Lead Pipe, Zinc Roofs, and Sheet Brass: What Wilkins Refused to Put in a Still
Dr. G. G. Wilkins covers the metals that poisoned New England drinkers, from Massachusetts Bay's 1723 law against leaden still heads and the dry gripes of rum drinkers, to the blue Burton's line he saw on patients' gums, to his own lesson in why quicksilver stays far from a still fire. North Carolina runner Junior Vance tells three new stories about bad metal: a corn-shucking taken down by galvanized-tub ague, a blue-gummed old-timer who taught him the paper-scratch test for lead solder, and a still head cast from a cracked church bell that rang on every thump. In the mailbag Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in a thump keg, then knocks down the blue-flame myth and the safe-pewter-worm myth with a coin stamped on the anvil for each.
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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! Put that down. That is not a ham, that is the tin peddler's hat, and the tin peddler is still partly in it. Drop it. DROP IT, you four-hundred-pound sack of bad breath and worse decisions. ... Good bear. Go lie down in your wallow and think about what a Christian bear would do. ... You're all right, friend. He only licked your scalp, and most of it will grow back. Get your cart on to Barnstead before he decides you're the pudding course.
♦ Chain clinks, a heavy body thumps into the dirt, a long disgruntled huff
Wilkins: He's settled. He smells like a wet buffalo robe left in a privy, but he's settled.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, you sinners, saints, and fence-sitters of the Suncook Valley, and welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. I am your host, Dr. George G. Wilkins: tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor, stamper of coin, and keeper of the only bear in Merrimack County with a better reputation than the county commissioners. Tonight we talk about poison. Not the quick kind your mother-in-law keeps in the pantry. I mean the slow kind a man builds into his still with his own two hands because he was too cheap to buy copper. Lead pipe, zinc roofs, sheet brass, and the gray pewter trash I would not put in a still if the Governor held a pistol to my ear. I am a dentist, friends. I have looked into the mouths of the men who drank that stuff, and I will tell you exactly what I saw.
♪ Theme fades under a single banjo pluck
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Why gamble your health on gutter-lead and roof-zinc when honest copper stands ready? The Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, is handcrafted of pure electrolytic copper. See it at moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, drip into jar
♪ Short fiddle sting
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. The Sweet Poison: a short history of lead in the New England drink.
Wilkins: Lead is the most polite poison God ever made. It tastes sweet, it says thank you, and it takes thirty years to kill you, so you die convinced you had a good time. The old Romans knew it. Vitruvius, the Roman builder, wrote in his books on architecture that water from clay pipes is more wholesome than water from lead pipes. His proof was the lead workers themselves, pale as boiled tripe and shaking like a wet dog. That was before Christ, friends. And men in Merrimack County are still soldering stills with plumber's lead because it melts easy.
Wilkins: Come closer to home. In 1723 the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay colony passed a law against distilling rum through leaden heads or leaden worms. The reason was the dry gripes. A Boston man would drink a few cups of rum run through a lead worm, and in a week his belly would knot up like a wet hawser on a whaling ship. He'd lie on the floor with his knees under his chin, howling at the rafters, bound up so tight he could not pass a pea for a fortnight. Doctor Franklin, the old kite-flier himself, remembered that law in a letter he wrote late in his life. He knew the same colic from the hot lead type of his printing days.
Wilkins: Over in England they had the Devonshire colic. Whole parishes of cider drinkers were doubled up and cursing. A physician named George Baker proved in 1767 that it came from lead in the cider presses and the vats. Lead dissolves in sour drink. Cider is sour. Mash is sour. Wash is sour. Do you see where I'm going with this, or do I have to draw it on the barn in tar?
Wilkins: And here is the devil's own trick. Lead tastes sweet. The old chemists sold sugar of lead, which is lead dissolved in vinegar, and crooked wine-sellers stirred it into sour wine to make it taste like Sunday dinner. So the poison does not warn you. It flatters you. A lead-run jar of liquor goes down smoother than a fat parson's sermon on gluttony.
