Heads, Tails, and Heads Again: The Counterfeit Cent Racket
Dr. G. G. Wilkins explains the counterfeit-cent racket of the 1850s: cast brass and lead 'coney' coppers, the 1857 law that ended the big copper cent, and the ring, weight and file tests that decided which coins were honest enough to take his 'G. G. WILKINS / PITTSFIELD N.H.' punch. Retired revenue man Captain Donald Vance tells three new stories: a still soldered with melted-down counterfeit cents, an old-timer who tested coins by ringing them on his still cap, and a forger whose fake merchant stamp read backwards. In the call-in segment Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, then debunks the blue-flame test.
▶ Listen in the Radio Moonshine app
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, you great black sack of grievances, sit down and quit rattling that chain. Nobody's coming up the turnpike but the mail coach and the Hendersons' cow, and you've eaten all you're going to get of either one. Lie down.
♦ Heavy bear huff, chain links settling in the dirt
Wilkins: There. He's sulking. Best behavior a bear's got.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, and welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log walls of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, here in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host, Dr. George G. Wilkins: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, and the man whose name is on more pennies than the Treasury's. Tonight's show is called Heads, Tails, and Heads Again: The Counterfeit Cent Racket. That's the swindle of the fifties, when every tavern till in New England had some bogus copper in it, and I'll tell you why the coppers with my punch on them were the honest ones.
♪ Theme fades under crackle
Wilkins: But first, a word from the men who keep the lamp oil in this fort.
Announcer: A quick word, friends! The Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960, is handcrafted from pure, heavy-gauge copper and built to last. Have a look at moonshinestill.com, that's moonshinestill.com, or come see one in person at the Fort Wilkins Showroom!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, single drip into jar
♪ Short fiddle sting
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. Heads, tails, and the rascals in between.
Wilkins: Let me start with an honest coin. The United States large cent was struck from 1793 to 1857. It was a big brown copper you could stop a door with, nearly pure metal, and after 1795 the law set it at one hundred sixty-eight grains. Hold that number in your head like a tooth in a forceps. For many years the Mint didn't even roll its own copper. It bought ready-made blanks from Matthew Boulton's works in Birmingham, England, which means the most American coin you ever held started out as an Englishman's scrap and crossed the Atlantic in a barrel. That's what this country's like, top to bottom.
Wilkins: You'd think nobody would bother faking a cent. A cent bought one egg, or a stick of horehound candy, or one brief look from the barmaid at the Pittsfield tavern, and a long look cost extra. But the koniacker, as the old boys called a counterfeiter, or the coney man, wasn't making one bad cent. He made bucketfuls. He took a good cent, pressed it into a box of damp moulding sand, and poured in whatever melted. Brass from old candlesticks, lead off a church roof, tin scraped from a dead man's pewter. Then he filed off the seam, rubbed the coins in lampblack and tallow so they'd look old and handled, and gave them to his shovers, which was the term for the fellows who passed the bad money. A shover spends one bad cent at every tavern between Concord and Dover, takes his change in good silver, and gets paid in turn. Ten bad coppers in, ten good coins out, and every innkeeper on the Suncook road gets robbed a cent at a time, too slow for anybody to work up a proper murder over it.
Wilkins: The coney man is a dentist in reverse. I take out what's rotten and charge you for it. He puts in what's rotten and charges you for it.
Wilkins: Mind you, the country was used to odd change. In the thirties and forties we had the Hard Times tokens. Those were cent-sized coppers that private men struck, a lot of them with political jokes on them, and folks took them as cents because a token in your hand beats an empty pocket. Then the merchants started punching their names into real cents to advertise, and you'd get a copper in Exeter that said a hatter in Lowell had handled it. So the public was in the habit of taking strange copper without asking, and the coney man made his living off that habit the way a tick makes its living off a dog.
Wilkins: Then on February 21, 1857, Congress passed a coinage act that killed the large cent and the half cent and brought in a little cent of eighty-eight parts copper and twelve parts nickel, with a flying eagle on it. The same act started pushing the old Spanish silver out of circulation. Congress spent sixty years building a cent too big to fake profitably, then shrank it to a size a mouse could carry off, and called that progress. The old coppers didn't disappear overnight, though. They stayed in tills and trouser pockets for years, the good ones and the bad ones all together, and in the confusion the coney men did better business than ever.
♦ Wilkins sets a heavy coin down on the anvil face, a low ring
Wilkins: So how did a man in a tavern tell good from bad? I'll tell you how I did it at this anvil, because I wasn't going to put my name on a liar.
