The Lamprey River Smugglers' Trail: Seacoast Rum, Inland Rye, and the Barter Between
Dr. Wilkins follows the old trading path from the Portsmouth wharves up through Great Bay, the Lamprey River falls and the Northwood ridge to Pittsfield. Molasses rum went west, hill-country rye came east, and salt fish, tinware and ship copper were bartered in between, all while runners slipped past the Portsmouth tide-waiters and the new internal revenue gaugers. Blue Ridge slang historian Clara Higgins brings new stories: eel signals nailed to trees, a hogshead with a false brine top and a widow's hollow butter churn. Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's voicemail about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and takes apart the blue-flame test at 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! Settle your great hairy carcass down. That's a jar of hearts, not a jar of honey. If you stick your snout through my window once more I'll pull your eyeteeth with the blacksmith tongs and sell them to a Concord lady for hatpins.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drops slack against the log wall
Wilkins: There. Now he sulks like a deacon caught at a barn dance with his collar on backward.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners and all you damp gentlemen of the jury. Welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. I'm your host, your tooth-puller, your blacksmith and, if the county clerk's ledger is to be believed, your most frequent defendant. Tonight we walk the Lamprey River Smugglers' Trail, where Seacoast rum rolled west, inland rye rolled east, and everything from salt cod to stolen copper changed hands in between.
Wilkins: Before we start, the usual word of sense. Making distilled spirit for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States. What you hear tonight is history, instruction and slander, offered for your education and nothing more.
♪ Theme swells and fades under
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Do you crave the coppersmith's art but lack the barn for it? Behold the Fort Wilkins 2-Gallon Tabletop Mini-Still, pure spun copper that fits a parlor table! Visit moonshinestill.com today!
♦ Wax crackle, a log settles in the stove
♪ Short fiddle sting, segment bumper
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. The trail itself.
Wilkins: Take a map of this state and put your finger on Portsmouth. That's where the ships came in from the West Indies, low in the water, holds full of molasses barrels sweating in the sun. A Portsmouth tide-waiter, which is what we call a customs man who boards on the tide, can smell a cask of rum through two inches of oak and a bale of hay. He can't smell his own breath, though, and his breath is the stronger evidence.
Wilkins: They finished the new granite Custom House on Pleasant Street around 1860. It's handsome, and it's built heavy enough to hold the federal government's self-regard. The government sits down there counting molasses. Meanwhile the trade slips up the Piscataqua into Great Bay on the gundalows.
Wilkins: If you've never seen a gundalow, picture a barn floor that took up sailing. She's flat-bottomed and broad as a widow's lap, with a short stubby mast and a long lateen yard that the crew can drop flat to pass under a bridge. A gundalow drops its sail to pass under a bridge the way a Newmarket mill agent drops his voice to pass under a raise in wages. They carry bricks, cordwood, hay, and kegs of whatever doesn't appear on the manifest.
Wilkins: At the head of Great Bay you come to Newmarket, where the Lamprey River falls into the tide. The Newmarket Manufacturing Company built its cotton mills on those falls back in the twenties. There are thousands of spindles going, girls at the looms and agents in starched collars, and you'd be amazed how much spirit a mill town drinks when the bell rings at quitting time. Newmarket was the first great swap-house of the trail.
Wilkins: From there you follow the river upstream, and the Lamprey has more twists than a Dover lawyer's will and is twice as slippery. You pass Packers Falls in Durham, then Wadley Falls up in Lee, where there's a sawmill and a gristmill and a miller who never once asked what was under the meal sacks. Then it's Epping, then Raymond, and on into Deerfield and the Northwood hills, where the river starts as a trickle off the high ground.
Wilkins: Where the river gives out, the road takes over. The First New Hampshire Turnpike was chartered in 1796 and runs from the Piscataqua Bridge at Durham up through Lee and Nottingham, over the Northwood ridge, and down into Epsom. From Epsom you turn up the Suncook valley, past the Short Falls, and come home to Pittsfield and this very log fort. That's the whole Lamprey trail, eighty-odd miles of mud, ledge, tavern and perjury.
