstead, Gilmanton, Loudon, from every stony hill farm in New Hampshire and half of Vermont. They went down in calico and came back in Manchester bonnets, and in between they stood thirteen hours a day in a room so loud a girl could curse the overseer to his face and he would only see her lips move and think she was praying.
♦ Distant rhythmic clatter of power looms, faint and muffled, as if remembered
Wilkins: Here is the part the preachers leave out of their sermons on idle hands. Those girls sent money home. Regular as the Concord stage. A Gilmanton family paid off a farm mortgage on one daughter's loom wages. I knew a Pittsfield man whose two sisters kept him at Dartmouth College, and he came home with Latin, a cough, and no idea how to milk a cow. Money well spent, the sisters said, and they were lying, but lying sweetly.
Wilkins: A mill girl sent her wages home to pay off the mortgage, and her brother spent the rest proving the mortgage was the sober half of the family.
Wilkins: Then came the war. And with the war came the cotton famine. No Southern cotton, no cloth. All up and down the Merrimack the mills ran short time or shut their gates, and the girls came home with empty trunks and long faces. But Amoskeag was cleverer than most. The company had machine shops, and machine shops can make more than looms. They took a government contract and turned out Springfield-pattern rifle-muskets, tens of thousands of them, which I find poetic. The same company that made the ticking on your mattress made the musket that kept the Rebel from sleeping on it.
Wilkins: Amoskeag ticking. You know it. Blue and white stripe, tough as a mule's hide, and the most honest cloth in New England. Remember the ticking, friends, because it comes back into tonight's story wrapped around something wet.
Wilkins: Now the money. Pay came at the counting-room window. A long line of hands, caps in their fists, a clerk behind the glass with ink on his fingers and a face like a pickled beet. The paymaster's window in Manchester is the only window in New Hampshire where a man stands in line to be relieved, and he goes home lighter by Monday either way.
Wilkins: A mill agent counts his money with both hands and his hands' money with a third hand nobody sees. Fines for lateness. Fines for talking. Board docked off the top. By the time a girl reached the front of the line, her envelope had been lighter than a deacon's conscience.
Wilkins: But what was in that envelope? There's your history lesson. At the end of December 1861 the banks stopped paying out gold. By the summer of 1862, silver had run off like a hired man on a hot day. Every man with a half dollar in his sock kept it there. Even the little nickel cents vanished into teapots and mattresses.
Wilkins: So Congress printed. The Legal Tender Act of February 1862 gave us the greenback. Then that August came the postage currency, little paper notes for five cents, ten, twenty-five, fifty. After that came the fractional currency of 1863. Postage currency was so small you could lose a week's wages in your mustache, and some of Pittsfield's men did. I once found eleven cents in Hezekiah Drake's beard while pulling his eyetooth, and he accused me of planting it.
♦ Wilkins chuckles, a jar is set down on a plank counter
Wilkins: And the greenback slid against gold like a sledge on a greased hill. In July of 1864 it took about two hundred and eighty-five paper dollars to buy a hundred in gold. A greenback in 1864 was worth about what a promise from a horse trader is worth: something, on a good day, if you squint.
Wilkins: So the merchants made their own money. Copper and bronze tokens, cent-sized, millions upon millions of them, stamped with a grocer's name or a flag or Liberty's head or some patriotic slogan. A merchant's tin token is a love letter that says I will be faithful to you, but only at my store. And some mills and company stores paid in tickets and scrip good only across their own counters. Congress got sick of it, and in 1864 it outlawed private one- and two-cent pieces meant to pass as money. I keep my anvil, and my punch, and my opinions, and I will say no more about it with a deputy in the lilacs.
Wilkins: Now here is why payday weekends were the best selling days of the whole season in the Suncook Valley. When a Manchester girl came home, or a brother rode down to fetch her trunk, or a mill hand took the Concord cars and then the stage out the turnpike, he came up Route 28 on Saturday with a month's wages warm in his pocket and nothing yet spent on sin. That's the whole trade. Molasses, nails, calico, a new set of teeth, and a jar of something clear to soften the news that the price of everything had doubled.