Wilkins: First test, the ring. Balance a good copper on your fingertip, tap it with a nail, and it sings a clean, bright note. A lead cent rang like a wet boot hitting a privy floor. A cast brass one gave you a short, cracked buzz, because the sand casting leaves it full of little bubbles inside.
Wilkins: Second, the weight. I keep a set of apothecary scales I won off a Rochester druggist at euchre, and he cried when he lost them, the soft devil. A true cent comes in near one hundred sixty-eight grains, less a bit for wear. A lead one weighs too much. A brass one comes in too light or too heavy, depending on what candlestick the fool melted.
Wilkins: Third, the face. Hold it to the window. An honest struck coin has crisp lettering and a sharp rim. A cast fake looks mushy and pitted, like it's been sucked on, and there's often a little file scar on the edge where the seam was. And if you've still got doubts, scratch it with a file. Brass shows yellow underneath like a coward's liver, and lead shows gray and soft as a banker's handshake.
Wilkins: Then comes my own test, which is the punch. My steel punch reads G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and when I drive it into honest copper the letters go in sharp and clean. Put the same punch to a lead coney cent and it sinks in like a thumb into butter, the letters smear, and the coin bends double. Put it to cast brass full of bubbles and the coin often cracks clean across. So a coin that came out of my shop with my name sharp on it had been rung, weighed, looked at, and hit. That's why the Wilkins coppers were the honest ones. The punch was a guarantee, same as a smith's mark on an axe head.
♦ Chain rattle, low bear grumble outside
Wilkins: Barnaby helped with this business too, and I'll tell you how, though the faint of heart may want to step out to the woodpile. In the summer of fifty-six a shover came up from Concord. He was a little fellow in a plaid vest, with whiskers waxed into points like a pair of gimlets, and he had a whole sock full of lead cents. He bought rum at the tavern with them, then a horse blanket, then he got cocky and came up the turnpike to buy a jar off me with six bad coppers. I rang the first one on the anvil and it went thunk. I told him that was a lead cent, and he said lead cents were the fashion now in Boston. And Barnaby, who will eat a tin plate if there's gravy on it, could smell the man's hands, sweet and greasy from the tallow they'd rubbed on the fakes. The fellow reached past the window to pat him, and I swear on my anvil that bear took the man's pinky finger off at the second knuckle the way you'd bite a radish. There was a crunch like stepping on a frozen snail, then the fellow screamed high and thin like a teakettle, and blood ran down his plaid vest in stripes so he looked like a candy cane. Barnaby chewed it once, made a face like a deacon tasting cheap communion wine, and spat the finger out in the dirt, ring and all, because the ring was lead too. Barnaby can tell lead from copper by taste, which makes him the only assayer in Merrimack County who works for fish heads. I bandaged the man with a jar rag, took his sock of fakes, and sent him home. He left Pittsfield with nine fingers and one fewer opinion about the honesty of Pittsfield copper.
♪ Banjo turnaround
♪ Fiddle sting, a little bolder
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Rogues, runners, and the revenue man I'm almost glad to see.
Wilkins: Before I bring on my guest, one more of my own scrapes. I pulled a molar for a drover from Barnstead. It was a big rotten stump with roots like a pine stump, and when we were done he paid me forty cents in coppers and smiled at me with his new gap. I rang the first coin and it went thud. I rang the second, thud. Thirty-eight of the forty were brass and lead. So I told him, friend, paying a tooth-puller in counterfeit coin is risky business, because I still have hold of the forceps. He paid me in silver after that. Back when I was arrested by the Merrimack sheriff, that sheriff's deputy saw one of my stamped cents on the magistrate's desk and wanted to charge me with defacing the currency. I told him I hadn't defaced it, I'd improved it, and I could prove it was real, which is more than he could say for his warrant. I punch my name into honest copper, and the county sheriff punches his name into an arrest warrant. Only one of us ever had a coin come back with interest.
Wilkins: Now, my guest has spent twenty-eight years chasing copper, though he mostly chased it out of the hills instead of into his own pocket. He tracked stills through the White Mountains and the Green Mountains, and he's that rare kind of revenue man who can tell an honest old copper pot from a deathtrap. Please welcome Captain Donald Vance. Captain, wipe your boots, keep your hands away from the window, and pull up the good stool. The other one's had a deputy on it.
Captain: Evening, Doctor. I believe I'll keep both hands in my lap. I saw your bear look me over on the way in. He looked me over the way a man looks at a pork chop he means to come back for.
