Pine-Tree Shillings and Planchets: What Colonial Coinage Taught a Counterstamper
Dr. G. G. Wilkins goes back to John Hull's 1652 Boston mint, the clipped and crooked pine-tree shillings, and the worn Spanish dollars still passing through Pittsfield in 1865. He compares them with the copper large cents he punches on his anvil and tells collectors how to read a hand-struck coin. Blue Ridge herbalist Clara Higgins tells new stories about mountain money slang: fips and levies, a peddler who chiseled Spanish dollars into wedges, silver hidden in an applejack bung, and a bent coin nailed to a still-house sill. Wilkins also answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and strikes coins on his anvil while knocking down the blue-flame myth.
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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. Get your tongue off that window glass, you four-hundred-pound sack of lard and fleas. That pane cost me a silver half-dollar and two molars out of a glazier's mouth, and you have licked it so long it looks like a frog's backside in April. Sit down. SIT. There he goes. He sits the way a county commissioner sits: heavily, slowly, and only after he has been fed at public expense.
♦ Chain rattles, one long, offended bear groan
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling bright, then settling under
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, cousins, creditors, and any revenue men listening at the keyhole. Welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, that's Route 28 to you, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am Dr. George G. Wilkins: tooth-puller, iron-beater, coin-marker, inventor of improving contraptions, and twice the honored guest of the Merrimack County sheriff. Tonight we go hunting for old silver. Pine-tree shillings and planchets, neighbors, and what two hundred years of crooked colonial coin taught a man who punches his own name into the nation's pocket change. Before anybody writes to the governor: making spirits for drinking without a license from the Federal government is against the law of these United States. Everything said in this cabin tonight is history and instruction. Nobody here is giving anybody an invitation.
♪ Theme fades out
Announcer: A QUICK WORD, friends, before the Doctor sharpens his punch! Do you admire copper that rings like a church bell and shines like a new cent? Then lay your eyes on the Flame-Flow Still, protected by United States Patent 10,561,960, built of heavy, pure copper by honest hands. See it with your own eyes at moonshinestill.com, where the Flame-Flow is waiting for you. That's moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax crackle, a log shifts in the stove
♪ Short fiddle sting
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. Silver in the Wilderness. Hand me that tin box, the one by the forceps. No, the other one. That one's got teeth in it. Not that I'm ashamed of the teeth. Every one of them paid me.
♦ Small tin box opened, coins sliding and clinking
Wilkins: Here in my palm I've got a coin no bigger than a thumbnail, thin as a sermon on charity, crooked as a Concord lawyer's smile. It's a pine-tree shilling out of Boston, struck by hand, and it's older than any grandfather in this valley. Let me tell you how it came to be. In 1652 the good Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony got tired of trading in wampum, beaver pelts, Indian corn, and whatever battered Spanish silver drifted in off the Caribbean ships. So they did something bold, and I'll say illegal, since in old England only the king could make money. They opened their own mint in Boston, and they put a silversmith named John Hull in charge, with his partner Robert Sanderson.
Wilkins: The first coins were nothing but bare silver discs with a little NE punched on one side, for New England, and the value in pence on the other. Plain as a boiled potato. And a plain coin is a thief's own dinner plate, because a man can take shears to the edge, shave off a sliver of silver, and pass it on, and nobody's the wiser. A clipped shilling is like a deputy's sworn testimony: it looks round enough until you set it on the scale. So the Boston men changed the design. First came the Willow Tree, then the Oak Tree, and at last the Pine Tree, every one with a beaded ring struck round the design. You clip one of those, the beads go missing like the buttons on a drunk man's waistcoat, and every shopkeeper from Salem to Portsmouth knows you're a crook.
Wilkins: Now here's the cunning part, and I admire it the way one rascal admires another. Nearly every one of those coins, willow, oak, or pine, says 1652 on it, even the ones struck thirty years later. Why? Because in 1652 England had cut off its king's head and had no king at all, so there was no Crown to offend. When King Charles the Second came back to the throne, the Massachusetts men just went on dating everything 1652, the way a widow in Concord has been forty-two years old since the Mexican War. They were telling the Crown, these are old coins, Your Majesty, we found them under the stairs.