Wilkins: Manchester money came up the turnpike on Saturday and went back down on Monday in the pocket of whoever sold the most whiskey and the fewest lies, and I am proud to say I sold plenty of the first.
Wilkins: And now, the confession you have all been waiting for. Yes. I weigh your coins before you are done talking.
♦ Small brass balance scale pans clink, a coin settles
Wilkins: You come in, you say, Doctor, my wife's mother has a molar the size of a hen's egg and she bit the preacher and, clink, your half dollar is already on the pan before you get to the preacher. Since 1853 a silver half dollar has weighed one hundred ninety-two grains. A clipped one is light. A sweated one is light. A lead-cored counterfeit out of some Boston cellar is heavy in the wrong places and rings dead as a church bell full of mud. I weigh a man's coin before he finishes his sentence, because the coin has never once lied to me and the man has never once stopped.
Wilkins: And the new bronze cent of 1864 weighs forty-eight grains, two-thirds of the seventy-two-grain nickel cent it replaced. Blindfold me and I'll sort a jar of them by feel. The old copper large cent, the kind I've punched on my anvil a thousand times, is a fat one hundred sixty-eight grains. My balance scale has heard more confessions than the Catholic priest in Manchester and handed out stiffer penance.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, chain rattles once
Wilkins: Barnaby agrees. Barnaby always agrees when he hears a coin, because he thinks it is a ham bone falling.
♪ Banjo roll, segment two
Wilkins: Segment two. Legends, outlaws, and runners. And tonight the legend is a fellow named Asa Tilton, who ran my jars down to Manchester boardinghouses and ran mill money back up, and who had the face of a choirboy and the morals of a weasel in a henhouse.
Wilkins: Asa's trick was the ticking. He'd buy three bolts of honest Amoskeag ticking, unroll them in my barn, lay the jars down the middle, packed in straw and wrapped tight, and roll the cloth back up so each bolt was as fat and innocent as a sleeping parson. Then he'd load them in a farm wagon and come up the turnpike whistling Lorena.
Wilkins: One payday Saturday, near Suncook village, a revenue man stops him. A thin, sour article from Concord with a ramrod in his hand and suspicion in his liver. He jabs that ramrod into the first bolt. Cloth. Jabs the second. Cloth. Jabs the third so hard he grunts. Cloth, and more cloth, because Asa wound the jars dead center, and that ramrod was a hand too short. A revenue man probing a bolt of ticking is like a bridegroom on his wedding night: very confident, very thorough, and entirely in the wrong place.
Wilkins: Asa thanked him, sold him a yard of ticking for his mother, and charged him a nickel over the Manchester price.
♦ Wax crackle, Wilkins sets down a tin cup
Wilkins: Now, the scale. You all want to hear what happens when the scale says no. So hear it. Last payday a sharper comes up from Concord, fine coat, hair oiled down like a wet otter, and sets down a half dollar for a jar and a tooth wash. I put it on the pan. Clink. Heavy. I bite it. It gives under my teeth like cold butter. Lead. That half dollar had more lead in it than a sheriff's backside after a long sermon.
Wilkins: I told him so, politely, with a pair of tooth forceps in my fist. He decided to leave without his change. And in his hurry he took the short way, past the still-house window. Past Barnaby's chain.
♦ Chain snaps taut, a roar, cloth tearing
Wilkins: Now I want you to hear it the way I heard it. First a sound like a wet sail ripping off a schooner in a gale. That was the seat of his trousers. Then a second sound, softer, which I won't describe except to say a man's dignity is mostly held in by wool, and his was suddenly out in the April air. Barnaby came away with a mouthful of fine broadcloth, a slice of the gentleman's left hind quarter about the size of a pork chop, and his purse, which burst open and threw counterfeit half dollars across my dooryard like hail on a henhouse roof.