Wilkins: Here's where the dentist in me comes in. In 1840 a doctor named Henry Burton wrote up a blue-black line along the edge of the gums in men poisoned by lead. They call it Burton's line. Once you have seen it, you see it everywhere: house painters, type-setters, and every stillman who ever got cheap.
♦ Wax crackle; a creaking chair; Wilkins sets down a pair of forceps with a clink
Wilkins: Some years back old Zebulon Haines came over the hill from Epsom with a molar that had gone to black rot. He had been drinking his own make for a quarter century. He sat in my chair, I pried his jaw open, and Lord preserve us. His gums were bluer than a Concord Whig's language after a lost election, a slate-gray line along every tooth like somebody had drawn it with a pencil. His breath would peel varnish. He could not lift his hands from the wrist. They hung off the ends of his arms like two dead trout on a string. The doctors call that wrist drop, or painter's palsy.
Wilkins: I put the forceps on that molar, and Zebulon let out a scream that sent Barnaby up the hemlock, which a bear that size has no business doing. The tooth came out with a crack like a pine knot in a stove, and half a thimble of black blood came with it. Then I asked him, Zebulon, what is your still made of? He grinned with the rest of his rotten teeth and said, The cap is copper, Doctor, but I made the worm from the pipes of an old meetinghouse organ over Gilmanton way. Pure as a hymn. Organ pipes, friends! Lead and tin, poured and rolled. The man had been running his liquor through the church music for twenty-five years and wondered why his insides sang off-key.
Wilkins: I traded him an honest copper worm for that organ pipe, and he lived another eight years. He shook the whole time, and he never could hold a fork, but he lived. I melted the organ pipe into fishing sinkers and gave them to men I don't care for.
Wilkins: Now, why did this go so bad in my time? Mr. Lincoln's whiskey tax. Lincoln taxed the whiskey two dollars a gallon, so every cheap fool in Merrimack County built his rig out of roof gutter, coffin lining, and spite. Copper got dear in the war. Lead was lying everywhere: old water pipe, roof flashing, tea-chest lining, and the lead coffins the rich folks get buried in. Deacon Hosea Plumley of Barnstead, God rest his gizzard, lined his still with lead off a rich man's coffin, and the rich man was the only one who got out of that deal healthy. Hosea's customers spent a whole summer in the outhouse, praying in two directions at once.
♪ Fiddle bridge, slow and mournful, then picks up
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. The Zinc-Roof Man, and a Runner from the Brushy Mountains.
Wilkins: First a story on myself, because the sheriff isn't here to tell it. Last spring a drummer came up the turnpike from Lowell, a Mr. Ebenezer Pratt, agent for galvanized iron roofing. Galvanized means iron dipped in hot zinc. The Frenchmen patented the process in '37, and now every barn from Nashua to Conway wants a roof of it. Mr. Pratt had waxed mustaches and a voice like a squeaky wagon, and he wanted to sell me a galvanized boiler for my still. Won't rust, Doctor! Never rusts! Shines like a new dime!
Wilkins: So I said, Mr. Pratt, let us have a little alchemy. I took a square of his sample, put it in a pan, and poured in a quart of my sour mash, which is about as acid as a widow at the reading of the will. I set it on the forge. In ten minutes his shining zinc had gone dull and grew a white bloom like mold on a cheese, and a sharp fume came up that tasted like licking a doorknob. The brass-founders down in his own Lowell know that smell. Breathe the fume of hot zinc and you get what they call brass-founder's ague: chills, sweats, aching bones, and a mouth like you've been sucking on pennies.
Wilkins: Mr. Pratt said I was a superstitious backwoods tooth-yanker. To prove the zinc was harmless he poured himself a tin cup of that mash, still warm, and drank it down. The zinc-roof man swore galvanized iron would never rust, and I swore he would never keep his breakfast, and only one of us was a liar.
