The Midnight Stagecoach to Concord
Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells the tall tale of running a keg of double-run apple spirit on the midnight stage from Pittsfield to Concord. Along the way he gets past three toll gates, with a temperance-preaching cousin of the Merrimack sheriff riding opposite him and a badly frightened mule named Obadiah tied to the back of the coach. Blue Ridge herbalist and slang historian Clara Higgins comes on with new mountain stories: a mourning coach that got waved through toll gates, a stage driver who signaled with his whip, a mule that would only cross a bridge if someone sang to it, and a toll keeper silenced with green persimmons. In the call-in segment, Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro asks whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg clean out bad heads, and Wilkins uses the question to take apart the old shake-test bead 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! Settle your carcass down, you flea-bitten sack of lard. The jar's dripping for the paying customers, not for you. Lie down and chew on that ham bone and dream about the deputy's leg you can't have.
♦ Bear grunts once more, chain rattles and goes slack
Wilkins: There. Four hundred pounds of jealousy, sulking under my window like a widow at a wedding.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, drunkards, deacons, and any revenue men with your ears pressed to the floorboards. Welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I'm Dr. George G. Wilkins: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, and the reason your grandmother won't say my name in church. Tonight we're climbing aboard the midnight stagecoach to Concord. Three toll gates, one keg, the sheriff's own cousin, and a mule with the nerves of a hen at a fox convention. Now before the coach rolls, my pitchman's been tugging at my sleeve. Go on, then.
♪ Brief brass flourish
Announcer: A quick word, friends! The Flame-Flow Still, protected by United States Patent 10,561,960, is handcrafted from pure copper and built to outlast your mortgage! Go to moonshinestill.com today. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Theme fades
♦ Wax crackle
Wilkins: Segment the first. A little history, so you'll know just what kind of coffin on wheels I put myself into. The coach that ran our line was a Concord coach, built right down the road in Concord by the Abbot-Downing Company. Lewis Downing and J. Stephens Abbot have been turning them out since 1827, and now they send them clear to California and beyond. Fine work, I'll give them that. Ash and oak, painted red as a harlot's garter, with landscapes on the doors pretty enough to hang in a bank. But here's the genius of it: no iron springs. The whole body hangs on thoroughbraces, long leather straps of ox-hide, layer on layer, so the coach rocks fore and aft like a cradle.
♦ Creaking leather and wooden coach groaning
Wilkins: The Concord coach rocks like a cradle, which is fitting, because every man aboard is crying for his mother by Chichester. It's a fine motion if you've got the stomach of a sailor. If you don't, you'll see your supper twice, once going down and once going out the window onto some farmer's stone wall.
Wilkins: Now, every coach has a boot. That's the leather-covered luggage hold, one up front under the driver's feet and one at the back. Mail sacks rode there, the express box, ladies' trunks, a parson's hatbox. And on certain moonless nights, ten gallons of something that would make the parson take off his hat and maybe his trousers.
Wilkins: Then there's the toll gates. Around the turn of the century this state chartered turnpike corporations the way a drunk charters friendships: freely and with no thought for tomorrow. Every one of them hung a pole across the road and posted a fellow in a little shack to take your pennies. Most of those corporations went bust. The towns took the roads over and made them free. But I'll tell you a secret about New Hampshire: a toll keeper is a highwayman who's given up the horse and taken up a chair, and some of them never heard the corporation died. They kept the gate, the chair, and the pennies. Some were toll bridges with a town charter. Some were just a pole, a lantern, and a mean old man with a musket full of nails and no paperwork whatever.
Wilkins: Which is why the Yankee farmer invented the shunpike: a cart track cut through some poor fellow's woodlot to get around the gate. A shunpike is the only road in New Hampshire built entirely out of thrift and spite, and it's the best-kept road in the state. But you can't shunpike a stagecoach. It's too big, too heavy, better than a ton of wood and iron, and it runs on a schedule printed in the Concord paper. A coach goes where the coach goes, gates and all.
Wilkins: Why the stage and not the railroad, you ask? Because the Concord Railroad got to the capital back in '42, but nobody's laid an inch of rail up the Suncook Valley. There's talk, always talk, of a Suncook Valley line. Until I see a locomotive steaming through Pittsfield, the stage is how a valley man gets to Concord, and how a valley man's merchandise gets there too. Concord is where the thirsty legislators are, the thirsty lawyers, and the thirsty hotel keepers who don't like paying the Washington gaugers their due. And remember, friends: United States law forbids distilling spirits for drinking without a federal permit. Everything on this program is history and education, nothing more. I'm telling you what a scoundrel did, not handing you his map.
♪ Fiddle sting
♦ Wax crackle, horse hooves on frozen road
Wilkins: Segment the second. Legends, outlaws and runners, and I'll start with the outlaw I know best, since I shave him every morning. Autumn, a black October night. I had ten gallons of double-run apple spirit in a little oak keg. I'd cut that spirit honest: heads in the slop bucket, hearts in the keg, tails set by for the next run. It was promised to a hotel keeper on Main Street in Concord who'll go unnamed, because he still owes me four dollars and his teeth are poor.
