The Cooper's Hoop and the Revenue Gauger: Marking, Measuring, and Miscounting Barrels in 1860s New Hampshire
Dr. G. G. Wilkins explains how federal gaugers measured barrels and proof under the 1862 and 1864 revenue acts. He covers the 231-cubic-inch gallon, the diagonal rod, the wantage stick, and chalk and stencil marks, then confesses to the shaved staves, doctored hoops, and cold spring-house dips that kept his taxable gallons low, along with the day Barnaby turned a Concord gauger's hickory rod into toothpicks. Blue Ridge herbalist Clara Higgins brings new mountain stories: a rain-washed chalk count, 'forty-rod' and other barrel slang, frozen applejack, and a cooper paid by the wet inch. Wilkins also takes Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's call about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg and debunks the gunpowder proof 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. Barnaby! Settle your great hairy carcass down. That is the wind in the hemlocks, not a gauger. If it were a gauger you would smell him first. They all wear the same Concord bay rum, with the same fear-sweat underneath it like a wet sheep under a Sunday blanket. Lie down, you four-hundred-pound sack of grudges.
♦ Bear exhales heavily, chain slithers and drops into the dirt
Wilkins: There. He is lying on the woodpile again, which is the warmest place on the property and also the place where I keep my kindling. A tyrant in a fur coat.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling then settling under
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and all you lost sheep of the Suncook Valley. Welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log walls of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, that is Route 28 to you teamsters, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host: tooth-puller, iron-beater, copper-bender, coin-stamper, and twice a guest of the Merrimack County sheriff. Tonight we are talking about barrels. The cooper's hoop and the revenue gauger. How Uncle Sam's men measured a cask down to the last thimble, the marks they chalked and burned on it, and the small sins of a Pittsfield distiller who wanted the government's count to come out a hair shy of the truth. Barnaby has strong opinions on the subject. You will hear them.
♪ Theme fades
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Before the Doctor gets his sleeves rolled up, hear this: the Flame-Flow Still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, hand-made of pure copper and built to last! See it at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
♪ Short fiddle sting
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. The gauger and his rod.
Wilkins: Picture the summer of 1862. The war is eating money the way Barnaby eats ham, whole and in a hurry. Congress passes the Revenue Act, and for the first time in a generation the federal government wants its hand in every jar of spirit made in this country. At first the tax is twenty cents a gallon. Twenty cents! A man grumbles, pays, and goes home. But the war keeps eating, and they keep raising it, twice in 1864 alone, until by the start of 1865 it stands at two dollars a gallon. That is ten times the bite in under three years. Two dollars a gallon! For two dollars a gallon a man should get the whiskey and a wife thrown in, though in fairness the whiskey talks less.
Wilkins: Now, a tax on gallons needs somebody to count the gallons. That somebody is the gauger, the inspector, the assessor's man. Every one I have met comes in a dark coat with a satchel, a pocket thermometer, a glass hydrometer in a velvet-lined box like a set of false teeth, a lump of chalk, a stencil plate, and his rod. The rod is the centerpiece. Every gauger is proud of his rod. Every gauger thinks his rod is longer than it is, and every distiller's wife thinks the same of her husband's barrel.
♦ Wooden rod tapped against a barrel stave, hollow knock
Wilkins: Here is how the man does his arithmetic, and you had better learn it, because the government already has. The American gallon for spirits is the old wine gallon of Queen Anne's day: two hundred thirty-one cubic inches. Not a hair more. So the gauger has to turn a fat-bellied oak cask, which is no simple shape, into cubic inches, and then divide by two hundred thirty-one.
Wilkins: He measures the length of the cask inside, head to head. He measures across the head, and he measures across the bilge, the fat middle where the bung hole sits. He knows a cask is not a straight pipe, so he takes a mean diameter. The old rule of thumb is the head diameter plus about two-thirds of the difference between the bung and the head. Then he squares that mean, multiplies by the length, and multiplies again by a little number, three-thousandths and a bit, 0.0034, and out comes your capacity in gallons. It is a tooth-puller's sort of mathematics: grip it firm, twist once, and the truth comes out bloody.
Wilkins: If he is in a hurry, and a gauger is always in a hurry to get to the tavern, he uses the diagonal rod. He pokes it in at the bung and slides it down slantwise until it fetches up against the far lower chime, where the head is let into the staves. The rod is marked so that reading gives him a capacity in gallons for a cask of ordinary build. It is a gauger's rod in a distiller's bung hole, and I will not dress that up any finer for the ladies, because it does not deserve it. A gauger's rod is the only stick in Merrimack County that gets shoved into more holes than a Concord politician's finger.