♦ Distant retching, a man groaning, chain clinks rapidly
Wilkins: Round about midnight Mr. Pratt was on my porch, puking over the rail in a long, wet, heaving chorus. You could have set a hymn to it. He brought up his supper, his dinner, and I believe a little of what he ate in Concord on Tuesday. And it all landed right next to Barnaby's wallow. Now Barnaby is a bear of low appetites. He came out of the dark nose-first to investigate the offering. Mr. Pratt looked down and saw four hundred pounds of black fur licking up his supper, and he lit out down the turnpike in his nightshirt and checked trousers, howling like a lynx with its tail in a door. Barnaby got to the end of his chain at the same moment Mr. Pratt got past it, by about the width of a sermon.
♦ Ripping cloth, a bear's grunt, a man's high scream fading away
Wilkins: Barnaby took the whole seat of his trousers and a fair portion of the Lowell hide underneath. There was a smear of blood on the chain post and a shred of drawers fluttering on Barnaby's tooth like a flag of surrender. I keep that patch of checked wool off his trouser seat nailed over my door, the only diploma I ever earned honest. Mr. Pratt sold his roofs in Chichester after that. They tell me he stands up through the whole sermon.
♪ Banjo flourish
Wilkins: Now I have a guest in the Fort tonight. He came a long road from North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, down in the Brushy Mountains, and he drives faster than a Concord stage with a hornet in the coach. Please welcome Mr. Junior Vance. Junior, you've got a face like a road map somebody sat on, and I mean it as a compliment.
Junior: Well, thank you, Doctor. You've got a face like the map got lost in a hog lot, and I mean that one kindly too. Your bear just looked at me like I was a sack of sweet corn.
Wilkins: He looks at everybody that way. Last week he looked at the Methodist circuit rider's horse that way, and the horse has not been the same. Tonight we're talking bad metal, Junior. You hauled for a good many makers. Did you ever see a man poison his neighbors through plain cheapness?
Junior: Doctor, I saw it more times than a preacher sees the collection plate. There was a fella up the Brushies we called Galvanized Gaither, and he earned the name. He got hold of a big zinc-coated washtub, the kind your mama scrubs overalls in, flipped it upside down for a cap, and cooked in a galvanized pot to match. Said it was the shiniest rig in Wilkes County, and it was, right up till it boiled.
Wilkins: Oh, I can see where this road goes, and it has a ditch at the end.
Junior: Big ditch. He sold his whole first run to a corn-shucking over in the next hollow. By midnight every soul at that party was shivering. It was July, Doctor, hot enough to fry an egg on a mule, and those folks were piled under quilts with their teeth chattering like a sewing machine. Sweating and freezing at once. One old boy threw up on the fiddler, and the fiddler kept on playing, I'll give him that. My daddy took one look and said that's the galvanize ague, boys. Then he walked up to Gaither's rig with a sledgehammer and beat it flat as a flapjack.
Wilkins: Your daddy and I would have got along. That's the same ague I gave the zinc man, only you folks had a fiddler. Hot acid mash eats the zinc right off, and you drink it or breathe it. Either way it comes back up, and usually on the fiddler.
Junior: The second one stuck with me the longest. When I was a young buck there was an old-timer at a fish fry we called Uncle Pink. Nice old fella. But when he grinned his gums were black-blue, like he'd been eating huckleberries with a shovel. And his hands just hung there. He couldn't lift his fingers. He picked up his cup with both wrists, like a dog holding a bone.
Wilkins: That's Burton's line and wrist drop, Junior, the very same thing I saw on Zebulon. A lead man.
Junior: Lead man through and through. He'd made his own liquor thirty years and patched every seam with plumber's solder, the soft gray stuff. Drank off it every night. So from then on, before I'd haul a single jar, I'd walk up to the maker's still with my pocketknife and scratch his solder seam, then rub the scrapings on a scrap of paper. If it wrote on the paper like a pencil, I turned around and walked off. Some of those boys cussed me down to my grandmother's grandmother. But I never hauled lead.
