Dr. Wilkins and the Smallpox Scare of 1863: Quarantine, Camphor, and Closed Roads
Dr. Wilkins remembers 1863, when fear of smallpox from returning soldiers led the Pittsfield selectmen to post guards on the roads and press the town tooth-puller into service as its doctor. He covers vaccination scabs, camphor bags, a pest-house quarantine, a coffin full of jars, and a guard who met Barnaby at the privy, and coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister brings new tales of brimstone-smoked army mail, a deacon who took a vaccine scab for snuff, and a pest-house kettle that got through the Barnstead line. In the mailbag, Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC about red oak shavings and hickory ash in the thump keg, then strikes coins on his anvil while he debunks the old 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 shaggy sack of lard and fleas, settle down. If you want to scratch your backside on my window frame, do it on your own side of the log. That is good spruce, and it ain't paid for.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across frozen ground, a long low groan
Wilkins: There. He has laid down on the woodpile like a deacon on a feather tick. Good bear. Expensive bear. Damned fool of a bear.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling, then settling under
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and whatever revenue men are listening at my keyhole. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, here in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. The fire is low, the copper is bright, and the jar is filling one slow drop at a time, which is about how the Treasury pays its debts.
Wilkins: Tonight we go back to the summer and fall of 1863, the year Pittsfield shut its roads, hung camphor around its neck, and sent for a doctor. There wasn't a doctor close enough, so they got me. Dentist, blacksmith, inventor, and part-time disappointment to the Merrimack County bench. Pull your chair up to the stove and keep your hands where Barnaby can see them.
♪ Theme fades out with a final banjo roll
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Is your vapor whistling out through a crooked joint like wind through a widow's shutters? Seal it tight with Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets from Moonshine Stills, just thirty-four dollars and ninety-five cents! See them at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield, or shop hardware at moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a chair creaks
♪ Short fiddle sting, segment marker
Wilkins: Segment the first. Smallpox, the speckled monster.
Wilkins: You young ones may not remember how a single word could empty a village. Smallpox. Say it in the Pittsfield general store in '63 and you'd see six grown men drop their crackers back in the barrel and back out the door like the floor was afire.
Wilkins: It came out of the army camps. The war packed men together like salt herring, ten thousand to a field, sleeping in each other's breath, and smallpox ran through those camps over and over. Men came home on furlough or discharge carrying their muskets, their lice, and now and then the pox. Every soldier stepping off the cars at Concord got looked at the way a farmer looks at a cow that's been in the neighbor's pasture.
Wilkins: Even Mr. Lincoln wasn't spared. He came home from Gettysburg in November of that year, gave his little speech, and took to his bed with the varioloid, a light dose of smallpox. The story goes that he said at last he had something he could give to everybody. Every office-seeker in Washington who had been crowding his door went to pestering somebody else for a fortnight. Mr. Lincoln came home from Gettysburg with the smallpox and said at last he had something to give every office-seeker in Washington, and that is the first tax policy I have ever approved of.
♦ Wax crackle, a log shifts in the stove
Wilkins: Now let me tell you what smallpox does, because folks who haven't seen it think it is a rash. It is not a rash. It starts with a fever that'll bake a man, a backache like he's been kicked by a mule, and vomiting. Then the spots come. They rise on the face first, then the arms and the legs, the palms of the hands, the soles of the feet. They swell into hard little blisters, round as buckshot and set so deep in the skin you can roll them under your thumb. Then they fill with yellow matter. A bad case swells a man's face till his own mother would sooner pass him a plate through the door than look at him. The sickroom smells sweet and rotten at once, like a cellar full of apples that went bad in August. You do not forget that smell. I have smelled it on my own coat sleeve a week after.
Wilkins: Then the pocks crust over, the crusts fall off, and if the man lives he is pitted for life. Many didn't live.
Wilkins: Now, there is a cure for being afraid of it, if not for having it, and that is vaccination. A country doctor in England, Edward Jenner, saw back in 1796 that milkmaids who'd caught the cowpox from the udder didn't take the smallpox. He scratched cowpox matter into a boy's arm and found it protected him. Vacca is Latin for cow, and that's where vaccination gets its name. So every man in this valley who is vaccinated owes his face to a cow's teat. Moo, and amen.