Wilkins: But a cask is not always full, is it? The space at the top is what the English call ullage and we Yankees call wantage. For that he uses a wantage stick. He dips it straight down through the bung, pulls it out, and reads the wet inches, the line where the spirit wet the wood. From the wet inches and his tables he figures how many gallons are actually sloshing in there and how many are only air and hope.
Wilkins: Then comes the proof. Proof in this country, since the tariff law of 1848, means half alcohol by volume at sixty degrees Fahrenheit. Proof is twice the percentage, so a spirit half alcohol is a hundred proof. The tax falls on the proof gallon. A gallon at a hundred proof is one proof gallon. A gallon at a hundred and twenty is a gallon and a fifth in the eyes of Washington. So the gauger draws a sample, floats his hydrometer, sticks in his thermometer, and if the spirit is not at sixty degrees he opens his little book of tables and corrects for it. A hydrometer that is not corrected for temperature is like a tax assessor who is not corrected for greed: it will always read in the Treasury's favor.
♦ Chalk scraping on oak
Wilkins: When he has his numbers, he marks the cask: the gallons, the proof, the date, and his name or his initials. Chalk for the quick work, a stencil and black paint for the proper work, and on some heads a hot brand that hisses and stinks of burnt hair. Those marks are the government's signature on your property. Scratch one out or doctor one and the law can take the spirit, the cask, and a fat fine besides. Uncle Sam measures my barrel to a hundredth of an inch and his own promises not at all.
♪ Banjo bridge
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Legends, liars, and the day Barnaby met the rod.
♦ Barnaby grunting, chain clinking
Wilkins: Yes, Barnaby, I am getting to it. He knows when he is being talked about. He is vain as a selectman.
Wilkins: Some summers back a gauger rides up the turnpike from Concord. A thin, damp fellow with a mustache like two caterpillars that had quarreled. I will call him Mr. Pettibone, because that was not his name and he will not thank me for the real one. He comes in through the yard, past the window where Barnaby is chained, carrying a long hickory diagonal rod over his shoulder like a soldier's musket. Now Barnaby has never seen a man carry a stick that long toward his house in any friendly spirit. To a bear, a long stick is a declaration of war.
Wilkins: Pettibone swings around to wave good-day and the end of that rod passes about four inches from Barnaby's nose. Neighbors, I heard the sound from the forge. It was not a growl. It was a cough, a deep wet hoof of a cough, the sound a bear makes when he has decided something. Barnaby took the rod in his jaws and pulled, and Pettibone, being a stubborn federal man, did not let go. So Barnaby pulled the rod, and Pettibone came with it like a fish on a line, right into the reach of that chain.
♦ Splintering wood, bear snarl, man shrieking
Wilkins: Barnaby set one paw on the man's back, gentle as a deacon at a baptism, and with the other he raked the seat of his trousers. Four claws, neighbors, through broadcloth, through drawers, through the hide beneath, four red furrows from the belt to the back of the knee like a plowed field in April. Pettibone let go of the rod at last and crawled under my woodpile howling. Barnaby sat down with that hickory rod across his paws and chewed it to splinters. Snap, crunch, snap, with a sound like a Methodist eating celery during the sermon: loud, guilty, and determined to finish. When he was done there were hickory toothpicks from the window to the well.
Wilkins: I hauled Pettibone into my surgery and laid him face-down on the tooth chair, which is a sight I wish on no one. I washed him with clean hot water and stitched those furrows with the same fine silk I use on gums after a hard extraction. Twenty-two stitches. He complained more than any patient I ever had, which is saying something for a man who was lying on his face the whole time. The gauger came to measure my bung and left with his own bung considerably more ventilated than when he arrived. And here is the cream of it: without his rod he had to gauge my casks by the long arithmetic, and he was in no fit state to sit and do sums. Barnaby measures a man the way a gauger measures a cask, by the girth and with an eye toward what is inside.
♦ Bear grunt, satisfied
Wilkins: Now the confession you have all been waiting for. I will not tell you I did these things. I will tell you that a man in Pittsfield did them, and that he looks remarkably like me in a good light.