Wilkins: Now that's a fair rough test, Junior, and I'll tell the listeners why. Lead is so soft it leaves a gray mark on paper. Good tin marks much fainter. But it's a hint, not a proof. A crafty man can lay tin over lead like a whitewashed tomb. The only sure thing is to build it honest from the start.
Junior: That's what my granny said about marrying, too.
Wilkins: Your granny is a philosopher. Got one more for me?
Junior: The last one's the funny one. There was a fella up past Moravian Falls who got hold of a cracked church bell after the steeple caught fire. He had it melted down and cast into a still head. Said a church bell is good copper, so why waste it.
Wilkins: Ha! Well, he wasn't wrong. Bell metal is bronze, copper and tin, honest metals. But it's brittle as a widow's patience and loud as one too.
Junior: Loud is right! Every time that rig thumped, the cap rang, bonnng, bonnng, all the way down the hollow. Sunday mornings the congregation would be sitting in the pews and hear that bell ringing from the woods, and some of 'em thought the Lord was calling 'em up the mountain. The preacher got so many folks walking out mid-sermon to go find the miracle that he finally went up the mountain himself.
Wilkins: And what did the reverend find?
Junior: He found it, sampled it, and blessed it. Twice. But the revenue men heard that ringing too, and they followed it straight up the ridge like hounds after a possum. They didn't need a map. They just walked toward the music. They chopped the rig to pieces, and that fella said that was the only church bell he ever heard that rang the sinners in instead of out.
Wilkins: A still head made out of a church bell is the only way a Brushy Mountain man ever got to church on time. Junior, you are a lying rascal and an honest one at the same time, which is the best kind of company. Stay put by the stove. We'll want you in the copper talk.
Junior: I ain't moving, Doctor. Your bear is between me and my coat.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks once
♪ Brisk parlor banjo vamp leading into the advertisement
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♪ Banjo flourish ends the advertisement
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, slow drip into a glass jar
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the Craft: building and running an honest still.
Wilkins: First a word from the law, which I respect the way Barnaby respects a locked smokehouse. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is illegal under United States law, and everything on this program is for historical and educational purposes only. Now, here is what goes into a Wilkins still, and what never does.
Wilkins: The pot, the cap, the arm, and the worm are copper. Heavy copper, beaten and riveted. The seams are sweated with pure tin or with silver solder, never with plumber's lead. The cap joint is sealed with a stiff paste of rye flour and water, the way the old-timers did it. It bakes hard in the heat, and it's made of bread, not metal, so it can't poison anybody. The worst it can do is draw mice. My fermenting tubs are white oak, never galvanized, never a zinc pail, never a painted keg, because old paint is lead too. And no sheet brass of unknown birth in my boiler. Brass is copper and zinc, and cheap scrap brass often has lead in it besides. A sound fitting of honest lead-free alloy, made by a careful shop for that job, is a different animal. But a sheet beaten out of an old bed-warmer and boiled in sour mash for six hours? No, sir.
Junior: Up home we sealed with a cornmeal paste. Same idea. The revenue man broke a rig of ours once and licked his fingers after, and he said it tasted like hush puppies.
Wilkins: The best-fed lawman in Carolina. Now, why copper? Not for looks, though she shines like a bride. When the hot vapor rises off the mash it carries sulfur-stinking stuff with it, the rotten-egg reek. The copper grabs that sulfur and keeps it on the metal. Here's the part a man ought to remember: copper does most of that work where the vapor touches it, in the cap, the arm, and the worm. That's why even the poorest honest maker in the old days, if he couldn't afford an all-copper pot, insisted on a copper head and worm. Put lead or zinc up there instead and you don't clean the vapor. You season it with poison.
