The Pittsfield Militia Muster Day: Drums, Drill, and Whiskey on the Common
Dr. G. G. Wilkins recalls the old New England training days: farmers drilling with cornstalks and umbrellas, gingerbread and cider carts, and the rye wagons that followed the drum. He then tells how the call of April 1861 turned the Pittsfield common into a solemn recruiting ground, and how Barnaby the bear wrecked the cannon salute. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister tells new stories about re-bushing the town cannon's touch-hole with copper, a powder flask full of rye at inspection, and a copper drum that came home from the war with a bullet dent. Wilkins also answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC, on hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and knocks down the blue flame myth.
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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! Lie down, you four-hundred-pound sack of lard and grievances. That was not a cannon. That was the widow's boy dropping a milk can on the turnpike. Ever since that day on the common, any door that slams in Pittsfield, that bear thinks the whole Union army has come for his supper.
♦ Bear grunt, chain dropping slack into the dirt
Wilkins: There. Now he's sulking. A bear sulks the same as a Congressman: loud breathing, no work done.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, sinners, and any revenue man with his ear to my chimney. You are listening to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log walls of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host, your tooth-puller, your blacksmith, and on a good night your confessor. Tonight we march out onto the common for Muster Day: drums, drill, and whiskey. Later on my old friend Silas Hacksaw McAllister comes up from the foundry with soot still in his ears. We have a voicemail tape from the Carolina hills. And yes, you will hear what Barnaby did during the cannon salute, because the Lord gave me a bear and a big mouth and expects me to use both. First, the solemn part. Everything on this program is for history and education only. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit breaks the law of these United States, and if you skip your cuts it breaks the law of common sense besides.
♪ Theme swells, then dips under
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♪ Theme resolves on a banjo flourish
♦ Wax crackle; distant snare drum rolling, a fife squealing a few bars of an old march
Wilkins: Hear that? That is the sound of every able-bodied man in Pittsfield remembering he forgot his musket. Pull your chair up to the stove and let me tell you about training day. Under the old militia law, here and all through New England, every able-bodied man from about eighteen to forty-five was enrolled in the militia. He was to furnish his own firelock, his powder horn or flask, a cartridge box and a knapsack, and turn out to drill when the captain called. If he didn't turn out, he paid a fine. Many a man paid it gladly, because it was cheaper than a whole day of being hollered at by his own brother-in-law in a borrowed cocked hat.
♦ Wilkins pouring from a jug into a tin cup
Wilkins: There were two great days in the year. In the spring came company training, when each town's company drilled on its own ground. Here in Pittsfield that meant the common by the meetinghouse, with Catamount Mountain looking down on us like a disappointed aunt. In the fall came the general muster, when the whole regiment gathered and every company in the district marched in to be reviewed by some colonel on a borrowed horse. Pittsfield has been a town since 1782, and I'd wager there hasn't been one sober muster in all those years.
Wilkins: Now let me paint you the scene. Picture a Pittsfield company on training day. It had the discipline of a henhouse in a thunderstorm and about half the firepower. Half the muskets on that common had not been fired since Bunker Hill, and the other half were cornstalks, umbrellas, and one fellow's wife's rolling pin, which was the only weapon on the field any man truly feared. City folk laughed at us and called us the cornstalk militia, and by God we earned it. I saw a man present arms with a hoe. I saw another present arms with a hoe that still had the potato on it.
♦ Crowd laughter, a drum stumbling out of rhythm
Wilkins: Our captain in my young days was Captain Ebenezer Thing. Yes, that was his name, and yes, we made every joke about it you are making right now, and some you're too decent to think of. Captain Thing could not tell his left from his right when sober, and on muster day he was never troubled by that condition. He'd bawl out, By the left flank, march! and half the company would go left, a quarter would go right, and the rest would go straight to the cider cart, which was the only order every man understood the first time.
Wilkins: And oh, that cider cart. Wherever the drum went, the wagons followed like flies after a butcher's boy. There was hard cider by the barrel. There was New England rum, sweet and hot as a Salem sermon. There was rye from the hill farms, and the gingerbread. Muster gingerbread was its own sacrament. Every peddler in the county baked it in great flat sheets and sold it by the square, and it was so hard you could load it in the six-pounder, and one year, God help us, we did. It went about forty rods and broke a window on the Lane house, and old man Lane came out and ate the evidence.