Wilkins: The sharper ran to Barnstead bleeding and praying, which is more churchgoing than he'd done in a decade. Barnaby ate three of those coins before I could get them away from him, and a week later he passed them in the woodlot. I recovered all three. That was the only time a bad coin ever came back to me improved. I punched them with my stamp and nailed them over the door as a warning to sharpers. Mind you, a chained bear is a hazard to every soul in the county, me included, and nobody with sense keeps one. I never claimed sense.
♦ Barnaby belches, long and deep
Wilkins: Thank you, Barnaby. Well said.
Wilkins: Now, I have a guest tonight who has traveled farther than any of my creditors, and that is saying something. She comes all the way up from the Blue Ridge of Virginia. She knows plants, she knows mountain talk, and she knows more names for whiskey than a Concord lawyer knows for perjury. Welcome to Fort Wilkins, Miss Clara Higgins.
Clara: Well, thank you, Doctor. I'll say this: I have been greeted by a lot of men in my life, but none of them ever had a bear belch for an introduction. I believe I'm flattered.
Wilkins: Barnaby only belches for royalty and good cooks. Now, Clara, tonight's talk is payday. Mill money, scrip, tokens, the window. Your mountains don't have Amoskeag, but they've got paydays. Tell me about money that wasn't money.
Clara: Oh, Doctor, we have more money that isn't money than we have money that is. My grandmother on my mother's side, she lived down near Lynchburg when the tobacco factories were going full tilt. And some of those factories paid their hands partly in tin tokens. Little stamped tin things, good at the company's own store and nowhere else on God's green earth.
Wilkins: Ah. The love letter that's only faithful at one store.
Clara: That's it exactly. Now a hand who wanted real cash, for a fiddle, or a train ticket, or a bottle from somebody who didn't keep a store, couldn't spend those tokens. So my grandmother would stand out by the road on payday with a little cloth bag. She'd buy a dollar's worth of tokens for seventy cents hard money. Then she'd walk right into that company store and spend them at the full dollar on flour and calico.
Wilkins: She shaved the token.
Clara: She shaved it so close it squealed. And she did it every payday for six years. She said she doubled her money and halved her friends, and she didn't miss either one.
Wilkins: Doubled her money and halved her friends. That is the whole of banking in one sentence, Clara, and your grandmother ought to have run the Treasury instead of that crowd in Washington.
Clara: She'd have agreed with you. She said Mr. Chase had a fine beard and no sense.
Wilkins: Now I confessed to the scale. Did your people weigh money?
Clara: Lord, no, Doctor, my people weighed the purse. My great-uncle Jubal, he made persimmon brandy, and he'd sell it on court day when the whole county came to town. Court day was our payday, near enough. The drovers sold cattle, the farmers sold tobacco, and everybody had a purse fat as a tick. And Jubal had no price at all. He'd say, let me see your purse, friend. And he'd heft it in his hand, like this, up and down, like a man judging a melon.
Wilkins: Pricing by heft.
Clara: Heavy purse, two dollars a jug. Light purse, fifty cents and a blessing. One time a fellow came up and Jubal hefted his purse and said, son, this one's free, you need it worse than I do. Turned out the boy had a pound of buckshot in there to make himself look rich to the girls.
Wilkins: Pricing by the heft of the purse is how every lawyer in Concord has done business since the Revolution, only Jubal was honest enough to say so out loud.
Clara: Jubal never said anything quiet in his life. They could hear him sneeze across the James.
Wilkins: Now bad coin. I had my lead half dollar. What did your people get handed?
Clara: My cousin Delphia. She sold a jug to a cattle drover once, a big loud man with a beautiful felt hat, and he paid her in an old Spanish silver piece. You know, them old Spanish coins went around for years down home.
Wilkins: Up here too, until the government called them in. Half the old men in Pittsfield still count in shillings and pence.