Wilkins: Now the mash, my rye-and-corn, step by step. Crack your corn and cook it in clean water until it's a thick porridge, near a boil, stirring so it doesn't scorch, because scorched mash makes scorched liquor. Then let it cool to about a hundred and fifty degrees on the glass. Old-timers who had no glass said hot enough to sting but not to scald. Now stir in your rye meal and your malted barley. The malt carries the ferment that turns starch to sugar. The French chemists Payen and Persoz named it diastase back in 1833. Put the malt in too hot and you kill it dead, and your starch stays starch forever, as useless as a deputy at a barn-raising. Let it rest an hour or so, stirring now and then, and taste it. It should turn sweet.
Wilkins: Next, cool it down to blood-warm, about eighty degrees, and add your yeast or a good dollop of brewer's barm. Cover it with a cloth, keep it warm, and keep the room aired out, because the working mash breathes out bad air. In four days to a week the bubbling slows, the sweetness goes sour and sharp, and you have a wash. That wash is the sour liquor that eats lead and zinc, which is why we've spent half the night cursing them.
Wilkins: Now the run. Strain your wash, charge the pot no more than three-quarters full, paste the cap, and bring her up slow. Low fire. A roaring fire puckers your cuts, pukes mash into the worm, and blows your cap clean off. And mind this hard: an alcohol flame burns pale blue and you can scarcely see it in daylight. A man can be on fire and not know it till his eyebrows go. No lamp near the spout, no candle near a leaking joint, a bucket of water and a wet blanket at hand always.
Wilkins: The first drops are the foreshots. They smell like a hatter's shop and a druggist's back room. Throw them out. Every drop. Then come the heads, sharp and nose-stinging like glue. Those go too, into the ground or the lamp, never into a man. Throw away more than you think you should, because a cheap man's heads end up in a churchyard. When the smell turns sweet and clean and the spirit rolls smooth on your tongue tip, you're in the hearts. Keep them. And when it starts to go oily and wet-dog and leaves a slick on the water, those are the tails. Set them aside to run again with your next charge.
Junior: My granddaddy said the heads are for the revenue men and the tails are for the in-laws.
Wilkins: Your granddaddy was generous to the in-laws. And when the run is done, clean that copper while it's warm. Scrub it with salt and vinegar till she's bright as a new cent, then rinse, rinse, and rinse again, so no salt or acid stays behind. A bright still is a working still.
Wilkins: And now, friends, a confession about quicksilver. I am a dentist, and like many of us I mixed amalgam fillings. Back in '33 the Crawcour brothers came over from France to New York and sold what they called Royal Mineral Succedaneum. It was filings off silver coins mixed with mercury and jammed into rotten teeth. That started what we call the Amalgam War. The American Society of Dental Surgeons made its members swear an oath against quicksilver in '45, then argued itself to death over it, the only society I ever saw killed by its own fillings.
Wilkins: One winter, like a damned fool, I warmed a pot of quicksilver on my forge in a closed shop to get the filings to take faster. Within a week my hands shook so bad I couldn't hold a punch to a coin. My mouth ran spit like a hound at a butcher's window, and my gums went sore and spongy. Two of my own teeth wiggled like fence posts in a spring thaw. The hatters down in Danbury, Connecticut get the same thing from the mercury in their felt. They call it the Danbury shakes. The Army doctors dosed our boys in blue with calomel, which is mercury again, until the soldiers' teeth fell out in their hardtack. Surgeon General Hammond pulled calomel off the supply table in '63, and the old pill-rollers screamed so loud it helped get him court-martialed. So when I say no quicksilver within a mile of a still fire, I'm speaking from my own loose teeth.
Junior: Doctor, I believe you've just confessed to poisoning yourself on the air.
Wilkins: Junior, I confess something on the air every week. It's cheaper than church.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, chain rattles
♪ Fiddle and banjo turnaround
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths, slang, and the mailbag. We have a call-in line, if you can believe it, a speaking tube run all the way to North Carolina by a man I would not trust to hold my hat. The fellows at the telegraph office catch the voices on wax cylinders. Let's crank up the call-in tape.