♦ Wilkins slurping from his cup, a satisfied exhale
Wilkins: By afternoon came the sham fight, the grand battle where one half of the company played the redcoats and the other half played the heroes. Nobody wanted to be a redcoat, so the redcoats always got the extra jug as pay, and so the redcoats always won, which I believe is the only time in history King George took New Hampshire. Then horse trading, wrestling, a fistfight or four, a man selling a cure for baldness out of the same jar he sold a cure for warts out of, and young couples drifting off behind the stone walls to practice their own close-order drill. I'll say no more about that, except that more than one Pittsfield child was born the following June with a remarkable sense of rhythm.
Wilkins: As the years went on the trainings got so ridiculous that the boys started mocking them on purpose. They formed companies of rags, with old women's bonnets for helmets, stovepipe for cannon, and a goat for a colonel, and called themselves the Horribles. I'll confess I marched with them one year as Surgeon-General, wearing my tooth forceps on a chain around my neck like a bishop's cross. By the forties and early fifties the states around New England quit the old compulsory musters and put their faith in volunteer companies. Training day faded out the way a good fire does, still warm but nobody feeding it.
♪ Fiddle drops to a low, mournful single line
Wilkins: Then came April of 1861. Fort Sumter fell, and on the fifteenth of April Mr. Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand militia to serve ninety days. Ninety days, they said. Like a fever, they said, over by haying. New Hampshire raised her First Regiment and the boys gathered at Concord. That spring the drum on our common sounded different. Same drum, same sticks, same common, but nobody was laughing at the man with the hoe anymore, because now they were asking him for his name.
♦ Single slow drumbeat, repeated, a church bell tolling once far off
Wilkins: They set a table on the common where the gingerbread cart used to stand. A recruiting sergeant sat behind it with a ledger and a jug. A recruiting sergeant and a tooth-puller have the same patter: this will not hurt a bit, now sign here and bite down. I have said those words myself ten thousand times, and I never felt so ashamed of them as when I heard that sergeant say them to boys I'd pulled baby teeth from. As the war ground on, the town meetings voted bounties, cash money to fill our quota. Then in March of 1863 Washington passed the Enrollment Act and brought the draft. A drafted man could hire a substitute, or pay three hundred dollars commutation and stay home. Three hundred dollars. A rich man paid for his life with what a poor man couldn't earn in a year, and the poor man went. That is how the festival became a recruiting ground, friends. The cider still flowed, but now it was poured for mothers.
♪ Mournful fiddle line resolves, then a brighter banjo pickup
Wilkins: Enough weeping. Barnaby's getting maudlin and when Barnaby gets maudlin he eats a fence. Stay right there.
♪ Banjo transition sting
♦ Wax crackle; heavy boots on plank floor, the creak of a door, a clank of a tool satchel set down
Wilkins: Now then. You can't talk about muster day in Pittsfield without talking about the gun, and you can't talk about the gun without the man who saved it. Coming in from the foundry, sooty as a chimney sweep's honeymoon, Silas Hacksaw McAllister. Silas, sit down before you fall down.
Silas: Evening, Doctor. I'd sit, but your bear chewed the leg off that chair, and I've no wish to end the night on your floor.
Wilkins: Take the keg. Silas measures twice and cuts once; I measure never and pull molars by the phase of the moon. Between us we make one competent man. Now, Silas, tell the folks about the night before the muster of '61.
Silas: Well, sir, the selectmen came to the foundry door after dark. The town had an old brass field piece, a little six-pounder that had been fired off every Fourth and every muster since before my father was born. And they wanted it to fire a salute for the boys going to Concord. Trouble was, the touch-hole was burned out. A gun's vent, the little hole you prime and fire through, takes the worst of the burning powder gas. Shot after shot, it eats the metal away. That vent had worn so wide you could have posted a letter through it.
Wilkins: And a wide vent is dangerous?