♦ Barnaby snorts outside; chain clinks
Wilkins: And John Hull? Hull kept fifteen pence out of every twenty shillings he coined, which makes him the first man in New England to get rich by charging folks for their own money, and the bankers have been studying him ever since. There's an old tale, and I tell it as a tale, that when Hull's daughter Hannah married Judge Samuel Sewall, Hull sat her on one pan of a great merchant's scale and poured pine-tree shillings into the other pan until the silver lifted the bride. That was her dowry. Hull weighed his daughter against silver and Sewall took the deal, which is the only time in New England history a man was glad his bride was heavy. Mr. Hawthorne put that story in a book, so it must be at least half true, which is better odds than anything you'll hear at Town Meeting.
Wilkins: Here's what a counterstamper notices. The Boston shillings were struck about a fifth lighter than an English shilling, roughly seventy-two grains of sterling silver. That was on purpose. A light coin won't sail back to London, because no English merchant wants it at face value. So it stays home. Massachusetts made a coin that was too poor to run away, like a hired man who owes at the company store. The mint closed down in the early 1680s, and in 1684 the Crown revoked the colony's charter altogether. The pine trees went into the ground, so to speak. But they didn't vanish. They wore and wore, passing hand to hand through two hundred years of New England, and in my own boyhood I saw them in old women's purses, smooth as creek stones.
♦ A heavy coin rings as it is dropped on a wooden table
Wilkins: Now hear that ring. That's a Spanish dollar, a piece of eight, eight reales, struck in Mexico City. It weighs about four hundred and seventeen grains of good silver, which makes it the big brother that bullied the whole American continent. Congress said in 1857 that foreign coin was no longer lawful money here, but nobody told the farmers. I still take Spanish silver at this cabin, worn down so far the old king's face looks like he's been dragged behind a hay wagon. We still say two bits for a quarter dollar, because a real was a bit, and two bits was a quarter of a Spanish dollar. And the oldest Spanish pieces, the ones they call cobs, out of Potosi and Mexico City, were chopped off a bar of silver and hammered by hand, lopsided as a pumpkin after a frost. Same as Hull's shillings. Same disease, same cure.
Wilkins: And then there are my coppers. The United States large cent, struck from 1793 till they quit in 1857 and gave us that little Flying Eagle cent no bigger than a shirt button. The old large cent is nearly pure copper, a hundred sixty-eight grains, wide and soft and generous. When I lay one on my anvil and drive my punch, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., it takes the letters the way fresh snow takes a boot. A pine-tree shilling taught me this: a coin's value is in its metal, but its honor is in its edge. And a Spanish dollar taught me this: a coin that's honest in weight will be trusted long after the king on it is forgotten. So a coin ought to carry three things: honest metal, a mark you can read, and a name that will answer for it. Mine carries all three, and a little bear spit besides.
♪ Banjo bridge, quick and jaunty
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Shavers, Sweaters, and a Bear with a Silver Belly. Before I bring on my guest, let me tell you about the vermin that hand-struck coin attracted. Clipping you know. Sweating is sneakier. A man puts a hundred silver coins in a stout leather bag and shakes it, hour after hour, like a Shaker at a revival, and the coins grind against each other and leave a fine silver dust in the seams. He burns the bag, sells the dust, and spends the coins at full value, a little lighter every one. England got so sick of it that in 1696 they called in all the old hand-hammered money in the Great Recoinage, with Sir Isaac Newton himself at the Royal Mint, the very same apple-dropping Newton. He hanged coiners, neighbors. The genius of gravity sent men to the gallows, which I suppose is gravity applied.
Wilkins: Which brings me to a coin-shaver who passed through Pittsfield last autumn. I'll call him Lemuel Grout, because that's the name he gave, and I doubt it was the one his mother gave him. He came up the turnpike from Concord in a velvet waistcoat with a pocketful of half-dollars that had been sweated so thin you could read a newspaper through them. He paid me for a jar of what I'll call tooth tincture and a molar extraction, and when I rang his half-dollar on the anvil it went thunk like a dead toad. A coin-shaver is a man who would shave a dead man's whiskers and then sell the dead man the shaving soap.
♦ Coin dropped on anvil, a dull, flat clack
Wilkins: I told him politely to pay in honest metal. He told me impolitely where I might store my anvil. Then he lit out the back door, the back door, neighbors, which is the door with the bear outside it. Barnaby was asleep in the sun with his belly up like a feather tick. Grout jumped right over him. A sleeping bear is not a stile, Lemuel. Barnaby woke with a sound like a cellar door tearing off its hinges, swung that great black head, and caught Grout by the seat of his velvet britches. I heard the cloth go first, a long, wet rrrrip, and then I heard Grout go, a high whistle like a teakettle in a hurry. Barnaby kept the britches, and a fair chunk of the meat behind them, hairy side and all, and Grout went up the Suncook Valley Turnpike in nothing but a waistcoat and a shirt-tail, bleeding from the hindquarters and spilling sweated half-dollars in the dust like a hen dropping eggs. Lemuel Grout came to Pittsfield with a pocketful of sweated silver and left with half a pair of trousers and a whole new respect for wildlife.
♦ Barnaby grunts proudly, chain clinks
Wilkins: Yes, I'm talking about you. Now here's the part I'm less proud of. In the scuffle, one of Grout's coins, a real Spanish dollar he'd been saving for himself, the rascal, went flying, and Barnaby snapped it out of the air like a trout taking a mayfly. Swallowed it whole. Well, a piece of eight is a piece of eight, and I'm a frugal man. So for three mornings running I went behind the woodshed with a manure fork and a bucket of creek water and went through that bear's leavings the way a forty-niner works a sluice. It smelled of rotten apples, wet dog, and the inside of a revenue man's conscience. On the third morning, there it was, gleaming. Barnaby swallowed a Spanish dollar and passed it in three days, which is faster than the Treasury has ever paid me anything. That dollar went in a piece of eight and came out a piece of something else entirely. I washed it, I boiled it, and I counterstamped it, and it's in my tin box right now, the cleanest dirty dollar in New Hampshire.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That's my punch, and here's why I trust it. My punch is the only thing in Merrimack County that hits the same way twice, and that includes the sheriff, the preacher, and my wife's frying pan. Now, enough of my own bragging. My guest tonight has come up from the Blue Ridge of Virginia, which is a long way to come to a log cabin with a bear chained outside, so either she is very brave or somebody lied to her about the accommodations. She's an herbalist, a scholar of mountain talk, and a woman who knows her apples. Please welcome Miss Clara Higgins.
Clara: Well, Doctor, somebody did lie to me about the accommodations, but nobody lied about the bear. He looked at me through that window like I was a ham with a bonnet on.
Wilkins: He does that to the parson too. Clara, tonight's about money, crooked old money. What did a mountain still-hand in Virginia take for payment when the paper was no good and the silver was foreign?
Clara: Oh, Doctor, the Spanish bits never left our hollers, I promise you. My great-great-uncle Zebulon kept a still up a branch so steep the mules had to say their prayers going up. He priced everything in the old Spanish talk. A real was a levy, from elevenpence, and a half-real was a fip, from fippenny bit. So Zeb would holler down the hill, a levy dram and a fip sip, gentlemen!
Wilkins: A fip sip! That's just enough to make a man brave and not quite enough to make him pay.
Clara: That's just about right! And there was a fellow, a horse-swapper from over in Botetourt County, who paid for his fip sip with a fip filed down so thin it weighed about as much as a fingernail paring. Zeb held it up to the sun and you could see daylight through it. So Zeb poured him exactly that much whiskey: one drop, right on the tip of his tongue, and said, there, a filed sip for a filed fip. That horse-swapper stood there with his mouth hanging open waiting for the rest, and folks up the branch called him Drop Tongue till the day he died.
Wilkins: [laughing] Now that's justice! A drop for a shaving. I've pulled teeth on that principle. If you pay me half, I pull half the tooth, and you can carry the rest home in your jaw and think about it.
Clara: Lord have mercy, Doctor, you're worse than they told me.
Wilkins: Much worse, and I bill for it. Tell me about cutting coins, Clara. Up here a dollar's a dollar, but I hear tell in your mountains they took a chisel to them.
Clara: They surely did, when there wasn't small change to be had. You'd cut a Spanish dollar into eight wedges, pieces of eight, just like a pie. There was a peddler named Asa Cudd who worked our end of the Blue Ridge with a cart full of tin cups, needles, and calico. Asa made change by laying a Spanish dollar on a flat creek rock and whacking it with a cold chisel. Only, funny thing, the eighth wedge, the one Asa kept for himself, was always the fattest.
Wilkins: Like the eighth child at a church supper.
Clara: Exactly like! Plump and greedy. Well, a widow named Mrs. Purdy had a steelyard scale she used to weigh sorghum. She took Asa's seven skinny wedges, hung them on one hook, and hung a pint jar of sorghum on the other, and those seven wedges didn't come close to lifting it. Then she grabbed Asa's fat eighth wedge out of his vest pocket, hung it all by itself on the hook, and it near about balanced the jar. She told the whole congregation the next Sunday that Asa Cudd sold calico by the yard and cheated by the ounce. He had to sell his cart in Lexington and take up teaching singing school.
Wilkins: Singing school! Well, that's where a crook goes to retire. He can still steal the high notes. Clara, during the war, I imagine silver had to hide just like the whiskey did.
Clara: Oh, it hid everywhere. My great-great-grandmother Dorcas had three Spanish dollars she meant to leave her children, and she knew the foraging parties were working the coves taking hams, horses, quilts, everything that wasn't nailed down or buried. So Dorcas took the bung out of a jug of applejack, carved the corncob hollow, pressed the three dollars down into it, and sealed it over with beeswax so it looked like any old stopper. Well, the foragers came, turned the cabin upside down, slit the feather tick, and dug up the hearth, and then the sergeant found the jug. He pulled that bung with his teeth, Doctor, his own teeth, spit it in the fireplace ashes, and the whole party passed that applejack around till it was empty.
Wilkins: And the silver was laying in the ashes the whole time.
Clara: The whole time! They rode off singing and never knew they'd spit out ten times the price of the liquor. Granny Dorcas fished that cob out of the ashes after dark, and her children had their silver.
Wilkins: So the foragers drank the jug and never found the silver, which proves a thirsty man will search everything but the thing in his hand. That's a woman I'd have let pull my teeth. One last thing, Clara. I've seen old pine-tree shillings in this country bent double, folded up like a letter. The old folks bent them for luck, and to keep off witches. Did your people do that?
Clara: Oh, we did. My grandmother kept a worn old silver sixpence, so thin you couldn't tell whose head it had, and she bent it double with her teeth, Doctor, she had better teeth than any of those foragers, and she nailed it to the sill of the still-house door. She said a bent coin kept the mash from souring and kept the witches from riding the copper. And she swore the one summer a cousin pried that coin loose to buy tobacco, every barrel she had turned to vinegar. Every one! She made pickles till Christmas and never forgave him.
Wilkins: Now there's a lesson. Mash goes sour from wild yeast, heat, and a dirty barrel, not from the absence of witchcraft, but I'll be damned if I'd want to be the cousin who explained that to your grandmother. I bent a coin for luck once, then the sheriff came twice, so I reckon I bent it the wrong way. Clara Higgins, you've brought the Blue Ridge to Pittsfield, and Barnaby hasn't eaten you, which is the highest honor this cabin can bestow.
Clara: Well, I thank you, Doctor. I'll take a fip sip for the road, if it's legal.
Wilkins: In this cabin it's tea, madam, strictly tea, whatever the jar says. Clara Higgins, ladies and gentlemen!
♦ Barnaby grunts once, approvingly
♪ Fiddle flourish leading into a bright, brassy patent-medicine-wagon march
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♪ March ends on a cymbal crash and a banjo strum
♦ Wax crackle; bellows wheeze at the forge
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the Craft. Every coin I punch is a lesson in copper, and every still I raise is the same lesson in a bigger hat. So let's talk metal. Copper is a good-natured metal with one fault. Hammer it and it hardens, gets stiff and springy and finally cracks, like a bachelor past fifty. When it gets hard under my hammer, I put it in the forge till it glows a dull red, then I plunge it in the water bucket.
♦ Red-hot metal hissing into a water bucket
Wilkins: And it comes out soft as butter again. Now steel would turn hard and brittle under that treatment and shatter like a Sunday plate, but copper goes soft. Copper forgives a hammer the way a good wife forgives a husband: heat it up proper, cool it down quick, and it goes soft again. That's how a coppersmith can hammer, anneal, and hammer again until a flat sheet becomes a round belly of a pot. And why do we fuss over copper at all? Because a distiller's run is full of stinking sulfur from the yeast, especially yeast that's starved or overheated, and copper grabs that sulfur and keeps it. Here's the part folks get wrong: copper does its best work where the hot vapor touches it, in the head of the still, the arm, and the worm. A copper bottom with a tin head is like a church with a good basement and no roof. The cleaning happens up top, in the steam.
Wilkins: Since my guest is an apple woman, and since New England has drunk more apple than water since the Mayflower, I'll tell you how an old Yankee made apple brandy. I tell it as history, the way you'd read about how they tanned hides in Exeter. Step one: grind your apples, sour, sweet, wormy, windfallen, it don't matter, in a cider mill, and press the pomace in straw or cloth till it gives up its juice. Step two: run that sweet cider into clean oak barrels, open at the bung but covered with a cloth to keep the flies out, in a cellar cool enough to keep it from racing but warm enough that it works. Wild yeast off the apple skins will start it, or a cup of good working cider from the last batch. In two or three weeks it quits bubbling and goes hard and dry. Step three: the stripping run. Charge the pot no more than three-quarters full, light a gentle fire, and run it all off quick into a weak, cloudy low wine. Step four: the spirit run, slow and patient, with that low wine back in a cleaned pot.
Wilkins: Now listen close, because this is where apples are dangerous. Apples carry pectin, the stuff that makes jelly set, and as the cider works, that pectin breaks down into wood spirit, methanol, the poison that blinds. Fruit brandy runs heavier in it than a grain whiskey, so the apple man has to cut more generous at the front of the run than the corn man does. The first little bit that comes off, the foreshots, goes on the ground, never in a cup. Then come the heads, sharp and solvent-smelling like a cobbler's glue pot, and those go too, or into the lamp. Collect your run in a long row of small jars, not one big crock, so you can smell each one and judge where the hearts begin, sweet and clean of apple. When the jars start smelling of wet cardboard and turning oily and cloudy, the tails have come, and you set those aside. The safe distiller would rather pour out a good jar than drink a bad one. Every blind man in New England who drank bad brandy made that bargain the other way round.
Wilkins: And a word on jacking. Some farmers set their hard cider out in the barn in January and let it freeze, then pour off the strong liquor that won't freeze. Applejack, they call it. But jacking throws away only water. Every drop of wood spirit and fusel oil stays right in the jug, because nothing gets cut away the way the heads come off a still. That's why a jug of jacked cider gives a headache so mean it ought to have to register with the county.
Wilkins: Now the fire. Never, ever seal a still tight. Steam has to go somewhere, and if you plug the worm or wedge the head down with a rock, that pot becomes a cannon and you become a shower of meat. Never run a pot dry, because she'll scorch and stink and maybe split a seam. Keep the open flame well away from the worm's end, where the spirit runs, since spirit vapor creeps along the floor and catches like gunpowder. I've seen a still-house in Barnstead go up in eight minutes flat, and the owner come out with no eyebrows and his beard smoking like a ham in a smokehouse. And when the run is done, I clean my copper with a paste of vinegar and salt, the same as a housewife brightens her kettle. It eats off the dull oxide and leaves the copper rosy as a parson's nose, but then you rinse it, rinse it, and rinse it again, so not a grain of salt or acid is left in the pot. Clean metal, honest cuts, low fire. That's the whole sermon, and the collection plate is the bear.
♦ Barnaby yawns, enormous and wet
♪ Banjo bridge into fiddle
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths, Mail, and the Call-In Line. We've had a voice come in on the call-in line, recorded and carried up the turnpike, all the way from Wilkesboro in North Carolina. Let's hear it.
♦ Wax crackle thickens; a hiss, a click, a faint distant rooster
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?
♦ Click; crackle settles
Wilkins: Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro! Rabbit, I hope they call you that for your speed and not your family habits. Let's take your uncle's remedy apart one piece at a time, like a clock that's stopped.
Wilkins: First, the hickory ashes. Wood ash is mostly potash, neighbors. Every farm in New England has an ash hopper out back, a wooden trough full of ashes with rainwater dripping through, and what comes out the bottom is lye, the same lye my mother boiled with tallow to make soap that would take the hide off a mule. Old New England sent barrels of potash to England by the shipload. It's an alkali, strong and caustic. Throw it in a hot thump keg and you're brewing a bad soap, with a scummy foam that can pitch over into your worm and a bitter, slippery taste in the liquor. Rabbit, your uncle's hickory ash would make a fine bar of soap, and after the way his whiskey tastes, I reckon somebody's mouth needs one.
Wilkins: Second, the red oak shavings. Red oak is a fine wood for a fence rail or a coffin, but a cooper won't make a whiskey barrel out of it, because it's full of open pores, and liquor seeps right through it like gossip through a sewing circle. Coopers use white oak, because its pores are plugged up tight by nature. Now, oak does give spirit color and a mellow flavor, but that comes from months and years resting quiet in a barrel, not from a handful of shavings boiled for an hour in a thump keg. Boil them hot and fast and you get bitter tannin and a brown color that makes young liquor look old. Red oak shavings in a thump keg are like a sermon at a horse race: they add color and nobody walks away improved.
Wilkins: Third, and this is what matters most: the bad heads. You don't clean out heads with ash or wood, Rabbit. You throw them away. You take the first of the run and the sharp, glue-smelling liquor right behind it and you pour them off, every time, by smell and by the jar. There's no ash, no shaving, no prayer, and no bent sixpence that'll turn a bad cut into a good one. So the truth is this: your uncle meant well, and the old-timers did put strange things in their kegs, but it's swamp medicine, Rabbit. Tell him Dr. Wilkins of Pittsfield said so, and if he argues, tell him I pull teeth for a living and I know where he keeps his.
Wilkins: And while we're in the swamp, let me drain another one. Every tavern loafer in this country will tell you to pour a spoonful of liquor and set it afire: if it burns blue, it's good, and if it burns red or yellow, it's poison.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Hogwash! Wood spirit, the methanol that blinds and kills, burns with a pale blue flame too, so faint you can hardly see it by daylight. Good whiskey burns blue. Poison burns blue.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: So the flame can't tell a good jar from a bad one any better than that bear can read a summons. All it tells you is that the stuff will burn, and you knew that already, or you wouldn't be drinking it in the dark. Setting your whiskey afire to test it is like setting your mother-in-law afire to check her temper: you learn nothing new and you lose the eyebrows.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, then a coin rolling across the anvil and dropping into a tin
Wilkins: There, that's three more coppers stamped. And since this is a coin night, a word for you collectors, so you can tell an honest old piece from a fake. One: weigh it. A pine-tree shilling ought to come in near seventy-two grains, and if it's far under that, somebody's had shears to it. Look for the beads round the edge; if a stretch is missing, the coin's been clipped. Two: look at the back side of a counterstamped coin. When I drive my punch, the anvil flattens the other face, and the design there goes soft and mushy. A counterstamp with a crisp, untouched back is either a miracle or a liar, and I've never met a miracle in Merrimack County. Three: one punch makes one mark. My G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. shows the same letter spacing, the same little nick in the second G, every time. Put a doubtful piece next to an honest one, and the truth will stare right back at you. My counterstamp says G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and the sheriff's warrant said the same, and only one of them was spelled right. And a last lesson, from two hundred years of crooks: if a revenue man ever offers you a coin, bite it, and if he offers you his hand, count your fingers after.
Wilkins: Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, thank you for the question. I'm sending you a large cent with my mark on it. Hang onto it, and don't let your uncle drop it in the thump keg.
♪ Fiddle sting
Announcer: ONE MORE QUICK WORD, neighbors! The finest copper in this country isn't in the Treasury, it's in the Flame-Flow Still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, built of heavy, pure electrolytic copper, the very thing for herbal tinctures and essential oils. Visit moonshinestill.com tonight, or stop by Fort Wilkins on Route 28. Once more: moonshinestill.com!
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme returns, soft and warm
Wilkins: Well, neighbors, the stove's burning low and Barnaby's dreaming of Lemuel Grout's britches. If tonight has made you hungry to learn the old craft proper, with honest metal, true cuts, and the reasons behind them, then sign on for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you to read a copper seam the way I read a coin, to cut a run by your nose and your jars instead of by superstition and swamp medicine, and to keep yourself and your neighbors safe and on the right side of the law. Inquire at Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike. Bring questions and leave your ashes at home. My thanks to Clara Higgins of the Blue Ridge, to Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, and to John Hull of Boston, dead these hundred and eighty years, who taught us all that a coin is only as honest as the man holding the shears.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme fades into wax cylinder crackle, then silence
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