Clara: Well, this one had been shaved around the edge till it was thin as a communion wafer. Delphia put it in her teeth and bit down and the dang thing folded up like a pocketknife. So she looked at that drover, and she looked at his hat, and she reached up and took the hat right off his head and said, I'll keep this for change.
Wilkins: And he let her?
Clara: She had a jug in one hand and her daddy's bird gun leaning on the wagon wheel. He let her. And Doctor, she wore that hat to church for eleven years. Trimmed it with a turkey feather. It was the finest hat in the congregation and every woman in the church hated her for it.
Wilkins: Delphia wore that hat eleven years, and the drover was still the only man in the county who ever paid a woman a compliment by mistake.
Clara: That's about right.
Wilkins: Now, the mill hands up here had their tricks for getting a drink past the overseers. What about yours? Paymaster days in the war, I hear the camps were thick with peddlers.
Clara: Oh, thicker than flies on a dead mule. When a paymaster's wagon rolled in, the soldiers that hadn't seen a dollar in two months or more, every sutler and peddler and widow-woman for ten miles came down on them. My aunt on my daddy's side baked rye loaves. Big, dark, heavy rye loaves. And she'd cut the bottom out of each one, scoop out the middle, set a pint jar of oh-be-joyful in there, and glue the bottom back with a little flour paste.
Wilkins: Oh-be-joyful. Now there's a name.
Clara: She'd sell those loaves to the teamsters right off her mule cart. And one payday a constable comes walking up, all buttoned and serious, and he buys a loaf. She about died. He takes it, breaks off the heel, bites it, chews a while, and he says, ma'am, this bread is stale. Pays his dime and walks off with a pint of whiskey under his arm and never knew it.
Wilkins: That constable took a bite of a crime and complained of the crust. I have met him. I have met him in every county in New England.
Clara: And I'd bet you a jug he ate the rest of it that night and found out.
Wilkins: Now Clara, slang. You're the slang woman. Give my listeners the payday words.
Clara: Well. Down home we didn't say payday so much. We said drawing day, because you went and drew your pay. And the Monday after, that was sorry day. Sorry about the money, sorry about your head, sorry about whatever you said to the preacher's wife.
Wilkins: Drawing day and sorry day. There's the whole Christian calendar for a mill hand: Saturday you draw, Monday you're sorry, and Sunday you lie to the preacher in between.
Clara: Now for the whiskey itself, the soldiers had names for the bad stuff. Tanglefoot, because it tied your feet in a knot. Bust-head, which I don't need to explain. Pop-skull, same family. And forty-rod, which they swore would kill a man at forty rods.
Wilkins: Forty rods! That's two hundred and twenty yards. Some of what's sold in Manchester on a Saturday night would kill a man at forty rods if he was upwind of it.
Clara: And the old Irish and Scotch folks, they'd just call it the creature. Like it was a living thing. And I'll tell you, Doctor, some of what I've tasted, it was.
Wilkins: Clara Higgins, you are a treasure, a scholar, and a terrible influence. Will you stay through the show?
Clara: I'll stay as long as that bear stays on his side of the window.
Wilkins: He makes no promises, but his chain does.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks
♪ Patent-medicine show calliope flourish, bright and brassy
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♪ Calliope flourish ends with a cymbal crash
♦ Barnaby grunts, unimpressed
♪ Slow mountain fiddle, segment three
Wilkins: Segment three. Copper and the craft. Before I say a word about method, here is my sermon, short as a dull sermon gets. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States. What I tell you is history and education. Learn it, remember it, and leave the wash to licensed men.
Wilkins: Now, payday changed the craft, and here's how. A distiller who sold on payday Saturday had to have his run done and rested by Friday. So he worked the calendar backward like a farmer reading the almanac. Mash set Sunday night after meeting. Four or five days to work in a warm corner, covered, with the barn door cracked so the gas can leave. Run it Thursday. Rest it Friday. Sell it Saturday to a girl with a brown envelope.