Wilkins: Trick the first: shaving the staves. A gauger cannot crawl inside a cask, so in a hurry he measures the outside and takes off an allowance for the thickness of the wood. If a cooper shaves those staves thin from the inside, the barrel looks the same from the outside but holds more than the gauger's allowance supposes. The rod says forty. The cask says forty-one and a half. That gallon and a half goes into the dark like a deacon going into a tavern by the back door.
Wilkins: Trick the second: doctoring the hoops. A cask's belly is held in shape by its hoops, iron or split hickory. A sly hand drives the bilge hoops a hair off true, or swaps in a heavier hoop at the bung, and that pinches the very spot where the gauger takes his bung measure, so he reads a slimmer barrel than he would if the hoops were set honest. A cooper who cannot drive a hoop true is like a husband who cannot drive a nail: he will be found out, and there will be shouting.
Wilkins: Trick the third, and it is the craftiest, because it uses nothing but the weather. Spirit shrinks when it is cold. On a forty-gallon cask, the swing between a hot August loft and a cold spring-house can be the better part of a gallon. So a certain Pittsfield gentleman always had his casks resting in the spring-house down by the brook when the gauger came. Cold spirit, low wet inches, low wantage reading. A cold barrel shrinks, a cold gauger shrinks, and a cold sheriff shrinks most of all, which is why I hold all my government business in the spring-house. An honest gauger corrected his hydrometer for temperature, but many forgot to think about the volume, and a few were too busy shivering to care.
Wilkins: As for chalk marks, I keep mine the way a widow keeps her age: written lightly, revised often, and never in front of a federal man. Now, let it be on the record that the law came down hard on all of it, with forfeiture and fines, and that this program is history and education and not a lesson in how to rob the Treasury, which has enough enemies in Congress without my help.
♪ Fiddle flourish
Wilkins: Tonight we have come a long way for a guest: up from the Blue Ridge of Virginia, by rail and stage and, I suspect, a good stretch on foot. She is a mountain herbalist and a scholar of every rude word ever spoken over a jug. Welcome to Fort Wilkins, Miss Clara Higgins.
Clara: Thank you kindly, Doctor. I have been in your yard a quarter hour and your bear has been eyeing my satchel like it owes him money.
Wilkins: It smells of dried apples. He thinks you have brought tribute. Now, Clara, you mountain people had gaugers too, once the war was done. Tell me about the chalk.
Clara: Oh, the chalk. In Franklin County in the spring of 1866, a gauger came up the holler to my great-grandmother's place. He was a fussy little man in a celluloid... no, a paper collar, and he went down the row of her barrels with his rod and his chalk, writing the gallons and the proof on every head, big as a schoolmaster. Then he took his dinner, her cornbread and a good deal of what was in the barrels, and said he would come back in the morning to make his book.
Wilkins: I can see where this is going, and I love it already.
Clara: That night it come up a spring rain, the kind that blows sideways off the Blue Ridge, and the barrels were sitting out under the eaves where the gutter run over. By morning every chalk mark was a white smear running down the staves like a weeping widow. Granny Higgins went out with a lamp before daybreak and re-chalked every barrel from memory. Doctor, my granny had the finest memory in the county, but it was a mighty humble memory. Every barrel remembered itself about two gallons lighter. The gauger come back, looked at his chalk, looked at his little book where he'd only half written, scratched his head, and wrote down what the barrels said. He told her it was a pleasure to deal with an honest woman.
Wilkins: Honest! She was a credit to the whole sex of chalk. Now, you collect words. What did your people call the gauger's rod?
Clara: The tattle-stick. Because it went down in the dark, come up wet, and told on you. And the men running stills after the war, they started calling themselves blockaders. They took it from the blockade runners on the coast. A man slipping his jugs past the government was running the blockade same as a sailor slipping cotton out of Wilmington.
Wilkins: The tattle-stick. I like that better than anything the Treasury ever named. What about the whiskey itself, the rough stuff a gauger could not tax because nobody would admit to making it?
Clara: Oh Lord. Tanglefoot, because it ties your legs in a bow knot. Bust-head, which needs no explaining. Pop-skull, same family. And forty-rod, because it was said to kill a man at forty rods. My granddaddy said the stuff from over the next ridge was so bad it was sixty-rod, and the man who made it had to shout his orders to his own still from across the creek.
Wilkins: Forty-rod whiskey kills at forty rods; the gauger's rod only kills your profits, and at closer range. Now, apples. You know your applejack.
Clara: I know enough to be scared of it. My great-uncle Asa had him a barrel of hard cider one January, and the cold come down so hard the trees were popping in the night like rifle shots. He set that barrel out on the north porch, and every morning he'd go out with a hatchet and chip off the ice on top and throw it in the yard. What was left got stronger and stronger, dark as molasses and sweet as sin. Jacking, they call it.