Wilkins: He's a judge of character, Captain, and his judgment's mostly by smell. You passed, or you'd be a shorter man. Now, the subject tonight is false coin. In your years in the hills, did counterfeit money and illicit spirit ever turn up in the same place?
Captain: More often than you'd think, Doctor, and the worst time had nothing to do with anybody being cheated out of a cent. It was up on a Green Mountain hillside, a little hollow under a ledge with maple saplings all round. There was an old man running a pot there, a decent sort, white beard down to his belt. I looked over the worm and saw the joints had been soldered with something dull and gray. I asked him where he'd got his solder. He said a peddler had sold him a sack of old coppers cheap as scrap, and he'd melted them down to seal his joints, since copper ought to go with copper.
Wilkins: Oh, Lord. Let me guess what the coppers were.
Captain: Coney cents, Doctor. A whole sack of lead-tin counterfeits, cast to look like large cents, which the shovers couldn't pass anymore and sold off by the pound. That poor old man had been running his liquor through lead for a year. I took my hatchet to that worm right in front of him, and he cried. I told him I'd rather see him cry over a worm than see his customers' children cry over a coffin. Lead's a poison, and it doesn't care whether you meant well.
Wilkins: So the worst counterfeit in the whole affair wasn't the money. It was the man's notion that he had copper. That peddler ought to have been put in the stocks with his own sack hung round his neck.
Captain: I hunted for that peddler for a month, Doctor. Never found him. If he's listening, I have a long memory and short patience.
Wilkins: Well, here's to hoping Barnaby finds him first. Now, Captain, you must have come across some old-timers who knew their coin as well as they knew their mash.
Captain: There was one fellow up near Bartlett, in the White Mountains, who was the most careful man with a coin I ever met. His still was a fine copper pot, riveted proper and silver-soldered, and the cap shone like a church dome. And every coin a customer gave him, he dropped on that cap from about the height of his chin. A true copper rang out across the hollow like a little bell. A coney cent just went thock and lay there like a dead beetle. The folks around there called it ringing the cap. If you came to buy and your coin wouldn't ring, he handed it back and sent you off down the mountain empty-handed, polite as a parson.
Wilkins: The ring test on a still cap! Captain, that's the finest use of a copper still I've ever heard of that didn't involve drinking.
Captain: I'm not done, Doctor. He kept every bad coin anybody ever tried to pass on him in a big pickle jar on his shelf, and he'd painted LIARS on the side in barn red. By the time I met him that jar was three-quarters full. He told me he knew every man in the county by which fakes he'd brought. That one was the Pratt boy's, this one the Tilton blacksmith's.
Wilkins: I'd pay good silver for that jar. It's the honest history of a whole county, sorted by sinner.
Captain: I didn't take the jar, and I didn't take him. His copper was clean, his joints were silver, and his still looked better kept than my own parlor. I wrote him up for the tax he owed like I was supposed to, and I bought a coin off him for luck. It's still in my pocket.
Wilkins: Captain, you're the only revenue man I ever met who could pass the ring test. Now tell me about the cleverest coney man you ever caught.
Captain: The cleverest one was also the stupidest, Doctor. He'd seen the honest smiths and storekeepers punch their names into good cents. So he cut himself a steel punch with a made-up merchant's name, some fine-sounding storekeeper from Portsmouth, and stamped it into his cast fakes so they'd look respectable, figuring a fellow would trust a cent that seemed to have been through an honest store. He passed a good many of them before I saw one. I held it up to the lamp and noticed the name was backwards, every letter of it.
Wilkins: Backwards! Ha! He cut the punch to read right as it sat in his hand, instead of cutting it in mirror so it'd read right on the coin.
Captain: Exactly so. Every one of his coins said Portsmouth backwards, like a looking-glass. We followed the backwards coins from tavern to tavern to a cellar in Rochester and found him there with his sand, his ladle, and his backwards punch. I nailed one of those coins to the doorframe of my office, and every young officer I trained had to read it before he could hang up his coat.
Wilkins: A forger who can't cut a punch facing the right way ought to take up shoeing horses, where the horse at least cannot read. Captain, that's the trouble with crooks. They copy what an honest man does without understanding why he does it, and they get it backwards.
Captain: Doctor, that's the most sensible thing I've ever heard come out of a man with a bear on a chain.
Wilkins: And that's the nicest thing a revenue man ever said to me without a warrant in his other hand. Captain Donald Vance, everybody. Stick around for the cider. It's taxed, I swear it.
Captain: I'll take your word for it, Doctor. Just this once.