Wilkins: Before Jenner they did it the rough way. In Boston in 1721 the Reverend Cotton Mather and Dr. Zabdiel Boylston put actual smallpox matter into healthy folks, inoculation they called it, and somebody threw a lit grenade through Mather's window for his trouble. Bostonians have always had strong opinions.
Wilkins: But here is the rub in the backwoods. Cowpox doesn't come by the barrel. In my day the vaccine traveled arm to arm. You scratch it into one man, a week later he raises a fat blister, you take matter from that blister into the next arm, and so on down the line, like passing a bucket at a barn fire. Or you wait till the sore dries and pick off the crust, the scab, which you can carry in a little case or a twist of paper, then grind it up, wet it, and scratch it into somebody else. That's what I carried in '63. Other men's scabs, in my waistcoat pocket, next to my watch.
Wilkins: And I'll be honest with you, because the dead deserve it: arm to arm could carry more than cowpox. Take your matter from a man with a bad blood disease and you might hand it along with the vaccine. Careful doctors chose a healthy, clean-living arm to take from. I chose the healthiest arm I could find, and I looked the fellow over like I was buying a horse.
♦ Wax crackle
Wilkins: So what did the town do in '63? Rumor came up the turnpike that a furloughed soldier had come home to Barnstead with the pox. Maybe he did and maybe he didn't, but rumor runs faster than any horse. Our selectmen met in the back of the store and decided to close the roads. They posted guards at the Barnstead line, the Chichester road, and the bridge toward Loudon. Nobody came in from a sick town without a paper, and nobody left without a reason.
Wilkins: Then they needed a doctor. The regular physicians had their hands full in Concord and the army had taken two more for surgeons. So they looked around the township for any man who owned a lancet and wasn't afraid of blood. And they found the tooth-puller. Pittsfield needed a doctor, and the nearest thing in the township was a man who pulls teeth, hammers horseshoes, and boils corn for a living, so they sent for me, the way you send for the fire company and get the town drunk with a bucket.
Wilkins: I told the selectmen I was a dentist, not a doctor, and they said the difference was only which end of the man I start screaming at. Fair enough. I took the job.
Wilkins: Now, camphor. Lord, the camphor. Every soul in Pittsfield wore a little muslin bag of camphor gum on a string around the neck that summer, on the belief that the smell drove off contagion. Children, grandmothers, the minister, the town drunk, the town drunk's horse. Wearing camphor in Pittsfield that summer made the whole Congregational choir smell like a sea captain's linen trunk, and the hymns sounded no better for it. I'll tell you plain as a horseshoe: camphor does nothing against smallpox. A camphor bag will keep off smallpox about as well as a Bible in your hip pocket keeps off a cannonball, unless the cannonball happens to be very poorly aimed. The only real armor was vaccination, and keeping the sick apart for a couple of weeks, since the pox hides in a man a week or two before it shows. That's why our quarantine ran fourteen days. It ain't magic. It's arithmetic.
Wilkins: The town kept a pest house too, out past the edge of the settled land toward the woods, a bare board shack with one stove, one door, and a kettle for boiling linen. That's where you went if you had the pox, and you didn't come back till you were healed or buried. Folks walked a quarter mile around it holding their breath, like the sickness could jump a stone wall.
Wilkins: And the soldier everybody feared? They sent me to look him over at his mother's farm. I stood in the dooryard with a bandanna soaked in spirits over my nose, and he came out in his drawers, spotted head to belly. I looked close. Some spots were fresh and red, some were blisters, some were crusted over, all of them at once, and most of them on his chest and back, not his face. He had spots like a ladder, some going up and some coming down, and I told him, 'Son, that is the chicken pox, and you have frightened four towns over a nursery complaint.' Smallpox comes up all together, every pock in the same stage, and it crowds the face and hands. Chicken pox comes in crops, a new batch every day, mostly on the body. His mother cried, he cried, and I went home and drank, which was the most reasonable of the three.
Wilkins: But the roads stayed shut a while yet, because the selectmen enjoyed being important. That's where our next segment comes in.
♪ Banjo bridge, quick and plucky
♦ Wax crackle, chain clinks outside
Wilkins: Segment the second. Closed roads, a coffin, and a guard who met the bear.
Wilkins: A quarantine line is a fine thing for public health and a finer thing for prices. When you close the roads, every jar of corn spirit in Merrimack County turns precious overnight. Tavern keepers in Barnstead couldn't get their supply from Pittsfield, the Chichester folks couldn't get theirs from Epsom, and men who had been happy to pay a little were suddenly happy to pay double. A quarantine line is like a pair of corsets: it squeezes everything, and it makes whatever gets through worth twice the price.
Wilkins: Smuggling got harder, too. The guards were farm boys with fowling pieces and orders to turn back every wagon. But I had something no other distiller in the valley had. I had a paper. The selectmen gave me a health pass signed by all three of them, saying Dr. G. G. Wilkins, acting physician, may pass the lines at any hour on errands of mercy. Errands of mercy. I have never in my life run so many errands, or been so merciful to so many thirsty men.
Wilkins: My doctor's bag held a lancet, a tooth key, some lint, a jar of camphor for show, and four quarts of good rye, which I described to every guard as medicinal spirit for washing wounds. And it was. I washed my lancets with it. I washed the guard's throat with it too, when he asked nice.
Wilkins: The best run of all was the coffin. A Barnstead tavern keeper's mother had passed, of old age, God rest her, and was buried decent in her own churchyard. But her son had ordered a fine pine box from the Pittsfield joiner before she went, and it sat unused. Well, he didn't need it anymore. I did. We lined that coffin with straw and laid in thirty-six jars, nailed down the lid, and painted SMALLPOX on the side in red lead letters a foot high. I rode beside it on the wagon seat with my bandanna over my face, coughing like a consumptive.
♦ Wagon wheels creaking on gravel, a horse snorting
Wilkins: The guard at the Barnstead line was a young fellow named Amos. He held up his lantern, read the side of that box, and went the color of skimmed milk. He said, 'Doctor, is that, is that...' and I said, 'Amos, she went hard, she went swollen, and she went this morning. Would you like to lift the lid and confirm it for the selectmen?' He hadn't run that fast since his mother caught him in the cider barrel. The coffin was the only honest box in Merrimack County that year: it said it was full of spirits, and it was.
♦ Wax crackle, Wilkins chuckles low
Wilkins: Now I promised you the guard and the bear. You'll want a strong stomach for this.
Wilkins: Some selectman with more ambition than brains decided Fort Wilkins itself ought to be watched, since I was crossing the lines so often. So they posted a guard on the turnpike right outside my still-house, a big soft Loudon fellow named Hezekiah. Hezekiah had two habits: he ate constantly and he moved his bowels constantly, and he did the second at my privy without asking, which stood about six feet past the end of Barnaby's chain.
Wilkins: Six feet. And Barnaby's chain had been let out four links that morning so he could reach a little shade. I'd meant to mention it.
♦ Bear grunt outside, long and satisfied
Wilkins: About sundown Hezekiah goes in, door half shut, drawers down round his ankles, eating a cold pork pie while he does his business. Barnaby smells the pie. Barnaby has never in his life smelled a pie and not acted on it. He comes round the corner of that privy on his hind legs, and the first Hezekiah knows of it is a black paw the size of a skillet coming in through the gap in the door.
Wilkins: Now he did the only thing a man can do, he lunged for the road. But a man with his drawers round his ankles doesn't lunge, he topples. And as he toppled, Barnaby made a swipe for the pie and missed, and got the seat of his drawers and about a dinner-plate of the left cheek. I heard it from the still-house. It sounded like somebody ripping wet sailcloth, then a squeal like a pig going under the gate, then the pie hitting the ground. Barnaby ate the pie. To his credit, he ate nothing else.
Wilkins: Hezekiah ran a quarter mile down Route 28 toward the village, bare from the waist down, hollering murder and bleeding like a stuck shoat, and Mrs. Tilton's whole Sunday school class was coming the other way from berry-picking at Berry Pond. The guard came off that privy seat faster than any man I have ever seen leave a church collection.
Wilkins: I caught up with him in the ditch and played doctor right there. I washed the wound with the strongest rye I had, my hearts, not my weak stuff, and he screamed so loud the cows in Chichester went dry. Then I stitched him with boiled horsehair, eleven stitches, like hemming a feed sack. I stitched his hindquarter with horsehair and he said it was the first time a doctor had ever seen his backside, and I said it would be the last time I wished to. He healed clean, but Barnaby took the seat of his drawers and about a dinner-plate of the left cheek, and to this day that man sits down in two installments.
Wilkins: The selectmen moved the guard post up the road the next morning. Barnaby got a commendation from me in the form of a ham hock.
♦ Bear grunt, chain clinks
Wilkins: Well, I didn't go through that summer alone. The man who kept my copper tight and my lancet case shut is sitting across the stove from me tonight. Master coppersmith, thumper builder, a man who hears a bad seam the way a preacher hears a lie. Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister. Welcome to the fort, Silas.
Silas: Evening, Doctor. Evening, Barnaby. I'll sit on this side of the stove, if it's all the same.
Wilkins: Smart man. Silas, you were working the foundry that summer. What did the selectmen want with a coppersmith during a smallpox scare?
Silas: They wanted a smoking box for the mail. Every letter that came up from the army was supposed to be fumigated before it went into anybody's hand, for fear the sickness rode in on the paper. So the postmaster comes to me and wants a box with a perforated tray in the middle and a pan underneath where you burn brimstone. Put the letters on the tray, shut the lid, light the sulfur, and let them smoke a quarter hour.
Wilkins: Brimstone and copper. You must have loved that.
Silas: I hated it. Burning sulfur turns copper black as a stove lid in a week, and it eats at any seam that isn't made right. So I folded and riveted every corner and sweated the joints with a good hard brazing, no soft metal anywhere, and I put a flange on the lid so it seated like a cork. Smoke has to stay where you put it. A box that leaks brimstone in a post office is a box that chokes the postmaster.
Wilkins: Silas, you are the only man I know who could hammer a letter-smoking box and make it tight enough to cure a ham.
Silas: Well, it cured more than ham. Sulfur fumes turn paper yellow, you know. There was a girl out on the Catamount road waiting on letters from a fellow in the Twelfth New Hampshire. His letter came out of my box as yellow as a buttercup, and she took one look and ran to her mother wailing that he had caught the jaundice in Virginia and was writing to her on his own skin. Her mother had to walk her down to the post office so the postmaster could show her the box and the burnt brimstone. She married him anyway when he came home. He wasn't yellow at all. A little gray maybe.
Wilkins: That's the war for you. Tell them about my scab case.
Silas: Doctor came to me wanting something to carry vaccine crusts in that wouldn't crush and wouldn't get damp. I hammered him a little hinged copper case, about the size of a snuffbox, and I lined it with a thin glass cup so the crusts never touched the bare metal. Copper and damp make verdigris, and I won't have green crust near anything going into a man's arm.
Wilkins: Fine little case. Prettiest thing I ever owned. Too pretty.
Silas: Too pretty. The Doctor set it down on the counter at the Chichester store while he paid for lamp oil, and old Deacon Haskell, a man who has taken snuff since Monroe was President, sees a handsome copper box on the counter and figures he's been offered a pinch. He flips it open, takes a big brown crust between his finger and thumb, and has it up his nostril before the Doctor can turn around.
Wilkins: I turned around just in time to watch him sniff. Hard. Like a hog at a truffle. Then he says, 'Mighty dry snuff, Wilkins. What brand?' And I said, 'Deacon, that is Mrs. Pike's boy's left arm.'
Silas: I never saw a man sneeze so hard. He sneezed his spectacles clean off and into the cracker barrel.
Wilkins: That deacon snorted a vaccine scab up his nose and he has not taken the smallpox since, nor snuff, nor communion without looking in the cup first. A scab up the nose won't vaccinate you, friends, it has to go in through a scratch in the skin. The Deacon got nothing out of it but humility, and he was short of that.
Silas: Then there was the kettle.
Wilkins: The famous kettle.
Silas: The pest house had a big copper wash kettle for boiling the sick folks' linen, sixty gallons, and the bottom had gone thin. The selectmen sent it to me to be re-bottomed. Well, I re-bottomed it. Then I had to carry it back. And it happened the Doctor had some business in Barnstead that same week, with the roads still closed.
Wilkins: Purely a coincidence.
Silas: Purely. So I painted PEST HOUSE WASH on the side, real large, and we packed that kettle with straw and two dozen jars, and I put a few soiled sheets on top, borrowed from the pest house, that had been boiled but didn't look it. I drove it right up to the Barnstead line and said I was delivering to a sick house on the other side. The guard came up with his lantern, read the side of the kettle, saw those sheets, and backed off so fast he went over the fence rail into a pigpen.
Wilkins: No guard on God's earth will put his hand in a kettle marked PEST HOUSE, which is why that kettle is the most decorated smuggler of the war.
Silas: It crossed that line four times that month. Never once inspected. I still feel a little bad about the pigpen.
Wilkins: You do not.
Silas: No, I don't. But I'll tell you the part that isn't funny. When I took that kettle back to the pest house for good, I turned it over to clean it and found eighteen scratch marks under the inner rim, made with a nail. Some poor fellow in there with the pox had been counting his days. Eighteen marks, then they stopped. I never learned if they stopped because he walked out or because he was carried out. I left those marks alone when I polished it. Seemed like they belonged to him.
Wilkins: That's the other side of the coin, neighbors. We laugh because the alternative is weeping into the mash, and weeping waters the proof. Silas, thank you. Stay by the stove, we'll want you later.
Silas: I'll stay right here, out of the bear's reach.
♪ Brassy patent-medicine fanfare on a wheezing parlor organ
Announcer: Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, farmers and freethinkers, step right up! Is your apparatus hissing at the joints like a goose in a churn? Are you still gumming up your seams with flour paste and prayer, or trusting a slipping hose clamp that lets go the moment the fire gets lively? Friend, a vapor leak is no joke. It robs your yield, it ruins your proof, and it sends flammable vapor wandering toward your firebox like a drunk toward a lit lantern!
Announcer: Banish that worry forever with the Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets from Moonshine Stills! Heavy-gauge sanitary ferrules, precision-milled in 304 stainless and copper hybrid fittings to marry true with your heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper. Food-grade PTFE gaskets that will not crumble, swell, or taint your spirit! Quick-release stainless wing clamps that seal tight with a twist of the thumb and come apart clean for scrubbing! Every one pressure-tested for airtight reliability that lasts a lifetime!
Announcer: And the price? Not fifty dollars. Not forty. Just thirty-four dollars and ninety-five cents! Come handle them yourself at the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, if you are bold enough to walk past the bear. Or order today at moonshinestill.com, that is https://moonshinestill.com/products/tri-clamp-fittings!
Announcer: Once more for the folks in the back pew: no more paste, no more slipping clamps, no more leaks. Shop hardware at moonshinestill.com, https://moonshinestill.com/products/tri-clamp-fittings. Moonshine Stills, sealed tight for life!
♪ Fanfare ends on a sour organ note
♦ Wax crackle, slow drip into a glass jar
Wilkins: Segment the third. Copper and the craft, or how to make a spirit strong enough to wash a lancet and honest enough to drink.
Wilkins: In the summer of '63 I needed two things from my still: good drinking spirit to pay my bills, and good high-proof spirit to clean my lancets and wash a wound. Now in those days nobody had heard of germs. Not even the Boston doctors. But every surgeon in the army had seen that a wound washed with strong liquor went bad less often than one washed with ditch water, and I'd seen it in a hundred bloody mouths. I'll say this much from experience: the strong stuff from the heart of the run did the job, and the weak stuff from the tail end did hardly anything. Drinking it does nothing at all against the pox, whatever the tavern says.
Wilkins: So let me walk you through the run, step by step, the way I did it that summer.
Wilkins: First, the mash. For a forty-gallon barrel I take about thirty pounds of cracked corn and cook it in near twenty-five gallons of water, stirring it like a wife stirs her grudges, slow and steady and never letting it stick to the bottom. Corn is starch, and yeast can't eat starch any more than Barnaby can eat a fence post. You have to turn it to sugar. So when the cooked corn cools down to where you can just hold a finger in it for a count of two, not more, I stir in five or six pounds of malted barley, ground. The malt has a working power in it that turns the starch to sugar in an hour or two. Taste the mash before and after, and you'll find it has gone from paste to sweet porridge. That's the alchemy, friends, and no philosopher's stone involved.
Wilkins: Then you cool it to blood-warm and pitch your yeast. Not hotter, or you'll scald the yeast like a cat in a washtub. Cover it loose, keep it in a warm room with the air moving, and let it work four or five days till the bubbling quits and it tastes sour and dry. That's your wash, weak as a temperance man's handshake, a few parts in a hundred of spirit. Never ferment in a shut-up pit or closed cellar, the gas that rises off a working barrel will lay a man down for good.
Wilkins: Second, the stripping run. Strain the wash off the grain and run it through the pot fast to pull out the spirit roughly. What comes out is called low wines. Cloudy, rank, middling strong. Save it all.
Wilkins: Third, the spirit run, and here's where a man is either a distiller or a poisoner. Put the low wines back in the clean pot, and this time you run slow. A low fire, steady as a clock. A hard boil muddles everything together, a slow run lays it out in order like a deck of cards.
Wilkins: The first drops are the foreshots. They smell like a hot nail in a paint pot, sharp enough to make your eyes run. That's where the worst of the wood spirit comes off, and it'll blind a man or put him in the ground. I catch a good measure of those, about a teacup for every five gallons of wash I started with, and I pour them out on the ground, away from the fire and out of reach of every cup, every patient, and every bear. Never in a jar. Never.
Wilkins: Then the heads. Still sharp, a smell like green apples and lamp solvent, and they'll give you a headache like a mule kick by morning. Out they go with the foreshots, or into a separate jar for running again, but never into the drinking jar.
Wilkins: Then the hearts. Clean, sweet, strong, smooth on the tongue, and this is the middle of the run and the whole reason you're doing it. I test strength with a glass hydrometer floated in a tall jar. Hearts are what I drank, what I sold, and what I washed my lancets with that summer.
Wilkins: Last come the tails, when the spirit turns oily and starts smelling like wet dog and boiled turnips. Set them aside to run again with the next batch. There's no shame in tails, only in drinking them.
Wilkins: Now copper. People think copper is just for looks. Copper is for the stink. Corn and rye mash give off sulfur in the vapor, and copper pulls it out, but only where the vapor touches the metal. So the copper does its best work in the head of the pot, the vapor pipe, and the worm, not in the bottom where the liquid sits. That's why I'll run a copper head and arm even when I've had to make do with something else below.
Wilkins: That copper surface has to be kept bright to keep working. After a run I scour mine with vinegar and a handful of salt, the way my mother cleaned her preserving kettle, then rinse it with plenty of clean water so no vinegar and no salt ride into the next batch. Silas, anything to add?
Silas: Just this, Doctor. Every joint above the liquid line has to seal tight. Vapor leaking from a seam near the fire is how a still-house burns down. But never, ever seal the far end. The worm has to run open to the air. If the outlet freezes shut or gets stopped up with a rag, the steam's got nowhere to go and the pot will burst like a pig's bladder in a bonfire. Scalding mash and burning vapor all over the room. I've buried a man for that, out Gilmanton way.
Wilkins: There it is from the man who builds them. Seal the joints, leave the outlet free, keep the fire low, never leave a running still unwatched, and keep a bucket of sand and a bucket of water by the door. In this house we put out fires, we don't start them.
♪ Fiddle bridge, slow and mournful, then picking up
♦ Wax crackle, the hiss of a needle on a cylinder
Wilkins: Segment the fourth. The mailbag and the myth-mill. We have a message cut onto a cylinder and sent up the pike from far away in North Carolina. Let's hear it.
♦ Crank of a phonograph, scratchy playback
Wilkins: The caller says: '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?' That is Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Rabbit, God bless you and God bless your uncle, because somebody has to.
Wilkins: Let me take the oak first, since I have a word about red oak you won't have heard before. Ask any cooper in Merrimack County why he won't make a whiskey barrel out of red oak. Because it leaks. White oak grows little plugs in its pores that seal it up tight, and red oak doesn't, you can blow smoke clean through a stick of red oak like a pipe stem. Rabbit, red oak in a thump keg is like a red-oak barrel in a cellar: it weeps on everybody and fixes nothing. A handful of shavings in the doubler will give your spirit color and a little woody bite, maybe a pleasant one. It will not take a single bad thing out. It's paint, not physic.
Wilkins: Now the hickory ash. Every farm wife in New Hampshire knows what you get when you run water through hardwood ashes: lye. Potash. She boils it with tallow to make soft soap, and if she splashes it in her eye she'll be half blind for a week. Hickory ash makes lye, and lye makes soap, and if your uncle wants clean spirit I suggest he wash his hands and leave the keg alone. Ash in the keg doesn't clean the heads, it just puts a caustic, gritty mess in your vessel for you to scrub out.
Wilkins: Here is the honest truth, Rabbit. The bad heads aren't in the keg to be cleaned. They come off first in the run, sharp and stinking, and the only way to be rid of them is to catch them in the jar and pour them on the ground. No wood, no ash, no hymn, no horseshoe over the door will do it for you. Your uncle had the right idea that something needed cleaning. He just went at it with a broom when he needed a bucket.
Wilkins: Rabbit, you're a long way from the Suncook, but you're always welcome at the fort. Mind the bear, bring some of that Carolina sorghum, and give your uncle a hard slap on the back from me, hard enough to knock the ashes out of his pockets.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now to the myth-mill. That's my anvil, friends, and a fresh large cent under my G. G. WILKINS PITTSFIELD N.H. punch. During the scare I wouldn't take coins handed from across a quarantine line till they'd soaked overnight in a dish of vinegar. I got that from an old English story: in the plague of 1665 the folks of a village called Eyam shut themselves in to save their neighbors, and they left their money in holes full of vinegar cut in a boundary stone so the outsiders who brought them food could take it safe. I soaked the coins, dried them, and stamped them, so a Wilkins cent from 1863 is the cleanest money in New Hampshire. A revenue man will take a coin hot off the anvil, and I believe he would take one hot out of the pest house if it was silver.
Wilkins: Tonight's myth is the blue flame. You've all seen it at a tavern table. A man pours a spoonful of spirit, puts a match to it, and says, 'Burns blue, she's safe. Burns red or yellow, she's poison.'
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Bunk. Pure bunk with a candle on it. Good spirit burns with a pale blue flame. So does the wood spirit that comes off in the foreshots, the very stuff that blinds and kills. Blue and blue. You can't tell them apart by fire, and the man who swears he can is the man who'll get you buried.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: A yellow or red flame might mean salt or dirt or junk in the spoon, or it might mean nothing but a dirty spoon. A blue flame proves your spoon is on fire, and that is all it proves, the same way a revenue man's badge proves he owns a badge. The only tests worth a damn are your nose, your hydrometer, and making your cuts honest at the still. If you don't know the man who ran it, and don't know he threw away his foreshots, don't put it in your mouth no matter what color it burns.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, the coin rings and rolls across the anvil
Wilkins: Four cents struck. Four myths dead. Two of them were the same myth and I hit it twice for spite.
♪ Banjo and fiddle return softly, the theme under
Announcer: One more quick word, neighbors! Keep every joint above the boil tight and true with Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets from Moonshine Stills, thirty-four ninety-five, at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield or at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
Wilkins: Thank you, sir. Now, before we put the lamp out. If tonight made you want to learn the craft proper, from mash barrel to cuts to keeping your copper bright, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you to make an honest cut, read a hydrometer, keep a fire low and safe, and to tell the difference between heads and hearts by nose alone. Silas will teach you seams. Barnaby will teach you humility for free.
Announcer: Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States. Everything on this program is for historical and educational purposes only.
Wilkins: The roads opened again by first frost in '63. The selectmen thanked me with a resolution in the town book and a handshake. The selectmen paid me for my doctoring in thanks and promises, which spend about as well as a Confederate bond at a Pittsfield feed store. But nobody in Pittsfield died of the pox that year, the soldier with the chicken pox married the Tilton girl, Hezekiah's backside healed, and Silas's pest-house kettle went back to boiling linen like nothing ever happened. I'll take that for wages.
Wilkins: Silas, any last word?
Silas: Check your seams, Doctor. And let out the bear's chain only when you mean to.
Wilkins: Wise words from a man who has never been bitten. Folks, get vaccinated when the doctor comes, leave camphor to the moths, and give a quarantined man his fourteen days in peace. And remember, Barnaby is a tall tale of the Suncook Valley, not an example.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme ends on a single banjo string, then wax cylinder crackle fades to silence