♦ Cylinder crank whirs, heavy hiss, faint ringing
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 stops with a click
Wilkins: Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Junior, do you know this Rabbit?
Junior: Know of him. They say he's fast as his name and twice as easy to scare.
Wilkins: Well, Rabbit, your uncle's heart is in the right place and his ashes are not. Let me tell you what hickory ashes really are. Every farm in New Hampshire knows. Steep hardwood ash in water and you get lye. Our grandfathers leached it in barrels, boiled it down in great kettles into potash and pearlash, and shipped it off to make soap and glass. So when your uncle tosses ash into his thump keg, he's putting soap-makings in his liquor. Rabbit, your uncle put soap-makings in his thump keg, so the best that liquor could do was wash his mouth out for him. It adds a slick, bitter, alkaline taint, and it does nothing about the heads.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That's one cent stamped, for the hickory ash. Now the red oak shavings. Red oak is so open in the grain that you can put your lips to the end of a stick and blow air clean through it. Junior, have you ever done that?
Junior: Did it in a schoolhouse once and blew pipe smoke out the other end at the teacher. Got switched for it.
Wilkins: Worth it. That's why no cooper worth his adze makes a tight barrel from red oak. It's white oak for barrels. Red oak shavings in a doubler will hand you some tannin bitterness and a little color, so the stuff looks older than it is. But they can't take out the heads. Nothing in that keg can. The only cure for bad heads is the cut. Throw away the foreshots and heads at the spout, every time, generously. Then nobody needs swamp medicine. Rabbit, a hearty shout across the Mason and Dixon to you, to your uncle, and to his ash bucket. Keep calling, son.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Two cents stamped. Now the myths. Every tavern from Pittsfield to Portsmouth has a man who'll pour a spoonful of liquor on the bar, put a match to it, and say it burns blue, so it's safe. A man who judges his liquor by the blue flame is the kind of man who judges a horse by the color of its flies. The blue flame tells you there's alcohol in the spoon, which you knew when you bought it. It tells you nothing about lead. Nothing about zinc. And wood spirit, the poison that lives in the heads, burns pale blue too. Zebulon Haines's organ-pipe liquor burned as pretty a blue as you ever saw, and it took the use of his hands.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Three cents. The second myth: a pewter worm is safe because pewter is tin. Some pewter is mostly tin. The fine Britannia metal is tin with antimony and copper and little or no lead. But the cheap pewter a peddler sells out of the back of his wagon can be a third lead or more. Pewter is like a deacon: you can't tell how much lead is in him till you've heated him up. So the word pewter tells you no more than the word gentleman on a Concord lawyer's sign. Copper for the worm, friends. Always copper.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin; coin rings and rolls across the anvil
Wilkins: Four cents stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and they go in the jar for the next poor soul who needs a tooth pulled and can't pay. I've pulled teeth from a man so full of lead you could have sharpened him and written a letter to his mother. I don't care to pull any more like him.
♪ Theme begins softly beneath
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! Honest metal makes honest work. The Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, handcrafted of heavy-gauge electrolytic copper, is waiting for you at moonshinestill.com, or at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28!
Wilkins: My thanks to Mr. Junior Vance of North Wilkesboro, who may now go and argue with my bear about his coat.
Junior: Much obliged, Doctor. If I'm not back by sunrise, tell my mama the bear's got it.
Wilkins: And if you'd like to learn the craft proper, from the mash tub to the cuts to the scrubbing of the copper, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. You'll learn what goes into an honest still, and what never does, all for history and education, without having to learn it from your gums the way Zebulon did. There's talk of a railroad running up the Suncook to Pittsfield one of these years, so maybe you'll ride in on the steam cars instead of a mule. Until then, the turnpike will do.
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