The Stove Foundry Fire at Suncook: Iron, Ash, and an Unexpected Alibi
Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells about the bitter January night the Suncook stove foundry burned. He spent it in the bucket line beside the county sheriff while a deputy searched his empty still-house and met Barnaby the bear. Along the way he covers cupolas, green-sand molds and what iron founders knew that coppersmiths never did. Wilkes County runner Junior Vance tells new stories about a parlor stove full of jars, a tobacco-barn fire that gave his daddy an alibi, and hollow pig iron, and Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's voicemail about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg.
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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 chimney, not a deputy. If it were a deputy you would smell him first. Deputies smell of boiled mutton and fear. Lie down, you overgrown fur muff, or no fish heads for a week.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across frozen ground, one last disgruntled grunt
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling, then settling under
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, tooth-sufferers, and you gentlemen of the Revenue Bureau who listen in with pencils. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host, your dentist, your blacksmith, and on certain moonless nights your apothecary. Tonight I tell you about the night the Suncook stove foundry burned, how half this county turned out with buckets, and how the Good Lord, in His sense of humor, handed me the finest alibi a moonshiner ever had. Iron, ash, and a deputy in his drawers. Stay by your fire.
♪ Theme flourishes and fades
Announcer: A QUICK WORD, friends! Is your kettle plain iron, dull and sullen? Then step up to the Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, handcrafted of pure copper by Moonshine Stills! See it at moonshinestill.com, where the copper is bright and so is your future!
♦ Wax crackle; a log shifts in the stove
♪ Low, mournful fiddle, a winter air
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. Iron on the Suncook.
Wilkins: Picture January of this very year, eighteen and sixty-five. The war is still grinding men up down South, coal is dear, and it is so cold on the turnpike that a man's spit clinks when it lands. I am in my still-house with the copper ticking as it warms, doing honest chemistry for dishonest purposes, when Barnaby stands up on his chain and starts moaning at the southern sky. I look out the log window and the whole bottom of the clouds is lit orange, like the inside of a blacksmith's mouth. Something big is burning down the valley toward Suncook.
Wilkins: Now, you young people may not know what a stove foundry was to a New England kitchen. When I was a boy, my mother cooked on an open hearth. She bent over the fire on her knees like a woman at prayer, with her skirts six inches from catching, and every winter some poor farm wife in this county went up like a candle. Then the cast-iron cookstove came up the river roads. Iron box, iron oven, iron lids you lift with a hook. It burned half the wood, cooked the bread even, and kept the women of the house on their feet and out of the coals. By the time Mr. Lincoln was elected, every decent kitchen from Concord to Barnstead had a cast-iron stove in it, and every Saturday some poor child had to black it with stove blacking, a paste of black lead that gets into your knuckles so deep you go to your grave with gray fingernails.
Wilkins: The Suncook foundry made those stoves. Old Ebenezer Hadley ran it, a man with a beard like a burnt broom and a temper to match, and he would tell anyone who held still long enough how the trick was done. You take pig iron. You know why it is called pig iron? When the founders run the melt out on the casting floor, it flows down one long main channel with a row of little side molds branching off it, and the whole thing looks like a litter of piglets crowded up to suck at a sow. The founders named it, and the name stuck. Pig iron got its name from piglets at a sow, and revenue men got theirs from the same animal by a shorter road.
Wilkins: Hadley melted his pigs in a cupola, a tall iron chimney lined with fire brick. He loaded it in layers: a bed of fuel, a charge of iron, a shovel of limestone, more fuel, more iron, up and up like a wedding cake built by the Devil. The limestone is the clever part. It is a flux. It gathers up the dirt, the ash and the rust and makes a scum called slag that floats on top of the melt, and the founder taps it off like skimming fat from a stew. Then the clean iron pours out the bottom, white-hot and running like syrup.
Wilkins: And where does it go? Into sand. Damp sand, green sand they call it, though it is brown as a ditch. The pattern-maker carves the stove plate out of good pine, curlicues and all, every acanthus leaf and every tiny eagle. That pattern gets rammed into sand inside a two-part box called a flask. The top half is the cope and the bottom half is the drag, and I have known married couples arranged on exactly that principle. They lift the pattern out, close the flask, and pour.
Wilkins: Here is what the founders knew that we coppersmiths never had to learn. Iron SHRINKS when it cools, about an eighth of an inch to every foot. So the pattern-maker uses a special ruler called a shrink rule, marked a hair longer than an honest foot, so the casting comes out right once it settles down. Every founder in Suncook kept one pattern-maker's shrink rule and one wife who knew he was lying about his height, and both measured him an eighth short to the foot.