Silas: A wide vent blows fire out the top instead of driving the ball out the front. It'll burn the gunner's face off and do nothing to the enemy. The proper cure on a brass gun is a copper vent piece, a bushing. Copper stands up to that burning gas better than the gun metal around it. So you drill out the ruined hole, thread in a plug of good copper, and drill a fresh, true vent through the middle of it. I did it by lantern light with my apprentice holding the lamp and shaking like a wet dog.
Wilkins: Why was he shaking?
Silas: Because the selectman who brought the gun had brought a jug for my trouble, and the apprentice found it first. Twice I had to tell him the lantern goes over the work, not under his chin.
Wilkins: And that's the very gun that fired the salute. Hold that thought, Silas, because the listeners deserve to know what that blessed copper bushing set loose upon the town of Pittsfield.
Silas: I've been trying to forget it for four years, Doctor.
Wilkins: You'll never forget it. Nobody will. Now, I had a booth at that muster. I always did. A tooth-pulling chair under a maple tree, with a sign that said PAINLESS on one side and RYE TONIC on the other, and I'd flip the sign depending on which way the deputy was walking. I pulled teeth between volleys so the cannon would drown out the screaming, and for the first time in my career the patients could not tell who was being louder, me or the artillery.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And when they paid me in copper cents, I gave their change back stamped at my little anvil, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. I punched my mark on so many coppers that muster day that half the drummer boys in Merrimack County were buying gingerbread with my name. Now, Barnaby. I had him with me, chained to an iron stake by the horse sheds, because I couldn't leave him home. Last time I left him home he ate a kitchen door, and I don't mean he chewed on it. He ate the door. And there was a man on that common I'd been hoping Barnaby would meet. A revenue assessor up from Concord, one Mr. Pettibone, wearing a white waistcoat and new buff breeches, walking from wagon to wagon with a notebook, sniffing every jug like a hound at a privy. He'd come to count my barrels.
Silas: I remember the breeches. They were very tight breeches.
Wilkins: Tight as a Baptist's purse at a church supper. So the sergeant rams the charge home, the gunner touches off Silas's new copper vent, and that six-pounder speaks.
♦ Massive cannon blast, rolling echo off the hills, glass rattling, horses screaming
♦ Bear roar, iron stake ripping out of the earth, chain whipping and rattling
Wilkins: Barnaby came out of the ground like a cork out of a hot jug, iron stake and all, dragging three feet of chain and a fair piece of the horse shed behind him. He went straight through the middle of the company. The front rank went down like wheat. Captain Thing jumped up on the gingerbread table, which was a tactical error, because that's where Barnaby was going. Barnaby hit that table at full gallop, and Captain Thing went one way, the gingerbread went the other, and Barnaby followed the gingerbread, which is the only sensible decision anybody made all day.
Silas: He ate the whole table's worth. I watched him. Forty pounds of it, sheet by sheet, crunching like a man walking on lake ice.
Wilkins: Barnaby ate forty pounds of muster gingerbread and passed it over the next three days in a manner I can only describe as a second artillery salute. I had to move the still-house window. But here's the part I live for. With his mouth still full, Barnaby smelled something sweeter than gingerbread, and that was Mr. Pettibone, who'd spent his morning sniffing every jug of rum on the common and had spilled most of it down his white waistcoat. That man smelled like a molasses barrel with legs. Barnaby turned, and Pettibone saw him turn, and I watched a federal official discover religion in about one half of one second.
♦ Running footsteps, a man shrieking, bear huffing in pursuit, cloth tearing with a long ripping sound
Wilkins: He ran. Barnaby closed the distance in four bounds, reached out with one paw, delicate as a lady taking a teacake, and hooked the seat of those buff breeches. The sound was like a sail splitting in a gale. One long rip, and those breeches came away entire, from the belt to the knee, and Mr. Pettibone carried on running in his shirt tails, his white backside flashing across the common like a flag of truce, with four fresh red furrows across it where Barnaby's claws had signed their name. The women screamed. A few of the widows took notes. The drummer boy, God bless him, never stopped playing. He played that man clear off the common to the Rogue's March.
Silas: And the breeches?