Wilkins: The old Suncook Valley grain mash, the way my granddad set it: cracked corn cooked in water to a thick porridge, cooled until you can hold your hand in it, then a portion of malted barley stirred in to turn the starch to sugar. Cooled further, then yeast. A bushel of meal to a good barrel of water, and you'll get a thin, sour beer, a few parts in a hundred spirit and the rest hope.
Wilkins: But in apple country, and New Hampshire is apple country, a man is tempted to run pomace. The squeezings and the mashed fruit. And here is a fact worth more than any coin on my scale. Fruit mash makes more methanol than grain mash. The pectin in the apple, the stuff that sets your wife's jelly, breaks down in fermenting and gives off methanol. So the apple man must be more generous with his cuts than the corn man. Asking a fruit mash not to make methanol is like asking a Manchester overseer not to dock wages. It is in the nature of the beast.
Wilkins: The cuts, then. Foreshots first, the sharp-smelling front of the run. Throw them out. A good teacup or more for every five gallons of wash, and more if you are in doubt, and never drink them or rub them on a sore tooth. Then the heads, still harsh, smelling like a varnish pot. Those go too. Then the hearts, sweet and clean, the part a man is proud of. And last the tails, oily and wet-dog, which go in a separate jar to be run again.
Wilkins: Now, the boiling-point men will tell you methanol leaves the pot first and politely, like a guest who knows his manners. It does not. It crowds the front, yes, but a pot still is no orderly schoolroom, and some lingers on. So I catch my run in many small jars, a dozen, twenty, lined up on the plank like a choir. Each gets its own sniff. A doubtful jar goes away and the rest are spared. One bad jar in a big crock spoils the whole batch. One bad jar on the shelf is only one bad jar.
♦ Glass jars clink as they are lined up on a plank
Wilkins: And the copper. You know my sermons on copper. The bright metal grabs the sulfur stink in the vapor and holds onto it. That's no superstition. That's chemistry, and it only works if you keep the metal clean. My still gets scrubbed after every run, the way I scrub my forceps after every molar. A tooth-puller with a dirty forceps and a distiller with a dirty pot both end up at the same funeral, from opposite ends.
Wilkins: Now fire. Listen close, because this is the one that kills. A still must always stay open to the air at the far end of the worm. Always. If the worm clogs with mash, or some fool plugs it to stop the drip while he goes off to supper, the pressure builds in that pot like a revenue man's grudge, and the pot bursts. Then you have scalding wash all over the floor and a cloud of flammable vapor drifting toward an open fire. I have seen the scar on a Loudon man's neck where his face used to be. He looks like a candle somebody blew out and then sat on.
Wilkins: A clogged worm is like a tight-fisted deacon: it holds and holds until it bursts all over everyone nearby. Keep the fire low. Keep the joints tight. Keep the end of the worm open. Keep a bucket of water and wet sacks at hand, and never walk away from a running still, not for supper, not for a pretty neighbor, not for the Second Coming.
♦ Fire crackles low under the pot, steady drip
♪ Banjo picks up, segment four
Wilkins: Segment four. Myths, slang, and the mail. And we have a call come in on the Fort Wilkins speaking line, all the way from Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Let's crank up the cylinder.
♦ Phonograph cylinder cranks, hiss and pop, a faint voice emerges
Cletus: Alchemist, my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?
♦ Cylinder hiss winds down, needle lifts
Wilkins: Cletus Rabbit Miller, of Wilkesboro! A fine Carolina name, and a fine question, and I'm sorry to say your uncle is cooking swamp medicine with a straight face.
Wilkins: Take the hickory ash first. What is hickory ash? It is potash. Lye. It's what your grandmother leaches through a barrel of straw to make soft soap, and what the old women use to skin corn for hominy. Put that in a hot doubler and you've got an alkali stewing in copper. It can foam like a mad dog's mouth. It can carry soapy, bitter flavors straight on into your worm. And it dulls the bright copper you've worked so hard to keep shining.