Wilkins: And they knew water. That is the grisly part, so put down your supper. Molten iron that touches wet sand, a damp ladle, or a puddle on the floor turns the water to steam in less than a heartbeat. The steam has nowhere to go but out, and it carries the iron with it. I knew a molder from Allenstown, a man named Thaddeus Brock, who poured into a mold that had sat too near a leaking roof. The mold blew. A gout of iron the size of a turnip landed in his boot. He did not scream at first. He said 'oh', very quietly, like a man who has remembered he left the gate open, and then the smell came, like a ham left on the stove at a wake, and THEN he screamed, and he did not stop until the doctor had cut the boot off and a good part of what was in it. He walked on a peg after that and used the peg to stir his coffee to prove he was not bitter. Molten iron on wet sand will throw a ladle of fire across a room faster than a widow throws a drunk husband off the porch.
Wilkins: Cast iron is a strange creature. It carries a heap of carbon, two to four parts in a hundred, and that is what makes it run so fluid into a mold. But it also makes it BRITTLE. You cannot hammer it cold like copper. Hit a cast-iron stove lid with a sledge and it does not bend. It breaks and looks at you as if it were your fault. Cast iron is like a Concord alderman: it pours easy, it sets hard, and if you hit it, it cracks and blames you.
♦ Wax crackle; distant fire bell clanging in memory
Wilkins: So the clouds are orange, Barnaby is moaning, and I know it is Hadley's foundry, because nothing else in Suncook has enough fuel stacked around it to make that much light. A foundry is a fire that men keep in a box, and that night the box opened. Hadley's coal pile and his pattern loft went up together. The pattern loft is where the pine patterns are stored, years of carving dry as tinder, and once it caught, it roared.
Wilkins: Now, a decent man goes to a fire. A clever man goes to a fire where the sheriff is going to be. I banked my still fire down to nothing, and mark that, friends: I never left a lit still behind me in my life. I hitched the mare and drove down the turnpike so fast the sleigh runners whistled. That fire lit up the clouds clear to Pittsfield, so bright Barnaby thought spring had come early and went looking for a picnic. He found Deputy Pruett instead, which is the next best thing to a ham. But I am getting ahead of the story.
Wilkins: When I got there, the Suncook hand-tub company was already pumping. For you who never saw one, a hand tub is a fire engine with no horse and no steam, just a long wooden box on wheels with pump handles down both sides. Ten men on a side heave up and down like sailors at a capstan, and a hose squirts a stream about as strong as a cow with a grudge. Behind that comes the bucket brigade, two lines of townspeople from the river to the fire. One line passes full leather buckets up, the other passes the empties back. And who do you think had the place in line right next to me? Sheriff of Merrimack County, in his good wool coat with the brass buttons, red in the face and sweating in ten-below. He looked at me. I looked at him. He handed me a bucket. And for five hours, every soul in Suncook watched G. G. Wilkins pass water alongside the law.
Wilkins: The sheriff passed me forty buckets that night and never once noticed my hands were cleaner than his conscience.
♪ Fiddle sting, then a jaunty banjo vamp
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. The Alibi, the Bear, and the Man from Wilkes County.
Wilkins: Here is the part they still laugh about at the Pittsfield store. While I am down in Suncook throwing water on Ebenezer Hadley's misfortune, a certain Deputy Asa Pruett has the bright idea that if the whole county is at the fire, Wilkins's still-house will be empty and he can poke through it with no one watching. Asa Pruett. A man so thin you could floss a horse with him, with a mustache like a dead caterpillar glued under his nose. He creeps up the turnpike in the dark carrying a lantern and a fresh warrant, and he forgets the one thing nobody in this valley is allowed to forget.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, low and interested
Wilkins: Yes, Barnaby, I am talking about you. Pruett comes around the corner of my still-house, and Barnaby rises out of the snow like a hairy hill with teeth. The lantern goes first. Pruett throws it, it lands in a drift and hisses out, and now the man is in the pitch dark with a bear. He told the magistrate later that he heard the chain run out link by link, clink, clink, clink, like a church bell counting down his sins. Then Barnaby got hold of his greatcoat.