Wilkins: Barnaby ran off with them and dropped them by the liberty pole. Some patriot ran them up the halyard, and the assessor's breeches flew there through two Fourths of July. It's the most patriotic service that man ever rendered his country. And the Concord assessor ran so fast he beat his own horse home, and the horse was the smarter of the two, because it never came back to Pittsfield at all. We sold it the next spring at the training-day horse auction for eleven dollars and a jar.
Silas: And Barnaby?
Wilkins: Climbed up on your cannon, Silas. Sat himself right on the barrel while it was still warm from the shot and went to sleep with his chin on the muzzle. Nobody could fire a second salute, because nobody would go near him to load. Now, I'll tell the listeners plain: a loose bear in a crowd is no joke. By the grace of God and a gingerbread table nobody was killed that day, and I spent a week paying for horse sheds. Silas, give us another. Tell them about Josiah Pervear's powder flask.
Silas: Josiah was a farmer from up toward Barnstead road. In the old days a man's powder flask was copper or brass, and for good reason. Iron or steel can strike a spark, and a spark near loose powder is the last thing you'll ever see. Copper won't spark. So every flask on the common was copper, and at inspection the captain walked the line and had each man pull the stopper to show his powder was dry.
Wilkins: I see where this goes.
Silas: Josiah pulled his stopper and the whole front rank turned their heads. That flask was full to the shoulder with rye. The captain put his nose to it. Took a long sniff. Took a second sniff, for thoroughness. Then he said, in a voice like a deacon, Private Pervear, this powder is wet, and I'm confiscating it for the safety of the company. Then he went behind the meetinghouse sheds and inspected it alone the rest of the afternoon. He came back for evening parade and saluted a cow.
Wilkins: A man who keeps his powder dry and his flask wet is a man I'd follow into battle, if the battle was at a tavern. Now, Silas, you told me once about the drum.
Silas: I did. That one's a quieter story, Doctor.
Wilkins: Then tell it quiet. The stove'll keep.
♪ Single fiddle, very soft, under
Silas: There was a boy, fifteen years old, named Asa, who drummed for the Pittsfield company in the last of the training days. His drum shell was old wood, cracked clean through. In '61 he came to the foundry with three dollars in pennies, half of them stamped with your name, Doctor, and asked if I could make him a shell that wouldn't crack, because he was going with the regiment. I told him three dollars would buy him about the hoops. But I hammered him a copper shell anyhow. I planished it bright, set the tack heads in a ring, and gave him back his pennies.
Wilkins: You never told me you gave the money back.
Silas: You never asked. He came home in the summer of '65 with that drum on his back. There's a dent in the shell the size of a thumbprint, right below the hoop, where a ball struck it somewhere in Virginia. He brought it to me to beat the dent out. I wouldn't do it. I told him that dent is the finest work ever done on that drum, and it wasn't done by me.
♦ Wax crackle, long silence, a soft drip into the jar
Wilkins: That boy pulled a tooth in my chair at nine years old and bit me on the thumb. I'd let him bite the other one now. Thank you, Silas. Give us a lighter one to wash it down.
Silas: My grandfather made the brass mouthpiece for the old training-day bugler, a fellow named Huckins. Finest mouthpiece in the county. Worst bugler in the Republic. One muster he blew Advance when he meant Halt, and the whole company marched straight down the bank into the millpond on the Suncook. Captain Thing went under hollering Halt and came up hollering Advance, and Huckins blew Retreat, and nobody's sure to this day who won.
Wilkins: A drill sergeant and a thump keg have this in common: all that banging and bubbling, and the strength ends up in somebody else. Silas, stay put. After our sponsor, you and I are going to talk copper.
♪ Brassy banjo vamp, patent-medicine-show flourish
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♪ Flourish ends with a cymbal tap
♦ Wax crackle, stove door creaking open, a log thrown on the fire
Wilkins: Now, back to the craft. Every rye wagon that followed the drum onto that common was filled from somebody's copper. So let's talk about how a careful man ran his rye in those days. I'll talk it through as history, and as the law reminds you, history is all it is. Silas, correct me when I lie, which will be often.
Silas: I'll keep count, Doctor.
