The Night the Still Sang
Dr. Wilkins tells the Fort Wilkins legend of the October night a loose copper worm hummed across the Suncook Valley. Half of Merrimack County blamed ghosts, and a Concord spirit medium came to talk to them, which went badly for him once Barnaby got involved. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister explains how he traced the moan to a worm that had slipped its brace, how he finds hidden faults by tapping a coil and listening to its ring, and why a still that sings or whistles is a warning. Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC asks about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and Wilkins answers it with the history of New England potash and the cooper's red oak problem, then breaks the blue flame myth over his anvil.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby. Barnaby! Settle that carcass down, you flea-bitten horsehair sofa. It's the wind in the hemlocks, not a ghost and not a deputy. Lie down before I sell your hide to a Concord lawyer for a carriage robe. At least then you'd be warm on the only honest thing in his office.
♦ Heavy bear huff, chain drags across frozen dirt, a great body slumps against the log wall
Wilkins: There he goes, four hundred pounds of bad temper folded up like a wet quilt. Ever since that night the still sang, he jumps at every hum in the hills. And so does half of Merrimack County.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, sinners and selectmen. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log walls of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. I am Dr. Wilkins: tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor, and the reason the county sheriff keeps a spare pair of trousers in his saddlebag. Tonight we have a ghost story with no ghost in it. It has a copper worm, a frightened township, a spirit medium who lost a fight with my bear, and a coppersmith who climbed into a tub of cold water to find the devil and found a loose bracket. Tonight's tale is called The Night the Still Sang.
♪ Theme swells, then fades under crackle
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Is your fire scorching your mash and roasting your patience? Ask after the Flame-Flow still, United States Patent 10,561,960, which spreads the heat even and gentle through heavy copper. Visit moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax crackle, a log shifts in the stove
Wilkins: Segment the first, friends, and before I tell you about the singing, I'll tell you where the singer came from. A still is copper, and copper does not grow on the Suncook like cattails. Every sheet I ever hammered came a long, crooked road to get here.
Wilkins: Most of the copper in this Republic comes out of the Lake Superior country, up on Michigan's Keweenaw, where the rock is so full of native copper that miners chisel lumps out of it the size of a dead cow. Since 1855 they've floated it down through the new canal at the Sault, across the Great Lakes, east by canal boat and rail, then up to the rolling mills. And here's a curiosity for the parlor: there's a Fort Wilkins up there at Copper Harbor, built in 1844, named for a Secretary of War. I've asked the War Department for royalties, and they've answered with the same silence they give my tax letters.
♦ Bear grunt, distant
Wilkins: Closer to home, the Ely mines over at Vershire, Vermont dig copper out of the Green Mountains, and the Revere Copper Company down at Canton, Massachusetts, which grew out of the mill Paul Revere himself put up in 1801, rolls the sheet. Old Revere rode at midnight to warn of the British, and his company has been riding the price of copper up ever since.
Wilkins: Then came the war, and copper went to soldiering. Every percussion cap on every musket from Bull Run to Appomattox was a little copper thimble. The bronze Napoleon guns, the twelve-pounders that tore up the fields at Gettysburg, ate copper by the ton. A coppersmith in New Hampshire couldn't get decent sheet for love, money, or his sister's hand. I paid one Dover peddler in coin, cordial, and a molar I pulled out of his own head for free, and he still cheated me on the weight.
Wilkins: And it all comes up the valley by wagon, because the Suncook Valley Railroad is still a promise and a pile of surveyor's stakes. Copper came to Pittsfield slower than a Barnstead man reaching for his purse. So when I finally got my hands on enough heavy sheet to coil a new worm, a long, fat spiral of copper tube sitting in a barrel of cold spring water to turn vapor back into spirit, I loved that worm the way a widower loves his second wife. Carefully, and with one eye on the door.
♦ Wind rising against log walls, faint creak
Wilkins: Now to the night. It was October, cold and clear, the leaves gone to rust on Catamount Mountain and the mill ponds black as ink. I was running a charge of rye, the fire low, and about ten o'clock a sound came up out of the still-house. It wasn't a hiss or a gurgle. It was a hum, low and long, like a bass viol bowed by a drunk who has found the one note he likes. It went MMMMMMMMM, rose a little, fell, and went on all night.