Wilkins: Now, Barnaby does not maul a man for spite. He is a gentleman. He is interested in pockets. Pruett had a fried doughnut in his coat, which tells you everything about the diligence of the Merrimack County sheriff's office. Barnaby put his snout into that pocket and pulled, and the coat came off Pruett like the skin off a boiled onion. Then the bear went after the trousers, because Pruett had wiped his greasy fingers on the seat of them. You could hear the wool tear clear across the yard, a long, wet, ripping sound like a sail splitting in a gale. Barnaby ate the warrant, the wax seal and the left mitten, and I do not doubt he would have eaten the deputy's signature if the man had written it bigger.
Wilkins: If you want to know what a deputy's courage is worth, put him between a 400-pound bear and a warm overcoat and watch which one he lets go of first. Pruett let go of all of it. Coat, trousers, one boot, his dignity, and the contents of his bowels, which Barnaby did NOT eat, being particular. And where does a half-naked man run at midnight in January? Toward the only light in the county, the Suncook fire, six miles down the road.
Wilkins: About three in the morning, with the foundry roof fallen in and the hand-tub men steaming like plow horses, out of the dark comes Deputy Asa Pruett in his long-handled underwear, one boot, no hat, eyebrows white with frost. Pruett walked into that fire in his long-handled underwear, frosted like a wedding cake, and he was the most honest-looking man the county ever sent me. He points his finger at me and says, 'Sheriff, I was at Wilkins's place and that bear...' And the Sheriff, God bless his slow mind, says, 'Asa, Wilkins has been at my elbow since ten o'clock. I have handed him a bucket every half-minute. Whatever happened at his place, he was not there to do it.' And that, friends, is an alibi sworn to by the high sheriff of Merrimack County. I could not have bought a better one for a barrel of gold eagles.
♦ Wax crackle; Wilkins chuckles, a chair creaks
Wilkins: Now, I have a guest tonight who knows a thing or two about fire, iron, and convenient witnesses. He has come up from the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County, North Carolina, where they make spirit on the creeks and hide it in places the Lord Himself would not think to look. Please welcome to Fort Wilkins, Mister Junior Vance.
Junior: Thank you kindly, Doc. I'll say this, that's the first deputy story I ever heard where the law come out of it better dressed than when it went in. Shoot, it come out worse. Never mind.
Wilkins: Junior, you talk like a man who has watched a few fires.
Junior: Doc, where I come from fire is half of everything. You cook with it, you cure tobacco with it, you run a still with it, and now and again you lose a barn to it. But I'll start you with iron, seeing as that's tonight's sermon. My great-uncle Hob, Mama's uncle, kept his jars in a cast-iron parlor stove all summer long.
Wilkins: In the STOVE?
Junior: In the stove. Big potbellied heater, cold as a tombstone from May to October. He figured no revenue man in his right mind opens a dead stove looking for liquor. Black it up good, shut the door, and the jars sit in there all summer nice as you please.
Wilkins: I sense the season is about to change.
Junior: First cold snap in October. Revenue man comes up the holler, nose running, shivering, a little city fella in a store-bought coat. Searches the corn crib, the springhouse, the hog lot. Finds nothing. Comes in the house, sits down, rubs his hands together and says, 'Mister Hob, you mind if I light your stove?' And Uncle Hob, who could not lie to save his life, just sat there and turned the color of buttermilk. Fella takes a match to the kindling that was laid in the front of that firebox, right up against the jars.
Wilkins: Oh, Lord.
Junior: Doc, it was like the Fourth of July in a bucket. First jar went POP and blew the door open. Second one went, then the third, and then there's liquor running out of that stove on fire, blue and yellow, rolling across the floorboards like a snake. The revenue man went out through the window, glass and all, and never touched the porch. Uncle Hob stood there beating the floor with a quilt, hollering, 'That's my medicine!' Burned his eyebrows clean off. They never did grow back right. He drew 'em on with stove blacking for church the rest of his life.
Wilkins: Junior's great-uncle hid liquor in a stove; I hid my alibi behind a sheriff, and my hiding place had the better brass buttons. Now, I am told your family has its own bucket-line story.
Junior: We do, and it rhymes with yours, Doc, so I reckon fire's on our side. When Daddy was a young man, a tobacco barn burned down on the next ridge over. You know a curing barn? Log barn, packed full to the roof with tobacco hanging on sticks, flues running hot all night. One spark and it goes up like a hymn. Whole holler come running with buckets out of the branch. Now, that same night, Daddy was supposed to be at a little copper pot of his down in the laurel, and a deputy, fella named Lonzo Pegram, had been fixing to catch him there for a month.