♦ Clink of two tin cups, Barnaby grunts outside
♪ Banjo and fiddle bridge, bright and jaunty
♪ Brisk patent-medicine wagon tune, tambourine and squeezebox
Announcer: Step right up, friends, and stop squinting at that leaky old kettle! There's an iron hoop, a lead-patched seam, a pot that hisses like a cat in a rain barrel, and you've been telling yourself it'll do. It won't! There's a better vessel, built by honest hands, and it's waiting for you!
Announcer: If you appreciate authentic American craftsmanship, look no further than Moonshine Stills, proud home of the Flame-Flow Still, our flagship, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960! It's built from heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper, the true metal, rings like a church bell and carries no lead or other base metal to taint what you make. Its brass unions are machined to a hair's breadth on CNC machines and seal snug as a Sunday collar. The Flame-Flow Still is designed to maximize convective circulation, to heat evenly, run steadily, and deliver unmatched purity for your essential oils, herbal tinctures, and traditional distillation demonstrations.
Announcer: Every Flame-Flow Still is handcrafted from pure copper, and the price is just eight hundred ninety-nine dollars! That buys you craftsmanship you can see, copper you can trust, and a still you'll hand down to your grandchildren!
Announcer: So don't wait! Order direct at moonshinestill.com, that's https://moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still! Or come down to the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, run your hand along that seam, give the copper a tap and hear it ring! One more time, friends: moonshinestill.com, or the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28! The Flame-Flow Still, it rings true!
Announcer: Moonshine Stills reminds you: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law. Mind the law, and mind your fire.
♪ Wagon tune ends on a tambourine shake
♪ Fiddle sting, slower, a working tune
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the craft.
Wilkins: Now, why spend all evening on honest copper and lying lead? Because the same thing that cheated your tavern keeper can poison your still. A coney cent has brass and lead in it, and you've just heard the Captain tell what happens when a man melts that into his joints. A still wants good, honest copper. Leave out the galvanized iron, because the zinc coating gives off bad fumes when it's heated hard. Leave out cheap brass that might be cut with lead. Leave out lead solder entirely. Join your copper with silver solder or a proper tight union, and if you don't know what's in a piece of metal, put it on the scrap heap where it belongs.
Wilkins: Copper does more than hold the heat. Your mash gives off sulfur stinks, like rotten eggs, boiled cabbage, and burnt cart harness. The bright copper takes hold of that sulfur in the vapor and keeps it, and it turns into a dark scale on the metal instead of ending up in your jar. That's the alchemy of it, and why the old-timers swore by copper over iron. It only works on bright metal, though, so you scrub the still after every run, the same way a good dentist scrubs his forceps before he puts them in your mouth.
Wilkins: Now I'll go through a run the way it was done at this fort, for history's sake and your education. Take cracked corn and cook it in clean water until it's a thick porridge. Stir in some malted barley as it cools so the malt can turn the starch to sugar. When it's cooled to about the warmth of your wrist, pitch in your yeast, cover it loose so it can breathe, and keep it somewhere warm. Mind the room it's in, too. Fermenting mash breathes out a heavy gas that settles in cellars and pits and can smother a man, so keep the air moving. In a few days the cap falls, the bubbling slows, and it smells sour and beery. That's your wash. It's weak stuff, a few parts in the hundred, and the still only concentrates what the yeast already made.
Wilkins: Strain the wash so the grain doesn't scorch on the bottom. Fill the pot only part way, never to the brim, because a pot that boils over will blow out its own seams. Bring the heat up slow. Low fire, steady fire. Never leave it alone, and never let an open flame near a leaking joint, because spirit vapor catches like dry hay, and many a still-house in this county has burned down with the moonshine still in it.
Wilkins: Now the cuts. Listen close, because this part keeps you alive. The first few drops off the worm are the foreshots. They're sharp, and they smell like a cobbler's glue pot and a shop full of fresh varnish. That's where the methanol rides, the wood spirit that can blind or kill you. Throw it all out, and throw out plenty. A good-sized cup or more for every five gallons of wash, more if the mash was fruit, and more again if you have any doubt. Never drink it, never rub it on a sore gum, never give it to the hired man. Pour it on the ground far from any flame. After the foreshots come the heads. They're still harsh and solvent-smelling and they'll give you a headache like a mule kick. Collect them in small jars, smell each one, and set them aside, because they don't go in the drink. Then the hearts start running, sweet and clean and smelling of the grain. That's what you're after, and you collect it in a row of small jars so you can judge each one by itself. Toward the end comes the tails, oily and dull and smelling like wet dog. Stop collecting and set the tails aside to run again with the next batch. Small jars are an honest man's friend, because you can judge each one on its own merits, same as the coins.