Wilkins: Sound carries in cold air, friends. By midnight they heard it in Barnstead. By one o'clock dogs were howling in Chichester. By two the sexton was in the belfry ringing the meeting-house bell to answer it, as if you could out-argue a ghost in bronze. The widow down the Barnstead road swore it was her late husband, drowned in a mill pond in '59, moaning for his supper. I told her he'd never made a sound that steady in his life. She agreed so fast it hurt my feelings for him.
Wilkins: By morning there was a selectmen's meeting, two sermons, a petition, and a rumor that Wilkins had raised a demon in his still and was teaching it to sing hymns backward. That one I didn't deny. Bad reputations are cheaper than locks.
♦ Bear chain rattles sharply
Wilkins: Then came the Professor. You all know the spirit-rapping craze. Ever since those Fox girls in York State cracked their toe-knuckles under a table in '48 and called it the dead talking, every half-educated parasite with a black coat and a sad mustache has hired himself out to chat with your grandmother. This one came up from Concord. Professor Ambrose Thistlewaite, trance medium, consultant to the departed. He had a tin spirit trumpet, the kind they made famous out at that Koons spirit room in Ohio, a long cone you put to your ear to hear the dead whisper.
Wilkins: Nobody invited him. He came over the back fence at dusk, stepped through the brambles, set his trumpet against my still-house wall, and called out, 'Speak, unquiet soul!' Something unquiet spoke, all right. It was Barnaby, lying in the dark three feet off with his chain slack, and he'd had about enough of strange men that week.
♦ Deep bear roar, chain snapping taut, tin crumpling
Wilkins: First the bear took the trumpet, and the hand holding it. He clamped on the meat of the Professor's palm, and I heard it from the kitchen: a wet crunch, like a boot pulled out of a cow-flop in March. The trumpet folded up. It now has the shape and the dignity of a stepped-on lobster. Then Barnaby gave him one sweep of the left paw, lazy, the way you'd brush crumbs off a table, and opened his scalp from the crown to behind the ear. It peeled back like a split melon rind, and a flap of hair the size of a pancake hung down over one eye. He was bleeding like a stuck shoat, howling 'The spirits! The spirits are upon me!' and running in circles at the end of a bear's reach, which, I'll tell you, is a short circle.
♦ Man's distant wailing, bear huffing, a door bangs open
Wilkins: I dragged him in by the collar, sat him at my kitchen table with a lamp, picked the bramble and the bear-hair out of his skull with my dental tweezers, and sewed that flap back on with dental silk, eleven stitches, while he prayed to every dead Indian chief and Roman senator he had ever claimed to know. He was the first patient I ever had who blamed the dead for the bill. He went back to Concord and lectured that winter on 'The Violent Spirits of Pittsfield', at a quarter a head, with his hat off to show the scar. I hear he did well by it. I've never seen a penny.
Wilkins: Now, the moaning went on two more nights, and I'll own up: I hadn't the faintest notion what it was. So I sent for a man who listens to copper the way a priest listens to confession.
♪ Short banjo sting
Wilkins: Segment the second, friends: legends, liars, and the men who fix what the liars break. With me in the fort tonight, smelling of tallow and pine pitch, is master coppersmith Silas McAllister, called Hacksaw. His mother called him Silas, and the girls of Gilmanton called him 'not tonight'. Welcome, Silas.
Silas: Evening, Doctor. Evening to whoever's listening. I'll say this once: the girls of Gilmanton were never asked.
Wilkins: Ha! That's what all the rejected men say. Now tell them, Silas. Third night of the moaning, you come up the turnpike with a lantern and a bag of tools. What did you do?
Silas: First thing, I listened. A ghost doesn't care where you stand, but metal does. I walked around the still-house and the hum got louder by the worm tub, the big barrel the coil sits in. So I put my ear right to the stave, and it buzzed my teeth. My jaw hummed like I was chewing on a bee.
Wilkins: You'd know. You've paid me twice to pull the ones the bees didn't get.
Silas: I took my boots off, rolled my trousers, and climbed into that tub with the lantern held up high. Spring water in October, Doctor. It took the breath out of me and some of my manhood with it.
Wilkins: Then you lost nothing the county will miss.
Silas: Down in the water I could feel it. The coil had dropped off its oak cleat. The wood swells when it's wet and shrinks when the tub's been low, and it had let go of the copper at the third turn. So the whole worm was hanging loose, and every slug of hot spirit coming down through it knocked it, and the vapor would catch in a loop and collapse with a little thump. It was ringing like a tuning fork the size of a man. Hit copper steady enough and it will sing to you all night long.
Wilkins: So my demon was a loose bracket.
Silas: Most demons are, Doctor. I cut oak wedges right there in the dark with my knife, drove them between the coil and the stave, and riveted a copper strap round the third turn and nailed it to fresh cleats. Then I climbed out blue to the knees, and the hum quit in the middle of a note. Every dog in three townships stopped barking at once. You could hear the whole valley go quiet like somebody had shut a door.
♦ Wind dies, single drip into glass jar
Wilkins: And did the county thank you?
Silas: The county never knew. The next day the sexton told everybody his bell had driven off the spirit.
Wilkins: A coil that sings is like a deputy that talks, friends: it means something inside has worked loose. Now Silas, tell them about the assessor.
Silas: Well. That second night, a deputy assessor of the revenue was riding up the turnpike from Concord. You know the kind, Doctor, a soft hat and a hard heart.
Wilkins: I know him well. I've pulled his eyeteeth and kept them in a jar. They're the only part of him that ever bit anybody honest.
Silas: He'd spent his whole career standing under the telegraph lines along the railroad, so when he heard that hum coming over the hills he decided it was a telegraph wire strung too tight and singing in the cold. He sat in a Pittsfield tavern and wrote a letter to the telegraph company complaining of the noise. There's no wire within miles of here. He listened to an illegal still for an hour and reported a public utility.
Wilkins: He wrote the telegraph company to complain about a wire that wasn't there. That is the most work a revenue man has done in Merrimack County since the war! Silas, how do you know a coil's sound before it ever sings?
Silas: You tap it. My father taught me with a hickory dowel, no bigger than a pencil. You tap every turn and you listen. A clean, even wall rings bright, like a dinner bell. A thin spot or a kink or a bad patch sounds dead, a thud, like knocking on a coffin lid with somebody in it.
Wilkins: Tell them about the Loudon coil.
Silas: I bought a secondhand coil off a man in Loudon, cheap, and one turn rang dead as a stone. I thought there was a crack, so I warmed it and worked it, and out of the bottom slid a gold wedding ring. Bright as the day it was bought.
Wilkins: Whose?
Silas: His own. He'd dropped it down the worm to hide it from his wife the week he went courting a milliner in Epsom. It got wedged in the turn and he could never shake it out. He had to tell his wife a pickerel took it off his finger through the ice. She believed him for eleven years.
Wilkins: The man hid his ring in a still worm to keep it from his wife. That's the only time I've heard of whiskey keeping a marriage together. Did you give it back?
Silas: I sold it back to him. Full price. In front of her.
Wilkins: Silas, you're a crueler man than I am, and I keep a bear. Now, what happened in your own house that first night?
Silas: I live four miles off, Doctor, over two hills. And that hum came through my bedroom window, low and steady, and my wife, Hannah, woke up and drove her heel into my kidney and said, 'Silas McAllister, roll over, you're snoring like a mill wheel.' I said, 'Woman, I'm awake.' She said, 'Then you're snoring awake, which is worse,' and put me in the woodshed.
Wilkins: For how long?
Silas: Three nights, till I fixed your coil and the noise stopped and she could see it wasn't me.
Wilkins: Silas slept in the woodshed three nights over a noise he didn't make. That puts him ahead of most husbands, who sleep there for noises they did make. Stay with us, Silas. There's copper still to talk about, and my pitchman's champing like a horse at the oats.
♪ Banjo roll into ad-break stinger
Announcer: Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, step right up! Do your cuts come out ragged? Does your still sing when it ought to hush, and burn when it ought to run? Tired of guessing at your fire, groping at your heads, and throwing good mash after bad? Then hear this: the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course, presented by Fort Wilkins Academy! It's eight full weeks of history and craft, with more than thirty hours of detailed lessons, blueprints, and live question-and-answer sessions with master distillers, coppersmiths, and historians. You'll master the thermodynamics of vapor, the art of cuts, and the deep history of American spirits, from the cider brandy of the colonies to the copper of today. You'll learn why heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper is the heart of an honest still, and you can come lay your hand on it yourself in the showroom at Fort Wilkins, on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. All for only one hundred ninety-nine dollars! Enroll today at fortwilkins.com/course. That's fortwilkins.com/course! And for the course and the finest copper in the Granite State, visit moonshinestill.com/course. Seats are filling, friends, so reserve yours tonight at fortwilkins.com/course!
♪ Fiddle flourish, cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Segment the third, friends: copper and the craft. And the first lesson of the singing still is not a funny one, so I'll tell it plain. A still that hums because the worm is loose is a nuisance. A still that whistles is a warning. Silas, tell them.
Silas: A whistle or a hiss means vapor is getting out somewhere, at a joint or a seam or a cap. That vapor is alcohol, and alcohol vapor near an open fire is a lit fuse. And the worse thing is a still that goes quiet when it ought to be running, because then the worm or the line may be blocked. Mash foams up, or a wad of grain gets into the neck, and the pressure has nowhere to go. A still must never be sealed tight. A blocked one can burst the pot and throw boiling mash across the room.
Wilkins: I've seen it. A man in Gilmanton boiled his pot dry with the arm plugged. The cap went through his roof, and he went through his own front door without bothering to open it. When I came by he was lying in the yard with the skin of his face hanging in sheets like wet wallpaper, asking if he could still sell the batch. I pulled three of his teeth out of the doorframe. So, the rules: fire low, joints tight but never sealed shut, worm clear, nothing burning near a leak, and someone watching the still every minute it runs.
♦ Coals stirred in firebox, low crackle
Wilkins: Now, how to run it, the way it's been done at this fort. Start with the mash. Rye is my favorite and my curse. It's sticky as a deacon's handshake and it foams like a mad dog. Raw grain is starch, and yeast can't eat starch, so you need malted barley in the mash. The sprouted barley carries a ferment the chemists call diastase, which turns starch to sugar.
Silas: You cook the cracked rye and corn in the water, let it fall back to about a hundred fifty degrees, then stir in the ground malt and hold it there, warm, while the malt does its work. You'll taste it go sweet.
Wilkins: Then you let it cool to blood-warm, pitch your yeast, and let it work in a warm room with air moving. When it quits bubbling and goes sour and still, it's a wash. Strain the solids and charge your pot, but only three-quarters full. Leave headroom for foaming, so boiling mash never climbs into the neck and plugs the worm. That's the blocked-still rule again, Silas's sermon in a sentence.
Silas: Bring the heat up slow. A hard fire scorches the bottom and blows the foam up the neck.
Wilkins: When it starts to run, catch it in small jars, a pint or less each, and number them in order. The first that comes out is the foreshots, then the heads. That's the sharp, varnish-smelling spirit, the stuff that's got the methanol and the headaches in it. That goes on the ground or in the lamp, never down a throat. Then come the hearts, sweet and clean, smelling of the grain. Then, as the run goes on, the tails creep in. They smell like wet cardboard, or like a wet dog that's been in a cellar. Set those aside for the next run.
Silas: And let the jars sit open overnight under a cloth before you judge them. The nose is more honest in the morning.
Wilkins: The nose is the only honest thing in the county in the morning. Now, copper. Silas, where does the copper do its best work?
Silas: In the vapor, Doctor. Folks think it's the pot, but the real cleaning happens where the hot vapor touches bright copper on the way out, in the helmet and the neck and the arm, and in the worm itself. That's why a pot of iron with a copper neck does better than you'd think, and a copper pot with an iron neck does worse.
Wilkins: And the copper pays for it.
Silas: It does. Every run it gives a little of itself up. Over years the neck thins out where the vapor scrubs it. I've had old stills on my bench with necks thin enough to dent with your thumb, while the pot below was still thick as a boot sole. That's not wear from careless hands. That's the copper doing its job until it's used up.
Wilkins: Copper's like a good wife, friends. It takes the poison out of everything that passes through it, gets thinner every year, and gets no thanks. Silas, thank you. Stay by the stove while I see to the post.
♪ Brief fiddle bridge
Wilkins: Segment the fourth, friends: myths, slang, and the mail. We have a recording on the call-in cylinder, all the way from Wilkesboro, North Carolina. That's a fine town, half named after me, and I've never been sent a dime for it. Let's hear it.
♦ Cylinder needle drop, hiss and crackle
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?
♦ Needle lifts, crackle fades
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller, God bless you and your uncle, and God help his liver. Let's take it apart like a bad jaw, one root at a time. First, hickory ashes. Every grandmother in New Hampshire knows what ashes make. You pour water through a hopper of hardwood ash and what drips out is lye. Ashes and lye were one of this state's first cash crops. A hundred years ago settlers felled whole hillsides, burned them, boiled the ash down to potash, and sent it to market. Half of New Hampshire's first money came from burned forest.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Lye strips the hair off a hog, makes your soap, and takes the skin off your knuckles if you're careless. Toss it in a thump keg and you get a slick, foaming, stinking mess. But it won't strip one drop of sin out of a bad head. The poison in the heads boils off early with the vapor, ash or no ash. The only cure is the one I just gave you: throw away the foreshots and heads, every time.
Wilkins: Now, red oak shavings. Any cooper will laugh at your uncle, Rabbit. Red oak is so open in the grain that you can put one end of a stick in your mouth, blow, and bubble the other end in a glass of water. You can smoke a pipe through a red oak stave. A cooper who makes whiskey barrels of red oak is building a fancy sieve with hoops. That's why barrels are white oak. Its pores are plugged up tight by nature and it holds liquor like a miser holds a dollar.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: But here's where your uncle isn't all swamp. Oak shavings will stain the spirit tea-colored and put a little bark-bite of tannin in it, so a fellow can sell young liquor as if it had sat years in a barrel. That's a dye, not a doctor. It makes bad liquor look old, and that's the oldest trick on the turnpike. So, Rabbit: it's true that they did it, false that it worked, and worth exactly one pinch of snuff. Give your uncle my regards, tell him to take up dentistry, and you keep listening down there in Wilkes County. You're a good rabbit, and I promise you Barnaby is chained.
♦ Bear grunt, chain clink
Wilkins: Now for a myth of my own choosing. The blue flame. Every jug-peddler from here to Tennessee will pour a spoonful, put a match to it, and say, 'Burns blue, it's pure. Burns yellow, there's poison. Burns red, there's lead.' Hogwash. 'Proof' comes from the British, who poured spirit on gunpowder. If the powder still lit, the spirit was 'proved' strong enough. It proved strength and nothing else.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And the very poison you fear most, the wood spirit in the heads, burns with a pale blue flame so faint you can barely see it in daylight. Your blue-flame test will pass the worst liquor in the county with a bow and a handshake. A blue flame proves your liquor will burn, and so will a deputy's warrant, a widow's letters, and a fool's eyebrows. Judge your spirit by honest cuts and an honest nose, never by a parlor trick with a match.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, ringing fades
♪ Theme begins softly beneath
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! Run gentle and even with the Flame-Flow still, United States Patent 10,561,960, built of heavy copper and made for a low, steady fire. See it at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com! And remember: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against United States law, and this program is for history and education only.
Wilkins: That's our night, friends. If tonight taught you that a hum in the hills is a loose bracket and not a ghost, and that a whistle in the still-house is a warning and not a song, then come learn the rest properly. Enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course, eight weeks of fire, copper, and history from Fort Wilkins Academy, at fortwilkins.com/course. Thanks to Silas McAllister for the cold-water bath and the hard truths, to Rabbit Miller down in Wilkesboro, and to Professor Thistlewaite, wherever he is lecturing tonight with his hat off. The worm is wedged tight, the Suncook is quiet, and Barnaby's dreaming of that tin trumpet.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Banjo and fiddle theme resolves, wax cylinder crackle runs out