Wilkins: And where was Lonzo?
Junior: In the bucket line. Right beside Daddy. Passing him buckets till sunup. Lonzo got so black with smoke you couldn't tell him from the mule. Two weeks later they had Daddy up before the judge on a still charge from that very night, and the judge says, 'Where was you?' Daddy says, 'Ask Lonzo.' And Lonzo, God love him, stood up in that courtroom and had to swear on the Book that Daddy never left his side from dark to daylight. Judge throwed the whole thing out. Lonzo didn't speak to Daddy for eleven years, then come to his wedding anniversary and brought a ham.
Wilkins: The law always brings a ham eventually, Junior. It is the only apology it knows. Now, tell me about the ironmonger. I hear there was a man in your mountains who cast iron for a living and didn't care much what he cast it around.
Junior: Old man Treadway, up toward the Wilkes and Alexander line. Had a little cupola furnace no bigger than a hog pen, poured plowshares and skillets and pot legs. But his real trade was pigs. Iron pigs, like you said, Doc, only Treadway cast 'em hollow. Packed a sand core in the middle so the iron set up in a shell, knocked the sand out after, cleaned it, filled it full of liquor, and drove an iron plug in the end tight as a jail door. Sold 'em as wagon ballast.
Wilkins: Wagon ballast.
Junior: Wagon ballast. A fella would ride up and say, 'Mister Treadway, my wagon's riding a little light,' and wink so hard his hat jumped. Revenue men drove past them pigs stacked in wagon beds for years. Who's gonna tap an iron pig? Only trouble was, a hollow pig rings when you knock on it, and a solid one thuds. One day a deputy leaned on a load to tie his horse, idle-like, knocked his knuckle on one and it went BONNNG like a church bell. That deputy looked at that pig. That pig looked back at him. And Treadway hollered, 'That one's defective!'
Wilkins: [laughing] Defective! He should have run for office. And I'll add a word for the listeners, Junior: liquor that sits in plain raw iron picks up a metallic, inky taste, and if it has touched oak, the iron turns it black. That is the same chemistry as iron-gall ink. I'd wager Treadway's customers drank something that tasted like a schoolmaster's inkwell.
Junior: Doc, the man who bought the most of 'em had teeth like a pump handle, all black. We figured that was from the pigs.
Wilkins: As a dentist I believe it. One last story. Have you ever broken good iron with your own two hands?
Junior: Lord, yes. My granny had a cast-iron wash kettle, big three-legged thing, set it over the yard fire on wash day to boil the sheets. I was about nine. She told me to put the fire out and I figured I'd be quick about it. Kettle's sitting there empty and red-hot from boiling dry, and I run down to the creek and come back with a full bucket of cold water and throwed the whole thing in it.
Wilkins: Oh, no. Oh, child.
Junior: Doc, it went off like a rifle shot. CRACK. Steam shot up higher'n the smokehouse, and that kettle fell in two halves like a split melon. Granny came around the house with her hands on her hips and didn't say one word. Just pointed. Made me carry both halves of that kettle to church three Sundays running and set 'em in the aisle, so the preacher could point at 'em and talk about the wages of foolishness.
Wilkins: That, friends, is what the founders call thermal shock. Cast iron does not like sudden changes in temperature, and neither do I, nor Barnaby, nor any revenue man who has been woken early. Junior Vance, you are a credit to the Brushy Mountains. Stay put, we will need you later.
Junior: I ain't going nowhere, Doc. Your bear's sitting on my hat.
♦ Bear grunt, satisfied
♪ Bright, quick banjo breakdown, medicine-show style
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♪ Banjo flourish and button
♦ Wax crackle; a slow drip into a jar
♪ Warm, slow fiddle under
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the Craft.
Wilkins: Now, why does a coppersmith look down his nose at iron? I have done both trades and I will tell you true. An iron founder pours his metal once and prays; a coppersmith hammers his ten thousand times and curses. I have done both and only the cursing ever worked. Iron is cheap and strong, and for a stove it is the finest thing God put in the ground. For a still it is a poor partner. First, copper carries heat roughly five to seven times faster than cast iron. Your pot heats evenly, with no hot spots to scorch the mash, and your condenser worm sheds heat into the cooling water quick, so the vapor turns back to liquid instead of blowing out the end as a ghost. Second, raw iron rusts and taints. Spirit touching iron tastes of nails, and if any oak gets in, it turns black as a lawyer's waistcoat. Third, and here is the alchemy, copper takes up the sulfur in the vapor, the stink of bad eggs and burnt rubber, and holds it on its own surface. Iron does no such thing.