Wilkins: True story. My neighbor down the turnpike, Ephraim, heard the same yarn as your uncle and threw a double handful of hickory ash in his doubler. It boiled up and puked over into the worm, and the spirit came out tasting like he'd washed a hog in it. The hog would have had the right to complain. Ephraim's wife used the whole run to scrub the floor, and she said that floor had never been so clean or smelled so drunk.
Wilkins: Now red oak. Ask any cooper in Merrimack County why he makes his tight barrels from white oak and not red. White oak's pores are stopped up with little plugs inside the wood, tyloses the learned men call them, so it holds liquid. Red oak's pores are open straight through. You could blow smoke through a red oak stave like a pipe stem. Boil red oak shavings in a thump keg and you'll pull out tannin, bitterness, and brown color, and you'll fool a fool into thinking it's aged. Rabbit, red oak in a thump keg is like a sieve in a rainstorm: willing, hardworking, and of no use whatever.
Wilkins: And the bad heads your uncle wants to clean? Neither ash nor shavings will take out one drop of methanol. Only the cuts do that. Throw out the front of the run, generously, and that's the whole cure. Everything else is a man stirring a pot to look busy.
Wilkins: So Rabbit, a shout-out to you and to every soul in Wilkesboro listening tonight. Tell your uncle Fort Wilkins says he can keep the ashes for soap and the red oak for his woodstove, and he should keep his cuts honest. And tell him if he ever comes north, I'll pull a tooth for him at the Carolina rate, which is free, plus a small fee for listening to him.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And now a myth for the anvil, because a myth deserves to be struck. The blue flame. Some fellow pours a spoon of spirit, sets a match to it, sees a pretty blue flame, and declares the whole jar safe as mother's milk.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Hogwash! A flame tells you the spirit will burn, and roughly how strong it is. That is all it tells you. Methanol burns with a pale blue flame too, near as pretty as the good stuff. The spoon cannot smell it and cannot sort it. And the color of a flame is no honest test for lead either, whatever some old-timer swears. A blue flame proves your spirit will burn, and so will a hayloft, a Concord tax ledger, and a sheriff's patience.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: The only thing a spoon test ever measured for certain was how many fools were standing around the spoon. Clara, you've seen the spoon test down home?
Clara: Seen it? Doctor, I've seen a man set his own eyebrows on fire doing it at a wedding, then swear the jar was fine because the flame was blue. The bride married him anyway. Brave girl.
Wilkins: Braver than any deputy in Merrimack County. There. Three strikes, three coins, and one myth flattened on the anvil like a bad cent.
♦ Coins scraped off the anvil into a tin cup
♪ Theme returns softly beneath
Announcer: A quick word before we part! The Flame-Flow Still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, is hand-built of pure electrolytic copper. See it at the Fort Wilkins showroom or order today at moonshinestill.com!
Wilkins: Thank you, sir. Friends, that's our hour. My thanks to Miss Clara Higgins of the Blue Ridge, who taught us that drawing day comes before sorry day and that a good hat is worth more than a bad coin.
Clara: Thank you, Doctor, and thank you, Barnaby, for keeping your mouth to yourself.
Wilkins: And if you want to learn the craft proper, the history, the copper, and the cuts the way I teach them at this very anvil, inquire after the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. It's history and science, taught honest and lawful, and it'll leave you knowing why the old men did what they did, and which of them were fools. Bring your questions, your notebook, and your own coin, which I will weigh while you are still asking about the syllabus.
Wilkins: Next payday, when Manchester money comes up the turnpike warm in somebody's pocket, remember where it came from. It came from a girl standing at a loom thirteen hours a day so her family could keep the farm. Spend it like it matters, because to her it did.
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 swells and fades into wax cylinder crackle