Wilkins: You start with your grain. Rye for the spice and bite, with a good share of malted barley, because the malt carries the working power. Raw grain is all starch, and yeast can't eat starch any more than Barnaby can eat a church pew. Though he's tried. You crack the rye, cook it in water till it goes to porridge, and here's the first lesson. Rye mash is gummy as a horse-trader's handshake. Rye grain carries natural gums, and the mash goes thick and sticky and wants to burn on the bottom of the kettle. So you stir, and you stir, and you keep your fire gentle, or you'll scorch it and the whole batch will taste like a burned-down barn.
Silas: A scorched kettle bottom is the devil to clean, too. Bakes on like enamel.
Wilkins: Then you let the cooked mash cool till it's hot but not scalding. A thermometer will tell you somewhere about a hundred and forty-five to a hundred and fifty-eight degrees. The old men judged it by how long they could hold a finger in it, and they had the scarred fingers to prove it. Into that you stir your malted barley. The malt's own working power turns the starch to sugar while you hold it warm. Give it time. Then cool it down to about blood warm, pitch in your yeast, and let it work for several days in a warm spot with air moving through the room, because a fermenting mash breathes out a gas that will quietly smother a man in a shut-up cellar. What you get is a sour, beery wash, weak as a selectman's promise, a few parts in the hundred of spirit.
Wilkins: Then comes the still. The careful men ran it twice. The first run is the stripping run. You run the wash through fast and pull out the low wines, cloudy and rough, and nobody drinks those. Then you charge the pot with those low wines and run it a second time, slow and gentle. That's the spirit run, and that's where you make your cuts.
Silas: And don't fill the pot to the brim, Doctor. Tell them.
Wilkins: I was coming to it, you impatient tinker. Never fill your pot to the top. Leave headspace. Heat it slow. A charge that's too full or too hot foams up into the neck and belches through to the condenser. That's a puke, it fouls your run and can choke the line. And here is the one I'll shout. A still must never be sealed. It must always be open to the air through the condenser. A still with a blocked worm or a shut vent is not a still, it's a bomb with a copper jacket. It'll burst, and throw scalding mash and burning vapor all over the man standing next to it, and his widow will be selling his tools at the next muster.
Silas: I've seen a pot come back to the foundry split along the seam like a boiled sausage. Fellow had stuffed a rag in the worm to stop a drip. He lived. His eyebrows didn't.
Wilkins: Now the cuts, and listen close. The first liquor out of the worm is the foreshots. Methanol boils lower than good spirit, around a hundred and forty-eight degrees against a hundred and seventy-three for the ethanol, so it gathers thickest at the very start of a run. Not all of it, though, some smears on through. So you throw out the foreshots, and you throw them out generously. On a small pot, a full teacupful or more for every five gallons of wash, and more if you have any doubt at all. Throw it on the woodpile, never down your neck. A man who will not throw away his foreshots is a man who would lick the spoon after stirring lye. Next come the heads, sharp and solventy, smelling like a fresh-painted coffin. Set them aside. Don't drink them. Then the hearts, sweet and clean, what you're running for. Then the tails come on, oily, flat, smelling like a wet dog in a wool blanket, and those you set aside as well. The cuts are a nose, a tongue, and patience. Mostly patience.
Wilkins: Now, Silas, this is your church, so you preach it. Why copper?
Silas: Rye wash can carry a good deal of sulfur stink, Doctor, especially if the yeast was stressed, too hot or too hungry. Copper takes that sulfur out of the vapor and holds it on its own skin. But here's what most men don't know. Copper does most of that work up high, in the vapor path, in the head and the neck and the arm, where the hot vapor brushes against bright metal. A copper pot with a cheap iron head is like a fine pair of boots with no soles. The cleanup has to happen where the vapor travels.
Wilkins: And where the vapor travels, the joints had better be tight, or else...
Silas: Or else you're leaking flammable vapor into a room with a fire in it. My grandfather used rye dough on the joints, and it worked till it dried and cracked, and then it didn't. A good tight union, properly gasketed, is worth more than any amount of prayer.
Wilkins: Spoken like a man who's never prayed. Silas Hacksaw McAllister, thank you for coming. Give the bear a wide berth on your way out. He still remembers the cannon, and he knows you built the vent.