Wilkins: And how did the family fare?
Clara: Doctor, freezing only takes off water. It don't throw anything away. Every mean, headachy thing a distiller would cut and pour on the ground stays right there in the jacked cider, packed in tighter. Uncle Asa served it to the choir after the Christmas singing, and they had what the old folks called the apple palsy clean through to Easter. The soprano held a cup of coffee like it was trying to escape. Their hands shook so the hymnbooks rattled like corn in a sheller.
Wilkins: That is the truest thing anybody has said on this program in a month. Freezing concentrates the poison right along with the pleasure. One more, Clara, and make it about a cooper.
Clara: Ransom Akers, over in Floyd County. Best cooper in the Blue Ridge, and he would not take a dollar for a barrel. He took persimmon brandy, and he took it by the wet inch. He'd come to collect with his own wantage stick, which was nothing but his thumb, and he'd poke that thumb into your jug to read the wet line. Doctor, Ransom Akers had the biggest thumb in Virginia. Folks said it was the size of a turnip and twice as ugly, and every time he dipped it a man lost a half a pint of payment.
Wilkins: A cooper who gauged with his thumb! The Treasury should have hired him; he'd have paid off the war debt by Michaelmas. Stay with us, Clara, we want you for the copper. Folks, don't go wandering off to the woodshed.
♪ Banjo bridge into ad sting
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
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♪ Ad sting fades
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the craft.
♦ Copper pot lid lifted, soft ring of metal
Wilkins: Now, a gauger measured a barrel, but before there was a barrel there was a run, and a run is honest work or it is poison. Let me walk you through a proper country rye-and-corn spirit the way it was done in this valley, and I will be plain about where men hurt themselves. And let me say plainly first: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and all of this is history and education.
Wilkins: First the mash. A common proportion is something like two parts cracked corn to one part rye, cooked in water until it gels and smells like a bakery on a Saturday, then cooled to about blood-warm before the yeast goes in. Hot mash kills yeast as surely as a cold sheriff kills a party. It sits several days under a cloth and bubbles, and when it falls quiet and tastes sour rather than sweet, you have your wash, a weak beer of a few percent.
Wilkins: Second, the stripping run. The wash goes into the pot, and you bring it up slow. Low wines come off cloudy and weak, and you take them all, quickly. That is rough work and not yet anything a Christian should drink.
Wilkins: Third, the spirit run, which is the real art. The low wines go back in, the fire comes up gentle, and now you make your cuts. The very first runnings are the foreshots: sharp, solvent-smelling, nasty stuff that will make a man sick or worse. Those go on the ground or in the lamp, never in a mouth. Do not be stingy with them. Then come the heads, still harsh, smelling of varnish and glue, and those are set aside too. Then the hearts: sweet, clean, round on the tongue. That is the only part worth barreling. Then the tails, oily, wet-dog and cardboard, and you stop collecting for the barrel. You catch the run in a long row of small jars rather than one big crock, so you can smell and judge each one and decide where the hearts begin and end. A man who catches his whole run in one bucket is a man who has decided to poison himself on the installment plan.
Clara: Back home they called those little jars the choir, Doctor. You listen to every voice and throw out the ones singing flat.
Wilkins: The choir! That is better than anything in the books. Fourth, the fire. Alcohol vapor burns, and it is heavier than air, so it creeps along the floor like a cat toward an open flame. Keep your collection jars and the end of your worm well away from the firebox. Air the still-house. Never leave a running still alone to go fetch a ham. Barnaby can tell you about the ham, but he cannot run a still.
Wilkins: Fifth, the proof. You float your hydrometer in the hearts and read it, and you mind the temperature, because the glass reads true only at the heat it was made for. That is the same trick the gauger used against you, and you ought to use it for yourself. If the spirit is too hot to barrel, you bring it down with clean water, a little at a time, stirring as you go. The mix warms slightly and shrinks a touch, so you read again once it has settled to the cellar's cool.
Wilkins: Sixth, the barrel. New white oak, toasted or charred inside, filled to a good strength. The wood drinks some spirit into its staves, and the spirit breathes out a little through the oak as the months go by, so a barrel comes up short over time whether the gauger touched it or not. That is the one shortage no Pittsfield man can be blamed for, and so naturally it is the one the government never believed.