Wilkins: Now, the goods. Rum went west. Those molasses barrels got cooked in Portsmouth and Newburyport into New England rum, rough as a cob and twice as useful. It went up the river to the hill towns, where a farmer can't grow sugar on granite no matter how hard he prays.
Wilkins: Rye came east. Rye will grow in thin, stony, cold dirt where wheat lies down and quits, which is why it does so well in Northwood and in my family tree. Every hill farm from Deerfield to Gilmanton has a rye patch, and the farmers distill their surplus because a jug of rye walks to market a great deal easier than forty bushels of grain.
Wilkins: In between came the barter, and barter is the true heart of it, because barter leaves no ledger. Salt fish came up from the coast, dried cod stacked like shingles. Tinware came in on the backs of the Connecticut tin peddlers, who'd trade you a dipper and a lantern for a sack of rags, a pound of feathers and your daughter's opinion of them. Potash went down to the coast, and so did shingles, butter and wool. And copper came up, the most precious freight of all to a man in my line.
Wilkins: I'll say one solemn thing about that salt fish, and then I'll go back to being disgusting. The poorest grade of the cod, which they call refuse fish, went south on the same ships, to feed people held in slavery on the sugar islands. Those were the people who boiled the molasses we turned into rum. Every barrel of Portsmouth rum has that trade in its blood, and a man who loves this craft ought to know where it came from. The war we just finished was fought over less than that and more than that. Enough said.
Wilkins: Back to the outlaws. In the old days a runner on the Lamprey had exactly one enemy, and that was the tide-waiter down at Portsmouth. You got your rum past the wharf and you were free as a robin all the way to Northwood. Then Mr. Lincoln's revenue law of '62 came along. They appointed assessors and collectors by district, distillers had to register and pay for a license, and suddenly there were federal eyes in the hill towns too. Gaugers, we call them. So now a runner has a customs man on the coast, a gauger in the hills, and the Lamprey eels in between, and of the three I'd trust the eels.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, chain rattles
Wilkins: Barnaby agrees. He's met all three, and he ate two of them.
♪ Banjo bumper, quick and rowdy
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Legends, outlaws and runners.
Wilkins: Let me tell you about the tin peddler who wasn't. Last October a fellow came up the turnpike from Epsom with a peddler's pack on his back, tin cups and pie plates and a nutmeg grater, the whole jangling show. His boots were too clean, though, and his hands were too soft. No real peddler has hands that soft. He was a revenue deputy out of the Portsmouth district, sent to buy a jug off me and write it down.
Wilkins: The trouble with a disguise is that it has to fool everybody, and Barnaby doesn't like tinware. He never has. The rattle of a tin plate sets his teeth on edge the way a dull forceps sets off a bishop. This fool walked past the still-house window rattling like a tinker's wagon in a hailstorm. Barnaby rose up on his hind legs, all four hundred pounds, with the chain singing out behind him, and took that pack in one paw like a man snatching a hat.
Wilkins: Tin went everywhere. There were pie plates in the woodpile and a dipper in the well, and the nutmeg grater landed on my roof, where it stayed until March. Then Barnaby went for the coat tails, and he got the coat tails and the seat of the trousers with them. Then he got a fair, honest, soup-plate-sized portion of the gentleman's hind end. You've never heard a sound like it, neighbors. It was like a wet bedsheet tearing on a clothesline in a March wind, followed by a high, thin noise like a teakettle saying its prayers. Barnaby sat down chewing with a look of deep philosophical disappointment. After a while he spat out the man's suspender buckle the way a Baptist spits out communion wine: like he'd been cheated.
Wilkins: That deputy ran. He ran north, not even toward home, with his whole hind end out to the breeze, and he didn't stop until Barnstead. A farmer there found him in a hog shed and lent him a feed sack to wear as a skirt. When he got back to Portsmouth he wrote it up as an assault by an unregistered animal. That's the first honest report any revenue man ever filed about this county. I sewed him a pair of trousers out of the pack cloth and mailed them down with my compliments, along with my bill for the nutmeg grater.