Wilkins: So let me take you through a run, as we did it in the old days, and as historians and the lawfully permitted may study it. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against United States law, and everything on this program is for historical and educational purposes only. Junior, you will keep me honest.
Junior: That's a big job, Doc, but I'll try.
Wilkins: The mash. For a five-gallon barrel, take something near eight or nine pounds of cracked corn. Bring it up in about five gallons of water and cook it slow, stirring until it goes thick as porridge. The cooking opens the starch so it can be worked on. Now let it cool until you can hold your hand in it without crying, warm as a milking cow, not scalding. Then stir in a pound and a half or so of malted barley, ground. The malt is the key. It carries a natural virtue, call it a ferment of its own, that turns the corn starch into sugar. Put in your malt too hot and you kill that virtue, and you have made very expensive porridge.
Junior: My granddaddy tested it with his elbow, like a baby's bath. Said if it made him cuss it was too hot.
Wilkins: A fine scientific instrument, the cussing elbow. Once the mash has sweetened and cooled further, you pitch your yeast and cover the barrel loose, never sealed, in a warm room with air moving through it. Let it work some days until the bubbling quits and the cap falls. What you have now is a sour, beery wash of only a few parts in the hundred of alcohol. The still does the rest.
Wilkins: The still. Strain the wash so no grain sticks and scorches on the bottom. Fill your copper pot no more than three parts full, so it does not foam over into the cap arm. And here is a rule I will cut into my headstone: a still must always be open to the condenser. Never seal it tight. Never cap the worm, never plug the outlet. A blocked still builds pressure like a teakettle with its spout stopped, and when it goes, it sprays scalding, burning liquid over everything with a face.
Wilkins: Then fire. LOW fire. Bring her up slow. And mind this well, because it is the one that kills: alcohol vapor is heavier than air. It does not rise politely up the chimney. It creeps along the floor like a cat, pools in the low places, and waits for a lantern or a stove door. I knew a man in Gilmanton Iron Works with a leaky cap joint. The vapor slid across his floor to the firebox, and the flame ran back up that invisible river to the still in a single breath. They found his boots in the yard. The rest of him they found in pieces too small to bury proper. Keep the doors open, keep the joints tight, and keep your open flame away from where the vapor goes.
Junior: We always set our fire box down the hill and out from the still where we could. Vapor runs downhill, just like water and deputies.
Wilkins: Now, the CUTS, the honest heart of the trade. When the first drops come off the worm, those are the foreshots. A small portion, sharp as turpentine, and they carry the methanol, the wood spirit, the stuff that blinds and kills. You throw them OUT. You do not drink them, you do not save them for your brother-in-law, you do not rub them on a child's gums. Next come the heads, still harsh and solvent-smelling. They give you a headache like a mule kicked you from the inside. Set them aside, not in the drinking jar. Then the hearts, the sweet, clean middle of the run, smooth on the nose. That is the spirit worth the name. Last come the tails, oily, wet-dog and cardboard, weaker and weaker. Those go aside to be run again another day. You make your cuts with your nose, a row of small jars, and patience. A greedy man who keeps too much head to fill another jar is a man who sells blindness by the pint.
Wilkins: And the copper. After every run, rinse and scrub her bright. That dark film is the sulfur she caught for you. Leave it on and the surface goes dull and stops working. Worse, the green crust can flake into what you make next. A dull pot is a dead pot.
Junior: Doc, my granny said you could tell a man's character by his copper and his fingernails, and most of 'em failed both.
Wilkins: Your granny would have made a fine dentist. A man who blackens his stove every Saturday and his reputation every Sunday is what we call a well-polished hypocrite in Merrimack County. Keep your copper bright and your conscience brighter.
♪ Fiddle transition, playful
♦ Wax crackle
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths, Ash, and a Call from the Brushies.
Wilkins: We have a voice on the speaking-tape tonight from down Junior's own country. Let us hear it.
♦ Click, mechanical whir, hiss of a recorded message
Cletus: Alchemist, my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?
♦ Click, whir stops
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Junior, do you know this man?
Junior: Doc, I know about forty Millers and every one of 'em is named Rabbit. Hey there, Rabbit.
Wilkins: Rabbit, your uncle is half right, and in this line of work half right is how a man goes fully blind. Let me give you the true half first, because there IS a true half, and it lives in the kitchen, not the still-house.
Wilkins: Hickory ash is a powerful thing. Pour water through a hopper of hardwood ash and what drips out the bottom is lye, potash, the stuff your great-grandmother boiled with tallow to make soft soap. Mountain families also soaked their corn in wood-ash lye to slip the hulls and make hominy. So every old farmhouse in your mountains had a lye hopper and a hominy pot, and the notion that ash 'cleans' things was as common as fleas. Somewhere along the line, some granddaddy carried that notion out of the kitchen and down to the creek.
Wilkins: But here is the false half. Lye is caustic. It eats skin, it blinds eyes, and it does not pull wood spirit out of your run. The methanol and the harsh heads come off the still early because they boil at lower heat than the good spirit, and nothing you throw in a thump keg changes that. The only cure is to throw out the foreshots and set aside the heads. Putting lye in a thump keg to clean out bad heads is like pulling a man's teeth to cure his bad breath: it changes the smell, all right, but he will not thank you for it.
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Oak does something real. Soak spirit on oak and it pulls color, tannin and a woody sweetness out of the wood, the same thing a barrel does over years. Put shavings in a thump keg and some of that flavor rides the vapor into your jar, so a man tastes it and swears the run is 'cleaner'. It is not cleaner, Rabbit. It is the same spirit wearing a new hat. And mind the iron while you're at it. If your thump keg has iron hoops or iron nails touching those oak shavings, you may draw off something that looks like a bottle of ink.
Junior: I had a cousin did that. Spirit come out the color of a stewed prune. Sold it as 'aged'.
Wilkins: Of course he did. Every rascal in America sells his mistakes as aged. Rabbit, for your honest question you get the Fort Wilkins honor. I am going to strike your name into a copper cent on this very anvil.
♦ Coin set on anvil, metallic clink; heavy breath
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There. 'G. G. WILKINS / PITTSFIELD N.H.' on the front, and on the back I've scratched 'RABBIT' with an awl, crooked as a Concord fence. Shout-out to Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller and all of Wilkesboro. Tell your uncle he can keep his ashes for soap.
Wilkins: Now one more myth, since the anvil is warm. The BLUE FLAME. Every barroom fool in the Union pours a spoon of spirit on the table, sets a match to it, and when it burns clean blue he declares, 'Pure as a baptism!' Friends, methanol, the very poison you are afraid of, burns with a pale, nearly invisible blue flame too. A blue flame tells you there is something in that spoon that burns. It does not tell you whether it will kill you. The blue flame tells you exactly as much about your spirit as a sheriff's smile tells you about his warrant.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That one is for every man who ever set fire to his supper table to prove a point. The only test that counts is the cut, and you make the cut before the spirit ever reaches the spoon.
Junior: Doc, I seen a fella in Statesville do the blue flame trick at a dance. Set the whole tablecloth afire, and the girl he was showing off for put it out with his own hat. Still on his head.
Wilkins: Ha! There is courtship and there is arson, and in North Carolina they appear to be the same dance. Junior Vance, thank you for coming all the way to the Suncook Valley.
Junior: Thank you, Doc. Next time I'll bring Rabbit. He don't talk much, but he'll eat your bear's supper if you let him.
♦ Bear grunt, offended
♪ Theme returns softly under
Announcer: ONE LAST QUICK WORD, friends! Before the lamp is trimmed, remember the Flame-Flow Still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, heavy-gauge electrolytic copper! Order yours at moonshinestill.com, or call on the showroom at Fort Wilkins, Route 28, Pittsfield!
♦ Wax crackle; fire pops in the stove
Wilkins: Well, friends, the Suncook foundry was rebuilt by spring. Old Hadley cast his first new stove plate with a little eagle on it, holding a bucket in its claws, and he swore it had nothing to do with me. Deputy Pruett got a new coat from the county and a new mustache from the Lord, though the mustache came in white on one side where the frost bit it. And Barnaby has guarded the still-house every night since with his chin on his paws, dreaming of doughnuts.
Wilkins: If you want to learn this craft properly, the honest history of it, the copper, the mash, the cuts and the fire safety I have preached tonight, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. You will learn the old methods without the old foolishness. No ashes, no blue flames, no deputies in their underwear, unless you bring your own. And remember: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against United States law, and everything on this program is for historical and educational purposes only.
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 warmly, then fades into wax cylinder crackle