Wilkins: So it's the same with liquor as with coin. You ring it, you weigh it, you look at it in good light, and you don't let a single bad one into the good jar. And so nobody misunderstands me: 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. Even old G. G. pays his fines.
♦ Steady drip into a glass jar, wax crackle
♪ Banjo bridge
♪ Fiddle sting, playful
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths, slang, and the mail sack. Tonight we've got a voice recording from down in North Carolina. Roll the cylinder.
♦ Cylinder change, needle hiss, distant crackle
Wilkins: This is Cletus Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and they call him Rabbit. Here's his question in his own words, as near as the wax caught them. 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?
♦ Needle lifts, crackle
Wilkins: Rabbit, I've got some good news and some bad news for your uncle, and I'll give him the bad first, the same way I pull a tooth before I ask for the money. Hickory ash doesn't clean out bad heads. Red oak shavings don't either. Nothing you throw in the thump keg will. Your heads, and the foreshots before them, are where the wood spirit rides, and it comes over the worm early and hot, same as it always has. The only way to clean it out is to catch it in a jar and pour it on the ground. The thump keg runs your vapor through a second time to make it stronger. It's a good tool for strength, but it's not a sieve and it's not a priest. It won't take the sin out of anything.
Wilkins: Here's what ash really is. You soak hardwood ash in water, the lye runs off, and the grandmothers of New England used that lye to make soap. This valley shipped potash and pearlash to Boston by the wagonload. Lye is caustic. It'll eat your skin, and it's no friend to a copper pot or a man's stomach. Rabbit, your uncle tossing hickory ash in the thump keg is like a man putting on his Sunday collar to clean out the hog pen. It looks like effort and does nothing.
Wilkins: Now the good news, so he doesn't sulk. Your uncle's notion has a grain of truth in it. Some old-timers in your mountains put peaches or apples in the thump keg for the flavor, and the keg will add some flavor. It just can't take anything out. And oak does belong to the craft, only not in the keg. Leave whiskey in an oak barrel, especially a charred one, for a good long while and it'll take up color and some sweetness, but that's aging, not cleaning. Red oak shavings in a doubler give you whiskey that tastes like a furniture shop caught fire and only the varnish survived.
Wilkins: So, Rabbit, tell your uncle he's half right, which is more than most uncles manage. The keg is for strength, the barrel is for flavor, and the cuts are for living through it.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That's a Wilkins copper I've just stamped, Rabbit, rung, weighed, and honest. It's going in the mail to Wilkesboro with your name on the envelope. Don't spend it on ashes.
Wilkins: Now one more myth while I've got the punch in my hand. It's the blue-flame test. Some fellow pours a spoonful, puts a match to it, and says that a blue flame means it's good liquor and safe to drink. Some say a yellow or red flame means lead and blue means it's clean. Neighbors, the wood spirit that'll blind you burns with a pale, nearly invisible blue flame too, the same as good spirit. A blue flame in the spoon tells you there's alcohol in it, which you already knew because you made it. It doesn't tell you whether you cut your heads. If blue flame meant safe liquor, every graveyard in Merrimack County would have a still burning in it. The blue-flame test is about as reliable as a horse trader's oath taken on a borrowed Bible.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That one's for all the fellows who ever lit a spoon and thought they'd proved something. Cut your heads. That's the only test that counts.
♪ Banjo turnaround
Announcer: Another quick word, friends! The Flame-Flow Still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, is handcrafted from heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper that rings true every time. Order yours at moonshinestill.com, that's moonshinestill.com, or visit the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28!
♪ Theme rises softly, parlor banjo and mountain fiddle
Wilkins: Well, neighbors, the lamp's burning low and Barnaby's snoring like a sawmill with a loose belt. My thanks to Captain Donald Vance, who still has all ten fingers, and to Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, whose uncle I'd still like to meet if he brings no ashes.
Wilkins: If tonight made you want to learn the craft properly, the copper, the cuts, the fire, the old Yankee ways, then sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you how to judge a cut by smell, how to keep your copper bright, how to know an honest joint from a lying one, and how to keep your eyebrows. The course is for history, education, and lawful work like oils and tinctures, and it's taught from these log walls by a man who's been arrested twice and fooled never.
Wilkins: And a word to the coney men if any of them are listening: there's a bear on Route 28 who can taste lead, and he's still hungry.
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
♦ Wax cylinder crackle runs out to silence