Silas: I'll go out the back, Doctor. Goodnight.
♦ Door creak, boots on gravel, bear grunting suspiciously, a man's quick steps
♪ Banjo transition with a jaunty fiddle turn
♦ Wax crackle; the mechanical whir and click of a cylinder tape machine being cranked
Wilkins: Now to the mailbag, or in this case the tape. This one came all the way up from the Carolina hills, from a man whose name ought to be a battle hymn. Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Roll it.
♦ Tape hiss, a faint static pop
Wilkins: Here's Cletus on the tape. He 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?
♦ Tape clicks off
Wilkins: Rabbit, I salute you and your uncle both, and I'm about to make a liar of one of you. Let's take the ashes first. Here in New Hampshire we know wood ash better than any people on earth. In my grandfather's day the whole of New England burned off its forests and leached the hardwood ashes in barrels with water, and what dripped out the bottom was lye. They boiled that lye down into potash and pearlash and shipped it to England by the ton, for soap and glass. Ash plus water makes lye, and lye is caustic. It eats the skin off your hands. So when your uncle dumps hickory ashes into his thump keg, he isn't cleaning anything. He's making a weak soap kettle. Lye in your doubler gives you a whiskey that will clean your boots, your floorboards, and your bowels, in that order of pleasure.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Oak does have a place in whiskey. It goes in a barrel, after the run, where it gives color and tannin and that warm wood flavor. But mark this. Any cooper in Merrimack County will tell you, you don't make a whiskey barrel out of red oak. Red oak's pores run wide open. Blow through a stick of it and you'll bubble your coffee. It leaks like a gossip at a quilting bee. Barrels are white oak, because nature plugs white oak's pores tight. So red oak shavings in a hot thump keg will add bitterness, color, and a taste like chewing a fence post. Red oak in a thump keg is like a parson at a horse race: it adds color, it adds bitterness, and it fixes nothing about the outcome. To be fair to your uncle, Rabbit, some of the old-timers did drop fruit or wood into their doublers to season the vapor. That's flavoring, plain and simple, and it isn't purifying. The bad heads were already in the vapor, and they pass through that keg like a deacon through a tavern, quick and unchanged. The only cure for a bad head is a good cut. You set aside the heads and throw out the foreshots. Nothing else will do it.
Wilkins: And while I've got the anvil hot, let's knock down one more old lie. There's a fellow in every county who'll pour a spoonful of liquor, put a match to it, and say, Burns blue, it's safe. Burns yellow or red, there's poison in it. Hogwash.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Good spirit burns with a pale blue flame. And methanol, the very poison you're trying to catch, also burns with a pale blue flame. Same color. That match can't tell you a thing. It won't find methanol, and no flame color is a trustworthy test for any poison. If a blue flame proved a liquor safe, the Devil's own kitchen would be the healthiest boarding house in Christendom.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, the coin ringing as it drops onto the anvil
Wilkins: There. One copper cent, stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and it goes in the post to Wilkesboro, North Carolina, for Cletus Rabbit Miller. Rabbit, tell your uncle he's a fine man with a bad recipe, and that's the most a Wilkins can say about any man's uncle. Keep sending the tapes, and keep those Carolina ridges honest.
♪ Fiddle and banjo reprise, warm and slow
Wilkins: Before I let you go, friends: if you've a hankering to understand the old craft proper, the mash and the copper and the cuts and the history, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. It's every lesson I've learned between the anvil, the dentist's chair, and the county courthouse, without the fines, the bear bites, or the deputies. It teaches you to respect the fire, honor the cuts, and know the law, and you get to keep all your teeth.
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! Before your next run, seal every joint the right way with Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets from Moonshine Stills. Shop Hardware at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♦ Distant single drumbeat, slow, fading
Wilkins: So when you hear a drum on the common this year, tip your hat. Some of those boys marched with cornstalks and came home laughing. Some marched with muskets and came home with a dented drum. And some didn't come home at all. Pour one out for them, legally of course, and pour it from something honest. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♪ Theme rises full, banjo and fiddle with antique warmth, then fades into crackle
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar