The Gold Premium and the Copper Cent: Why Greenback Swings Made Everyone a Coin Trader
Dr. G. G. Wilkins explains how banks stopped paying out gold in 1861, how the Legal Tender Act of 1862 created the greenback, and how the gold premium swung with every battle report until it peaked at 285 in July 1864. By then every Pittsfield farmer weighed his coins like a goldsmith, and Wilkins shows how this played out at the general store, at his anvil and in his grain-and-copper bartering. Retired revenue officer Captain Donald Vance tells new stories about distillers who priced their liquor in gold and a nail keg full of cents. Wilkins also answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's voicemail about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg and knocks down the blue-flame myth between strikes on his 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. Barnaby! Settle your great stinking carcass down. That is a drip in a jar, not a dinner bell, and you have already eaten a Concord tinker's satchel this morning, the buckles, and most of the tinker's good opinion of you. Lie down. Lie DOWN, you four-hundred-pound sack of fleas and bad intentions.
♦ Bear grunts once more, chain drops into the dirt with a heavy clank
Wilkins: There. He lies down like a tired Congressman, belly first and conscience last.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swells and settles under
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and you three revenue men hiding in my woodpile, I can smell your boot grease from here. Welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log walls of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, Merrimack County. I am Dr. George G. Wilkins: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, twice-arrested gentleman, and the only man in this valley who will pull your tooth and sell you the cure for it before the blood is dry.
Wilkins: Tonight we talk about money. Not the money you earn, God knows none of you earn much. The money you could not trust. 'The Gold Premium and the Copper Cent: Why Greenback Swings Made Everyone a Coin Trader.' From '62 to '64 every farmer, widow, and drunk in this valley turned into a Wall Street sharper overnight, biting coins, weighing pennies, and squinting at paper like it owed them rent. I was right there with the worst of them. But first, a word from the folks who keep my coppersmiths in beans.
♪ Quick snare roll and bright banjo sting
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Want the craft of Fort Wilkins on your own kitchen table? The Fort Wilkins 2-Gallon Tabletop Alembic is pure spun copper, hand-riveted and handsome, made for botanical waters and floral oils. Explore Tabletop Stills at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Sting resolves into a soft fiddle bridge
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a log shifts in the stove
Wilkins: Segment the first. Let me take you back to the last days of 1861. The war had gone badly. Bull Run had our boys running back to Washington with their trousers full and their pride empty. Then came the Trent business, when our navy snatched two Confederate gentlemen off a British mail packet and for a few weeks it looked like we'd be fighting England as well as Richmond. Every banker in New York got so scared he puckered up tight. On the thirtieth of December, 1861, the New York banks stopped paying out gold for their notes. The Treasury soon did the same. That is called 'suspension of specie payments.' In plain Suncook talk it means: your paper is no longer a ticket to gold. It is just paper.
Wilkins: Then in February of '62, on the twenty-fifth, Congress passed the Legal Tender Act, and Mr. Salmon P. Chase at the Treasury began printing United States Notes. Green ink on the back, so we called them greenbacks. No gold behind them. Just the government's word and a pretty engraving. Mr. Chase printed money the way a drunk deacon tells the truth: generously, at night, and with no gold behind it.
Wilkins: Now here is the trick of it, and it is a nasty trick. The law said a greenback dollar was a dollar. Pay your debts with it, and the man had to take it. But gold did not care what Congress said. Gold is a stubborn old metal. The alchemists gave it to the Sun, Sol, the king of metals, and a king does not take orders from a Treasury clerk. So a gold dollar and a paper dollar parted ways like an unhappy couple at a church social, and the difference between them was the gold premium.
Wilkins: They quoted it down in New York in a place they called the Gold Room, a pit full of screaming men in silk hats buying and selling gold like hogs at the Brighton cattle market. The quote went out by telegraph, and by the next morning the Concord papers had it, and by noon some boy on a mule had carried it up Route 28 to Pittsfield. The number told you how many greenback dollars it took to buy one hundred gold dollars. If gold stood at 150, your paper dollar was worth sixty-six and two-thirds cents in coin. At 200 it was worth half.
♦ Wilkins taps a pencil on a tin cup
Wilkins: And war news moved that number like the moon moves the tide. When our boys lost, gold went up. When we won, gold came down. After Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July of '63 it sank near 125, and men in this valley cheered twice, once for the Union and once for their pocketbooks. But in the summer of '64, with Grant bleeding men in front of Petersburg and Jubal Early's rebels raiding right up to the edge of Washington, gold climbed to 285 on the eleventh of July. Two hundred eighty-five paper dollars to buy one hundred in gold. A greenback was worth about thirty-five cents.
Wilkins: So what does a sensible Yankee do when the paper in his pocket loses half its value between planting and haying? He becomes a coin trader, that's what. Gold went up when the Union lost and down when the Union won, so the most patriotic man in Pittsfield was the one praying his own investment would go broke.
Wilkins: There is an old law the English call Gresham's Law: bad money drives out good. If two coins are worth the same on paper but one has more metal in it, folks spend the bad one and hide the good one in the mattress. By the summer of '62 the silver had vanished. Half dimes, dimes, quarters, gone like a sheriff at the first sight of my bear. Every silver coin in Pittsfield was in a sock, a sugar bowl, a hollow fence post, or down some old miser's privy shaft wrapped in oilcloth.
Wilkins: Then the cents went too. The little copper-nickel cents, the eagle ones and the Indian-head ones, eighty-eight parts copper and twelve parts nickel, seventy-two grains each. People hoarded them by the jar. Brokers in Boston were selling a hundred cents for more than a dollar in paper. Think about that. Folks were paying a premium for pennies. Merchants got so desperate for small change they struck their own little copper tokens, the size of a cent, with their names and some patriotic scrap like 'The Union Must and Shall Be Preserved,' and they put millions of them into trade until Congress outlawed private cents and two-cent pieces in '64.
Wilkins: So you walk into Hutchins' store down by the Suncook mills in the spring of '64. Old Mrs. Hutchins has a slate behind the counter. One column says 'Currency.' One column says 'Specie.' A pound of tea at one price in paper, a smaller price in coin. A barrel of flour, same. She changed that slate every time the mail stage came in. I watched her pick up one of my cents, look at me like I was a horse thief, and bite it so hard she left a dent. I charged her a quarter for the dental consultation, and she paid me in a greenback, which I suppose was her revenge.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside the window
Wilkins: Yes, Barnaby, I'm getting to your part, you vain beast. Let me tell the folks about the Boston gentleman.
Wilkins: In August of '64, with gold still crazy-high, a fellow came up the turnpike from Boston in a checked waistcoat and a hat so tall it needed its own church pew. Gold speculator. Buying up hoarded coin from country people at half its worth and selling it in Boston for twice. He'd heard old Wilkins had a strongbox. He came to my door and offered me greenbacks at a robber's rate for my gold and silver. I said no. He got sharp with me. Called me a hayseed tooth-yanker. Then he made his mistake. He decided to walk around back to look at my still-house window, as if a stubborn Yankee keeps his treasure next to a wild animal.
Wilkins: Barnaby was asleep in the dirt like a fallen haystack. The speculator never saw him. Stepped right over the chain. And Barnaby woke up in the worst mood God ever put in a bear. Neighbors, I will tell you the sound first, because the sound is what I still hear at night. A low, wet sort of huff, like a bellows full of mud, and then that chain going taut with a crack like a musket shot. The man screamed. Not a manly scream. A high, thin, opera-house scream, like a fiddle string snapping at the top of a waltz.
Wilkins: Barnaby got the greenback first. The man was waving it, God knows why, maybe he thought a bear could be bribed like a deputy. Barnaby took it right out of his fist and swallowed it. Then he got hold of the coat-tail, and the coat tore off with a ripping sound like a bed sheet in a gale. Then he got a mouthful of the gentleman's hindquarter. I mean the actual meat God gave him to sit upon. Took a piece about the size of a man's fist, trousers, drawers and all. The man's britches went red from the waist to the knee like a shot deer, and he came round the corner of my still-house running with one hand clapped over his backside and his tall hat still on his head, which I admired.
Wilkins: I stitched him up on my dental chair with silk thread and a curved needle I keep for gums. Eleven stitches. He bit a leather strap so hard I could read his molars in it after. And I want it on record that I charged him in gold, at the day's premium, because a man ought to pay for his education in the currency he respects. He rode home to Boston standing in the stirrups like a heron in a stiff wind. He left Pittsfield short a pound of hindquarter and long a lifetime of standing up at church suppers. Barnaby passed that greenback two days later. It was in better shape than the economy.
♪ Short fiddle sting, comic and sour
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, the anvil rings faintly as a hammer is set down
Wilkins: Segment the second. Outlaws, runners, and my own mischief. You know I stamp my name on coins. 'G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H.' Punch, hammer, anvil, done. But listen to why it mattered in the gold-premium years, because this is where a country dentist turned into a banker without a license.
Wilkins: When nobody trusted paper, people trusted a name they could walk to. If you had a cent with my stamp on it, you knew where Fort Wilkins was. You knew I'd take that cent back at my counter for a cent's worth of anything I sold, and around here folks believed I'd do it with a better heart than the United States Treasury. My stamped cents passed hand to hand from Barnstead to Epsom. I have seen a farmer turn down a clean, unstamped cent and ask for one of mine. That is not counterfeiting. A counterfeiter makes false money. I only make true money louder.
Wilkins: I told that to a Merrimack deputy who came sniffing round in '63 with a pocketful of my cents, saying he'd seize them as evidence of 'tampering with the federal coin.' I asked him what he planned to buy with the evidence. He thought on it, and the poor fool admitted he'd been spending them at Hutchins' for chewing tobacco for a month. So I said, Deputy, if this is tampering, you are an accomplice, and the evidence is in your cheek. He spat the tobacco out right there in my yard, which I took as a confession.
Wilkins: And here's another thing. The old big copper cents, the large cents they stopped minting in '57, weigh near a hundred sixty-eight grains, about a fortieth of a pound. During the war, copper went so dear that the metal in a large cent came near to its face value. So a man who held old large cents held copper as much as money. I bought copper sheet for my stills by the pound, and some days I'd do the arithmetic and realize I was paying for copper with copper, weighing out cents against sheet like an apothecary with his scales. Copper cost so dear in '64 that I bought my sheet by the pound and my patience by the ounce.
Wilkins: Now I've got a man in the parlor who knows more about who paid for what with which coin than any tax collector alive, because he spent twenty-eight years following copper through the hills. He sits in my good chair, the one with no blood on it. Please welcome Captain Donald Vance, retired from the Federal Revenue, out of Manchester. Captain, welcome to Fort Wilkins.
Captain: Thank you, Doctor. I'll admit I checked that chair for blood before I sat. And for teeth.
Wilkins: You'll find two molars in the cushion, but they're paid for. Captain, when the gold premium went wild, what did that do out in the hills where you were hunting stills?
Captain: It made every distiller an economist, Doctor, and most of them were better ones than the men in Washington. A man making whiskey up a hollow doesn't want paper that loses a third of its value between Monday's run and Saturday's sale. So they started pricing in gold, or in grain, or in anything that held still.
Captain: I'll tell you about a fellow up near Bethel, in the Green Mountains of Vermont. Kept a still in a sugarhouse behind his farm. Clean copper, good work, I'll grant him that. But he would not take a greenback for love nor prayer. Priced every jar in gold and silver. And he kept a jeweler's balance on a shelf, little brass pans, little brass weights, and he weighed every coin anybody handed him, because a worn coin had less metal and he'd charge you the difference.
Wilkins: A careful man.
Captain: Careful to a fault. When I walked in, badge on my coat, he didn't run. He looked at the badge. Then he asked, polite as a parson, if he could see it. I handed it over, not thinking. He set it in the brass pan, put the weights on the other side, frowned, and said, 'German silver. Not worth much.' Doctor, that man was weighing my badge to work out whether a bribe was worth offering.
Wilkins: Captain, a man who weighs your badge has already decided what your soul costs and found it underweight.
Captain: That's about how I felt. I wrote him up proper. But I'll say this, I kept that sentence of his in my head for twenty years. 'German silver. Not worth much.' My wife quoted it at me every time I came home late.
Wilkins: Ha! Tell them about the nail keg.
Captain: Over in the Androscoggin country there was a tavern keeper, I won't say which town, his grandchildren still run cattle up there. He'd been buying copper sheet from a peddler and paying him off in cents. The peddler got arrested on another matter, and I seized his wagon, and in the back was a nail keg. Full of cents to the brim. Copper-nickel, old large cents, merchant tokens, every kind you can imagine.
Wilkins: How many?
Captain: Doctor, I sat in a cold barn by a lantern and started counting, and after two hours and eleven hundred cents my eyes crossed and my fingers turned green. So I hauled the keg onto a hay scale, weighed a counted hundred, and worked it out by the pound. Near enough six thousand cents. Sixty dollars. And when we tipped the keg out on a blanket we found a shirt button and a human tooth in among them. I wrote it in the report just as it was: 'Approximately sixty dollars, one shirt button, and a tooth.'
Wilkins: And I want it on record that the tooth was not one of mine. My work comes out whole, root and all.
Captain: I'll take your word, Doctor. The magistrate laughed so hard at that line he had to call a recess.
Wilkins: Did you ever see a man play the gold premium with his liquor?
Captain: Oh, the best one was up near Plymouth, on the Pemigewasset. A moonshiner who sold out of a lean-to behind a blacksmith's shop. He had a slate nailed to a post, and on it he chalked the price of a jar. Every time the telegraph brought word of a Union defeat, gold went up, paper went down, and up went his price. The Wilderness, up. Cold Harbor, up. Every bad battle report, fifteen cents more a jar. When Atlanta fell in September of '64, he rubbed it down again, grumbling the whole time.
Wilkins: A man who raises his whiskey price on bad war news is the only fellow in New England whose pocketbook roots for General Lee.
Captain: I put it gentler in my report. I called him 'the best war correspondent in the White Mountains.' Folks would walk to his slate just to read the news. Faster than the Plymouth paper.
Wilkins: Now Captain, you were famous for going easy on a clean copper man and hard on a dangerous one. Did the paper money ever drive men to build something deadly?
Captain: It did, and this one's not a funny story, Doctor. Near Conway, a young fellow wanted a still and couldn't afford copper, not at wartime prices, not with his greenbacks shrinking every week. So he bought cheap. Patched his kettle seams with melted pewter spoons and lead solder he got for next to nothing. Pewter of that sort often has lead in it. When I found it, there was gray metal smeared along every seam like bad mortar, and the spirit coming off had been running through it for a month.
Wilkins: God help whoever drank it.
Captain: Two men in that town had the colic, the shakes, and that gray look along the gums that lead gives a man. They lived, but one never worked a full day again. I didn't just smash that still. I made the boy take it apart himself, seam by seam, so he'd know with his own hands what he'd done. Lead is a poison, Doctor. It doesn't matter how hard the times are. You don't save money with poison.
Wilkins: Amen, Captain. Pewter spoons in a still are like a Merrimack deputy in a courtroom: soft, cheap, and sure to poison everything they touch. You may hang that one on the wall of any revenue office you like.
Captain: I'll have it embroidered.
Wilkins: One more before I let you go. How did you get paid in those years, Captain? Did the government pay its revenue men in gold?
Captain: In greenbacks, Doctor. Same as the soldiers. I'd go out chasing a man who priced his whiskey in gold, and my own wages were worth less every week I chased him. Some months I think the moonshiners had better finances than the Treasury.
Wilkins: Some months? Captain, I have been paid in gold, greenbacks, rye, hay, a hog, and a set of false teeth that did not fit the man who paid me, and of the whole lot only the hog ever showed any gratitude. Captain Donald Vance, thank you for sitting in the clean chair.
Captain: Thank you, Doctor. And tell that bear I'm leaving by the front door.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks
Wilkins: He heard you. He's disappointed.
♪ Brisk banjo transition into a fanfare of cornet and snare
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♪ Fanfare resolves with a final snare tap
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, the hiss of a low fire under a copper pot
Wilkins: Segment the third. Copper and the craft. And since tonight is about money, let me tell you why copper is worth what it's worth to a distiller, whatever the Gold Room says.
Wilkins: The old alchemists gave each metal a planet. Gold to the Sun. Silver to the Moon. Lead to Saturn, the gloomy old devil, and he's welcome to it. And copper to Venus. Venus is the planet of copper and the planet of love, which explains why every man in Pittsfield wants to rub her, and why she turns green when he does it wrong.
Wilkins: But there's honest chemistry under the poetry. When your mash boils, the vapor carries sulfur stink along with the spirit: rotten egg, burnt match, old cabbage. Bright copper grabs hold of those sulfur compounds and binds them to its own skin, so they stay on the metal and don't drip into your jar. That's why the helmet of the still and the worm are copper. The more bright copper the vapor touches on its way, the sweeter your spirit runs. Iron won't do it. Lead certainly won't, and you heard the Captain on lead. Lead in a still is a slow grave.
Wilkins: Now I'll walk you through a rye mash the way I made it in '64, when I had to buy grain from Barnstead farmers who wouldn't take paper. First I need to pay my farmer. Old Mr. Tasker would take a pulled tooth and a jar of my best for two bushels of rye, and he thought he got the better of me, and maybe he did, because he had only four teeth left and he valued each one dearly.
Wilkins: Step one. Grind your rye coarse, like rough meal, not flour. Flour turns to glue and scorches. For a small batch, I take about eight pounds of rye meal and two pounds of malted barley. The malt carries the ferments, what the learned men call diastase, that turn starch into sugar. Without malt, rye is just porridge with ambitions.
Wilkins: Step two. Heat about five gallons of clean water near boiling, and stir in the rye slow so it doesn't clump. Hold it hot and stir. Rye is a sticky, ornery grain. It'll set up like wet mortar if you let it. Keep it moving for an hour.
Wilkins: Step three. Let it cool until you can hold your hand in it comfortably, just about as warm as a bath you'd let a baby sit in, and then stir in your malted barley. If the mash is too hot it kills the malt's ferments, and if it's too cool they work slow. Cover it and let it rest a few hours. Taste it. It'll go sweet as the starch turns to sugar.
Wilkins: Step four. Cool it further, down to warm-room temperature, and pitch your yeast. Brewer's yeast from a good tavern, or a cup of active mash from your last batch. Cover it with a cloth, not a tight lid, because it'll puff and bubble and give off gas. Keep the room aired out. That gas will drown a man who sleeps beside his fermenter with the door shut. In four to seven days, when it stops bubbling and the cap sinks, you have your wash, a sour sort of beer, weak in spirit.
Wilkins: Step five. Strain off the grain, and charge your still with the liquid. Never fill her more than three-quarters full. She needs room to boil without frothing into the cap. And never, ever seal a still airtight. The vapor must have a free road from kettle to worm to jar. A closed kettle on a fire is a bomb, and I have seen a still-house roof land in a neighbor's pasture.
Wilkins: Step six. Fire low and slow. Low fire gives you a steady run and clean cuts. High fire gives you a muddled run and maybe a burned-down barn. Keep your collecting jars well away from any open flame, because spirit vapor catches like dry hay. Keep a bucket of water and a wet blanket at hand. And don't you ever walk away from a running still to go to the privy. Hold it or shut her down.
Wilkins: Step seven. The cuts, and this is where a man shows if he's honest. Collect in small jars, numbered in order, so you can sort them after.
Wilkins: The first spirit that comes is the foreshots. Sharp and nasty, smells like varnish and a tannery fire. That is where much of the methanol comes off, the wood spirit that blinds and kills. With a rye or corn mash there's less of it than with fruit, because most of the wood spirit comes from the pectin in apples and pears. Less is not none. Throw away the foreshots, every time, generous. Better to pour out a pint too much than to keep a spoonful too many.
Wilkins: Then come the heads, still harsh, a solvent sort of smell, gives you the worst headache God ever invented. Set them aside and don't drink them. Then the hearts, clean and sweet, smelling of the grain. That's your spirit. Then as the run tires, the tails, oily, wet-dog smelling, cloudy. Set them aside too; some men run them again with the next charge. A man who drinks his heads to save money is like a man pulling his own molar with a door latch to save my fee: he keeps the money and loses the jaw.
Wilkins: Step eight. Clean your copper. When the still is cool, scrub her with sour cider vinegar and a fistful of salt till she shines, then rinse her well and rinse her again with clean water, and dry her. The black and green crust is the sulfur she caught for you. Scrub it off so her face is bright for the next run, and never let that green crust get into anything you mean to drink.
Wilkins: And let me say this as plain as a hammer on an anvil: under United States law it is illegal to make distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit. What I tell you here is history and education, from an old man who got caught twice and wants you to get caught never.
♪ Gentle fiddle bridge
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a click and whir as a second cylinder is threaded onto the machine
Wilkins: Segment the fourth. The listener postcard and the myth-breaking anvil. Tonight we have a voice recording from the Carolina mountains. Let's spin it.
♦ Tinny playback with heavy surface hiss, a distant rooster
Cletus (on tape): 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 stops with a scratchy thunk
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller from Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Rabbit, I'm guessing they call you that because you ran from somebody once and kept running. Good man. Let's get your uncle sorted out, and I'll do it with my hammer in hand.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Hickory ash first. Here's the bit of truth your uncle has hold of: hardwood ash soaked in water makes lye. That's how every grandmother in America made soap. Lye is a powerful caustic. It'll eat the skin off your hand and blind you if it gets in your eye. Your uncle has seen lye do things, and he figures if it scrubs a kettle it ought to scrub the whiskey. But the heads, the harsh, head-splitting part of the run, are not dirt you can scrub. They're spirits that boil off early, and the only way to get them out is to catch them in your jars and pour them away. Ash in the thump keg won't do it. Hickory ash in your thump keg is soapmaking, not distilling, and I have never met a man who wanted his whiskey to taste like his grandmother's wash day.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Here your uncle is half right, but for the wrong reason. Oak gives up color, a little tannin, a little woody vanilla sort of taste. That's why spirit aged in oak goes amber. So if he throws oak into the doubler, his liquor will come out looking older and tasting a bit more like barrel whiskey. But oak does not take out the heads, and it surely does not take out the wood spirit. It just puts a Sunday coat on the same old body. Red oak shavings dress your liquor up like a widow in Sunday black: prettier to look at, same old trouble underneath.
Wilkins: So, Rabbit, tell your uncle with my respects: swamp medicine is right. The cure for bad heads is a patient man, a low fire, and a row of little jars. And if he won't believe you, send him up Route 28 and I'll explain it to him with Barnaby standing by.
♦ Barnaby grunts
Wilkins: Now while I've got my punch warm, let's knock down an old myth. The blue flame. You've all seen it. Some fellow at a tavern pours a spoonful of liquor in a dish, lights it, and says, 'Burns blue, it's safe. Burns yellow or red, there's lead in it, throw it out.'
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Hogwash. Plain hogwash. Here's the trouble. Good grain spirit burns pale blue. Wood spirit, the methanol that blinds a man, also burns pale blue, sometimes so pale you can hardly see it by daylight. So the flame cannot tell the good from the deadly. A whole jar of poison can burn the prettiest blue you ever saw.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And the 'red means lead' part is no better. A flame will color for all kinds of reasons, a dirty dish, salt, a bit of the ash your uncle threw in. It's no proper test for lead. The only real protection is a still with no lead in it to begin with, clean copper joined honestly, and cuts made by a sober man. Trusting the blue flame is like trusting a tax collector's smile: it glows pretty, and it means nothing.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, the coin skitters off the anvil
Wilkins: And there goes a cent under the bellows. Barnaby will find it by spring. He finds everything worth swallowing.
♪ Banjo and fiddle swell, then settle into a slow closing waltz
Announcer: Quick word before we go! The Fort Wilkins 2-Gallon Tabletop Alembic is pure copper, spun and riveted by hand, made for botanical waters, floral oils, and countertop demonstrations. Explore Tabletop Stills at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, stove door creaks shut
Wilkins: Well, neighbors, that's the hour. Think back on it next time you hold a coin in your palm and wonder what it's worth. For three years nobody in this country knew what a dollar was. The paper said one thing, the metal said another, and the battlefield said a third. Every farmer weighed his cents like a goldsmith, every storekeeper kept two prices on her slate, and every moonshiner, me included, learned to price his work in something that would still be worth the same come Saturday.
Wilkins: If you want to learn the craft the honest way, from mash tub to cuts to cleaning your copper, then sign on for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. History, metallurgy, alchemy, and enough of my bad jokes to keep you awake through the boring parts. Write to Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, or inquire at the showroom. Bring gold if you have it, greenbacks if you must, and a ham bone for the bear if you want to leave with your hindquarter whole.
Wilkins: My thanks to Captain Donald Vance for sitting in the clean chair, to Rabbit Miller down in Wilkesboro for his uncle's swamp medicine, and to Barnaby, who has digested more federal currency than the Bureau of Internal Revenue ever collected from me.
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 out under wax cylinder crackle