♦ Barnaby grunts, satisfied
Wilkins: He remembers. He's licking his lips.
Wilkins: Here's another story, and it's true as gravity. A while back I traded a man on the trail a fistful of my stamped coppers, the cents I punch at the anvil, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. This spring I drove to Portsmouth for wire and borax. A ship chandler on the wharf counted out my change, and there in my palm was one of my own cents, with my own mark, worn half smooth. It had gone down the Suncook, over the Northwood ridge, down the Lamprey and across the bay, passing through the Lord knows how many rum deals, card games and church plates, and come home to me in better shape than any man who's walked that turnpike. That's how you know a trail is real: your money knows the road better than you do.
Wilkins: Now, I've got a guest who's come further than any cent of mine. She traveled clean up from the Blue Ridge of Virginia, and she's a mountain herbalist and a historian of the old drinking talk. Clara Higgins, welcome to Fort Wilkins.
Clara: Thank you kindly, Doctor. I'll say this: I've slept in haylofts that smelled better than this studio, and I've got the bear to thank for most of it.
Wilkins: Ha! The bear and the still and the dentistry. We've got three kinds of stink in here and every one is honest. Clara, you've come so far north your accent needs a buffalo robe.
Clara: Oh, my accent's fine, Doctor. It's my feet that need the robe. I've been tramping your Lamprey River for two weeks, reading old letters in farmhouse attics, and I'll tell you what, your New Hampshire people hide their history the way they hide their liquor. It's in the walls, under the floorboards, and in the Bible box.
Wilkins: So tell us what you dug out. What did the runners do for signals on that river?
Clara: Well, this one tickled me. Up around Epping and Raymond the runners didn't trust a lantern or a whistle, because anybody can light a lantern, the revenue man included. So they used the river's own creature. They'd take a lamprey eel, one of those ugly sucking things with a mouth like a peppermill, and nail it to a pine by the cart track. Head pointing upstream meant the road was clear. Head pointing downstream meant there were officers about and you'd best set your load in the brush.
Wilkins: An eel for a signpost. That's very Epping.
Clara: Isn't it? But here's the best part. One June a raccoon came along and ate the signal right off the nail, head, tail and all. Two wagonloads of Portsmouth rum sat in the woods outside Epping for three days, with the drivers too scared to move, waiting for an eel that was already in a raccoon. A whole crowd of men sat back in there guarding the rum and not one of them took a drink, because they swore they had to stay sharp.
Wilkins: So half of Epping sat three days in the woods for want of an eel, and it's still the most sober Epping has ever been.
Clara: That's what the letter said, Doctor, near enough word for word. The woman who wrote it said her husband came home so dry and cross she sent him back out for the eel.
Wilkins: Now, the Portsmouth customs men. They had gauging rods, didn't they? They'd push a long stick down the bunghole of a hogshead to measure it and taste what came up.
Clara: They did, and I've got a family story on exactly that. My great-uncle Amos Higgins went to sea young, as a cook on the coastwise schooners running from Norfolk up to Portsmouth, and he wrote home letters my grandmother kept in a cracker tin. He tells about an inspector on the Portsmouth wharves they called Old Gauge-Stick, because he'd ram that rod into every hogshead and lick it clean like a widower at a church supper.
Wilkins: I know the type. I've pulled teeth from the type.
Clara: So a crew Amos sailed with built themselves a hogshead with a false top. There was a tight little partition a foot and a half down, and above it they packed brined salt cod, sloshing in pickle. Below it was a hundred gallons of good rum. Old Gauge-Stick rammed his rod in, hit the fish, pulled it up dripping brine, licked it and made a face like he'd kissed a herring. He wrote down salt fish and waved it on up to Newmarket.
Wilkins: Ha! He licked the evidence and missed it. That's the Portsmouth customs service all over: a fine nose and a poor tongue.