Wilkins: As for copper, it conducts heat even and true and it is a joy to hammer. Keep the inside bright and your joints made of good silver solder or sound brass unions. Lead has no business anywhere near a still, ever. I have pulled lead-black teeth out of a few mouths in my life, and I know where they came from.
♪ Short fiddle bridge
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths, slang, and the mail bag.
♦ Anvil ring as a hammer is set down
Wilkins: Tonight's call-in tape comes all the way from Wilkesboro in North Carolina. Gentleman calls himself Cletus, Rabbit to his friends, Miller to the sheriff. Run the cylinder.
♦ Second cylinder cranked, thin scratchy playback
Wilkins: (reading along over the 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 clicks off
Wilkins: Rabbit, I am glad you called, and I am going to treat your uncle more gently than he deserves. Let me take the two halves separately.
Wilkins: The hickory ashes. Up here in New Hampshire, every farm with a woodlot used to cart its hardwood ashes to the ashery, a shed with big kettles where they leached the ashes and boiled them down into potash. Pittsfield sent potash to Portsmouth by the barrel for the soap boilers and the glassmen. Potash is lye's first cousin: harsh, alkaline, takes the skin off your knuckles. Put a scoop of hickory ash in a thump keg and you will knock back some of the sourness in a rank, acid run, and your uncle will taste the difference and swear he has worked a miracle. But the bad heads, the foreshots, the stuff that blinds a man, the ash does nothing to them. They boil off and walk right on through the keg and down the worm, laughing.
Wilkins: The red oak shavings. Oak gives color and a little bite of tannin, as a barrel does. Put shavings in the keg and your spirit comes out the color of weak tea and looks older than it is. Rabbit, your uncle's red oak shavings will give the whiskey a fine color, the way a coat of paint gives a fine color to a rotten barn. Over in Tennessee some makers dripped their finished whiskey slowly through sugar-maple charcoal, and that does take some rough edges off. But that is filtering a finished spirit through a deep bed of charcoal, and it is nothing like throwing a handful of wood into a boiling keg and hoping.
Wilkins: The only cure for a bad head is the one I gave you an hour ago: cut it off and throw it away. So I say this to your uncle with love: you did not make swamp medicine, you made a swamp. Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, you are a gentleman and a scholar, and this one is for you.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: A fresh copper cent, stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., going in the mail to Wilkesboro. Don't spend it. Hang it on a nail over your uncle's thump keg so he remembers.
Wilkins: Now one more myth, since we are talking about proof. You will hear that 'proof' comes from the gunpowder test. A man pours some spirit on a pinch of powder and puts a flame to it. If the powder still burns, the spirit is strong enough and it is proved. If the powder just sits there wet and sullen, the spirit was watered and the seller is a cheat. That is old folklore and there is likely something in the story of the word. But as a test it is worthless and it is dangerous. It depends on how much you pour, how damp the powder is, how hot the day is, and how close your face is to the business. The gunpowder test tells you two things: whether the whiskey is proof, and whether you still have eyebrows. The glass hydrometer and a thermometer replaced it for a reason. Gaugers used them, honest makers used them, and you should too.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That one is for every man in Merrimack County who has walked around since boyhood with no eyebrows and a fine story about it.
Clara: Doctor, my granddaddy tried the powder test once at a barn dance. He spent the rest of the night looking like a surprised possum.
Wilkins: Then he got off light. Clara Higgins, thank you for coming all this way, chalk, choir, thumb and all.
Clara: Thank you, Doctor. And tell Barnaby I left him the dried apples on the stump. I am not fool enough to hand them to him.
♦ Barnaby grunting, chain clinking, a crunch
♪ Theme returns softly
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Before the Doctor banks his fire: the Flame-Flow Still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, built of pure electrolytic copper! Get yours at moonshinestill.com, or see it at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield!
Wilkins: SIGN-OFF.
Wilkins: If tonight's talk of cuts and proof and barrels has you wanting more, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. You will learn mash, fire, cuts, copper, and the history of every tax that ever tried to strangle the craft. We teach it lawfully, with essential oils, tinctures, and demonstrations, and with all the same rough talk you get here. Particulars can be had at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28. I will see you at the anvil.
Wilkins: My thanks to Clara Higgins of the Blue Ridge, to Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, and to Mr. Pettibone of Concord, wherever he is sitting tonight, which I trust is on a cushion. And thanks to Barnaby, who has never once miscounted a barrel because he has never once counted anything.
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 rises and fades into wax cylinder crackle