Clara: Amos wrote that the rum tasted a touch fishy when they tapped it, but nobody upriver complained. He said a Newmarket loom-fixer told him it put him in mind of the sea.
Wilkins: Clara, did the women run the trail too? I've always held that the best smugglers in New England wear an apron.
Clara: Oh, Doctor, they ran the smartest part of it. There was a widow in Raymond named Patience Ladd. I found her in a neighbor's diary. She sold butter, fine yellow butter, and she was famous for it. Her churn had a hollow dasher. You'd lift the lid and see cream and butter right up to the brim, but the dasher handle was bored out like a gun barrel and held a quart of rye from the hills.
Wilkins: A hollow dasher. Lord, there's a sentence a man could get in trouble finishing.
Clara: You hush. Here's the best of it. The new revenue deputy for that district boarded right down the road, and every Saturday he bought his butter from Widow Ladd, churn-fresh, with a little something poured into the crock while she wrapped it. He complained to the whole Raymond store that the widow's butter made him dizzy and he couldn't account for it. He reckoned it was the clover.
Wilkins: So the deputy bought his own evidence by the pound every Saturday and complained it made him dizzy. That's federal investigation at its finest. Patience Ladd ought to be on the five-dollar note.
Clara: She ought to be on all of them, Doctor, and her churn ought to be in the Capitol.
Wilkins: Now, you're the woman for words. What did they call this rum on the Lamprey? Down here a man says rum the way he says Methodist, with his lip curled.
Clara: There's a whole dictionary of it. The old sailors called rough rum kill-devil or rumbullion, which goes back to the sugar islands. Blackstrap was rum with molasses stirred in, thick enough to tar a roof. Flip was beer and rum and sweetening, stirred hot with a red-hot loggerhead out of the fire until it foamed. Stonewall was cider stiffened with rum, and they named it right, because a man who drank it ran into one. But on the Lamprey I found two I'd never heard anywhere. The cheapest, rankest molasses rum that came up on the barges, they called Great Bay grog, or Gundalow Tea.
Wilkins: Gundalow Tea! I'm stealing that.
Clara: And the customs man who'd take a jar to look the other way? They called him a wet tide-waiter.
Wilkins: A wet tide-waiter is like a leaky worm, Clara: he does the job, but half of it ends up down his front. Clara Higgins, you're a credit to the Blue Ridge and a menace to every attic in Rockingham County. Stay right there, because after this the Announcer's going to sell you a still whether you want one or not.
Clara: I'll hold onto my purse, Doctor.
♦ Barnaby grunts
Wilkins: Hold onto it tighter than that. Barnaby's had his eye on it since you came in.
♪ Brassy patent-medicine wagon fanfare, tambourine shake
AD BREAK
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♪ Fanfare button, cymbal
♦ Wax crackle, hiss of steam from a copper kettle
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the craft.
Wilkins: Speaking of copper. I said copper came up the Lamprey trail, and it did, much of it torn off the bottoms of ships. They sheath a hull in copper below the waterline to keep off the worms and weed. When a ship comes into the yards to be broken or re-sheathed, the old sheets go out the back gate at night in a fish cart.
Wilkins: Now listen, because this is where a man can poison his neighbors. A great deal of that sheathing isn't copper at all. It's Muntz metal, yellow metal, a brass of about sixty parts copper and forty parts zinc. It's pretty as a Sunday bonnet, and it's no good in a still. Zinc doesn't belong in your spirit, and salvaged brass often carries lead besides. A man who'd build a still from yellow-metal ship sheathing would also pull a tooth with a fireplace poker. I've met both, and they're married to sisters. Pure copper is red, not yellow. If it's yellow, sell it to a bell-founder and keep it away from your mash.
Wilkins: So you've got your copper. Where does it earn its keep? Here's the alchemist's secret. Copper takes the sulfur stink out of the spirit, and it does most of that work in the steam, not in the soup. It works where the hot vapor kisses bare metal, in the helmet, the lyne arm and the worm. A copper pot with an iron cap and a tin pipe is a fine boiler and a poor alchemist. Put your best copper where the vapor travels.
Wilkins: Now the rye, the hill-country way, as it's been done on these farms since before the Revolution. Remember, this is history, not an invitation.
Wilkins: First, grind your rye coarse, cracked, not flour. Take something near seven or eight parts rye to two parts malted barley. Rye has a little of its own converting power, but not enough to trust, so the barley malt does the heavy work of turning starch to sugar. Heat your water, mix in the rye, and cook it, stirring the whole time, because rye goes gummy as a molasses taffy and will glue itself to the kettle. Let it come down to about where you can just hold a finger in it for a count of two, a hundred and fifty degrees by the glass, and stir in the malt. Hold it warm an hour or more, wrapped in quilts, and the mash goes from porridge to sweet thin gruel. That's the conversion.
Wilkins: Then cool it, all the way down to blood-warm or under, about eighty degrees, before you pitch your yeast. Put yeast in hot mash and you're running a funeral for it. Now, rye mash foams like a Concord legislator who's just been asked where the money went, so leave a third of your barrel empty or you'll be mopping rye off the rafters. Ferment four days to a week in a warm, airy room. Never ferment in a shut-up cellar, because that gas will put you down for good.
Wilkins: When it goes quiet and sour, strain off the liquid. If you leave the grain in a direct-fired kettle, rye will scorch on the bottom, and scorched rye tastes like a burnt church. Strain it, or stir it steady, and keep your fire low.
Wilkins: Rum is simpler. Thin your molasses with four or five parts water, pitch your yeast and let it work. Down in the islands they add dunder, the spent liquor left in the still from the last run, to give the next batch backbone. Molasses wash makes a rank sulfur stink, and that's another reason to run it through good copper.
Wilkins: Now, the cuts, and listen close. When the run starts, the first trickle off the worm is the foreshots, sharp, solvent-smelling and nasty. Then come the heads, still harsh, smelling like glue and nail polish. Then come the hearts, sweet and clean, and those are what you keep. Last come the tails, oily and wet-dog, which you set aside to run again.
Wilkins: The foreshots and heads go out. They don't go in your mouth, your patient's mouth or your mother-in-law's mouth, however tempted you are. Here's a point most moonshiners never learned: the poison wood spirit, methanol, comes mostly from the pectin in fruit. Grain and plain sugar washes make very little of it. Apple, pear and plum make a good deal more. So the cider-brandy man and the pear man have to cut deepest and most honestly of anybody. The first spirit off a fruit run is fit for the lamp, the floor and the revenue man's grave, in that order.
Wilkins: And fire, the thing that kills more distillers than any sheriff. Alcohol vapor is heavier than air. It doesn't rise like smoke. It creeps along the floor like a cat and pools down low, and if your firebox or your lantern sits low, it'll find it. I've seen a still-house in Gilmanton go up so fast the owner's eyebrows reached Loudon before he did. Keep your joints tight, keep open flame away from the floor around the still, never walk away from a running still, not even to visit the privy, and keep a bucket of sand by the door. Fire low, cuts honest.
♦ Distant drip into the jar
Wilkins: There's the sound of hearts. Prettiest music in Merrimack County.
♪ Fiddle bumper, a little crooked
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths, slang and the mailbag.
Wilkins: First, a myth, and I'll punch a cent for every lie I knock flat. Here's the anvil, here's the punch, and here's a Lincoln-era copper too worn to buy a sneeze.
Wilkins: Myth number one: good whiskey burns blue. Every porch-sitter between here and the Carolinas pours a spoonful, lights it, sees a blue flame and calls it pure.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Wrong! All the blue flame tells you is that the spirit is strong enough to burn. You could have learned that more cheaply by setting fire to your uncle's mustache. Methanol burns too, with a pale, nearly invisible flame, so the spoon can't warn you of it. Lead doesn't announce itself in any color either. The flame doesn't know poison from paregoric. The only test that matters is the one you make at the worm, when you throw out the foreshots and heads.
Wilkins: Now the mailbag. We've got a voicemail recorded on the wax down at the general store, from a fellow way down in North Carolina. Roll the cylinder.
♦ Cylinder click, a scratchier crackle, faint wind
Wilkins: Here's Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and he asks: 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 click off
Wilkins: Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit. Bless your uncle, and bless the jar that taught him. Let's take his two remedies one at a time, and I'll hammer as I go.
Wilkins: The red oak first. Your uncle chose the one oak in the forest that can't hold liquor. Red oak has open pores running the length of the grain. Cut a stick a foot long, put your lips to one end, and you can blow bubbles through it into a washtub. I've done it for a crowd at the Pittsfield fair and won two dollars. That's why no cooper worth his adze makes a whiskey barrel out of red oak. Whiskey barrels are white oak, whose pores are stopped up tight. Rabbit, red oak holds liquor about as well as a Portsmouth customs man holds a secret.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And even good white oak doesn't do its work in an afternoon. Oak gives spirit its color and its bite slowly, over months and years in the barrel. A handful of shavings bouncing in a hot thump keg will turn your spirit the color of weak tea and the taste of a sawmill floor. It won't touch a bad head. The thump keg doesn't know what a head is. It just thumps.
Wilkins: Now the hickory ash. Wood ash is lye, Rabbit. It's what your grandmother leached in a barrel to make soap. Your uncle's hickory ash isn't medicine, it's soap that hasn't met its grease yet. It's caustic. Throw a scoop of it into a hot vessel and it can foam up like a mad dog and boil over hot onto your hands and face. I knew a man in Chichester who did exactly that and wore his eyebrows on the inside of his hat for a month. And it doesn't remove methanol, not a drop.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: So where'd the notion come from? I'll give your uncle this much. Hardwood charcoal, made properly, burned, cooled and packed clean, will take some of the rasp off a finished spirit when you pour it through slowly. The old men saw charcoal work and figured ash must be its cousin. It isn't. Charcoal's a sponge. Ash is a lye bath.
Wilkins: The truth is simple, Rabbit. Your heads are bad because somebody kept them. The only cure is to cut them off and throw them out. There's no ash, no shaving and no prayer that will save a man from his own greed at the worm. You tell your uncle that Dr. Wilkins of Pittsfield says he's a fine storyteller and a terrible chemist, and that I'm the same, only the other way round. Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, you're a gentleman and a scholar, and your coin's on the anvil. I've struck it G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and I'll keep it in the cigar box for you until you walk up here and collect it.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, coin rings on the anvil face
Clara: Doctor, down in Wilkesboro they'll tell you the uncle's never wrong. They'll just say he's early.
Wilkins: Then he's two hundred years early on red oak, Clara, and he'd best sit down and wait.
♪ Soft banjo under
Announcer: One more quick word! Bring Fort Wilkins craftsmanship to your tabletop with the 2-Gallon Tabletop Mini-Still in hand-riveted pure copper, made for botanical waters and floral oils! See it in the Pittsfield showroom on Route 28, or visit moonshinestill.com!
♪ Theme returns, slow and warm
Wilkins: That's the Lamprey River trail, neighbors. It's salt fish and blackstrap, rye and rum, eels on pine trees and a widow with a hollow dasher. My thanks to Clara Higgins, who came all the way from the Blue Ridge to rummage New Hampshire attics and lecture an old dentist on his own state.
Clara: It was my pleasure, Doctor. Tell the bear I forgive him for the purse.
Wilkins: He'll never forgive you for the hatpin. Now, if you want to learn this craft from the bottom of the mash tub to the top of the worm, done safely, legally and honestly, sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. You'll learn copper, fire, fermentation and the cuts, all from the man who's been arrested for knowing them. Inquire wherever you heard this broadcast, or come knock on the log door, and mind the chain.
Wilkins: And for the record, Barnaby has heard so many sign-offs he grunts on cue now, and he's still the only member of this staff who's never asked for a raise.
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
♦ Cylinder runs out, needle hiss, silence