Wilkins: The midnight stage left from the tavern yard, four horses, driver up top with his whip and his plug of tobacco. I gave him two dollars and a jar of something extra, and he loaded the keg in the rear boot, tucked between a sack of Pittsfield mail and a trunk of ladies' corsets bound for a Concord dressmaker. Wrapped it in a horse blanket so it wouldn't slosh. I climbed inside, sat down, and found myself knee to knee with Mister Orrin Gage.
♦ Coach door slams, leather creaks
Wilkins: Now Orrin Gage was the Merrimack County sheriff's own cousin, and a temperance man. A Cold Water Army man, a pledge-signer, a hymn-howler. He'd preached temperance so long his liver had turned Quaker and stopped speaking up in meeting. He looked at me the way a heron looks at a frog and said, 'Doctor Wilkins. Bound for Concord at this hour? On what business?' And I said, 'Dental business, Orrin. There's a molar in Concord that's been asking for me by name.'
Wilkins: And the mule. I near forgot the mule, which is how all my troubles start. Behind the coach on a lead rope trotted Obadiah, a gray mule I'd sold to a Concord teamster. He wore two saddlebags that were supposed to hold horseshoes and in fact held two more half-gallon jugs of my Pittsfield finest. Obadiah was a nervous creature. Owls frightened him. Lanterns frightened him. His own shadow, he regarded as a revenue man in disguise. Obadiah had a constitution like a Concord legislature: one loud noise and everything he was holding came out at once.
♦ Mule braying anxiously behind clattering wheels
Wilkins: Gate number one, the Chichester gate. The keeper was a little weasel named Haskell with a lantern and a pole. Wanted his toll. I leaned out and paid him with a large cent I'd stamped on my own anvil, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., bright as a new sin. He held it to the lantern and bit it. That's the only time a man has bitten one of my coins without me charging him to pull the tooth after. Then he sniffed. 'What's that smell, Doctor?' And quick as you please I told him, 'Clove oil, Haskell. For the toothache. I've a whole case of it.' He pulled up his pole. One gate down.
Wilkins: Now, between the first gate and the second, the road did what the roads do around here in October: it rutted, it heaved, it threw us around like dice in a cup. And somewhere in all that bouncing, the bung of the keg came loose. Ten gallons of apple spirit got to sloshing in the boot, and the smell came up through the floorboards like the Holy Ghost at a Methodist camp meeting. Orrin Gage sat up straight. He sniffed. His eyes narrowed. 'Doctor,' says he, 'that is not clove oil.'
Wilkins: I'll tell you what a temperance man is, neighbors. A temperance man is a drunkard who hasn't been introduced yet. I took out my flask and said, 'Orrin, you're right. It's a medicinal rinse for the gums. Take a nip, hold it in your mouth, and spit it out the window, and you'll never lose a tooth.' He looked at that flask like it was a snake handed over by the Devil himself. Then the coach hit a rut so deep the whole thing pitched, and he grabbed the flask to keep from falling, and a little went in, and he didn't spit it out.
♦ Gulping, then a loud cough
Wilkins: The sheriff's cousin had sworn he'd never let spirits pass his lips, and he kept his word, because by the second gate it was going straight down his chin.
Wilkins: Gate number two, out on the Loudon road. There was a big ox of a keeper there, and he'd hung his lantern on a pole right at the height of a mule's nose. Obadiah came around the coach and saw that lantern swinging in the dark like a hanged man's eye, and he lost his mind. He reared up and kicked, and the gatekeeper ran right up into it to grab the rope. Then Obadiah's bowels let go of everything he'd eaten since Sunday, steaming and sour, all over that keeper from the collar down. I heard it hit him, neighbors, like a bucket of wet porridge thrown at a barn door, and the sound he made was half scream and half prayer. That toll keeper went home wearing more mule than coat, and his wife said it was the most he'd ever brought back from a shift. He was so busy wiping his eyes that he waved us through to be rid of us. Two gates down, and the toll still in my pocket.
Wilkins: By the last gate, the toll bridge over the Merrimack into Concord, Orrin Gage was singing 'Oh! Susanna' out the window and calling the driver his brother in Christ. The bridge keeper held up his lantern and said, 'What's in the boot?' And before I could open my mouth, the sheriff's own cousin leaned out and hollered, 'I'll vouch for the doctor! I'm Sheriff Gage's cousin, and there's nothing in that boot but the Lord's own clove oil!' Then he hiccuped, and fell back in his seat, and went to sleep with his head on my shoulder like a schoolgirl on a sleigh ride. The keeper took one look at the sheriff's cousin, drunk as a lord, and didn't want any part of it. Up went the pole. Three gates down, delivered on Main Street by two in the morning.
♦ Wilkins chuckling, wax crackle
Wilkins: Now I'll tell you, there's a reason I don't run the keg with Barnaby along. A few years back a collector came out to Fort Wilkins, a fellow from one of those dead turnpike companies, waving a paper that said I owed eleven years of back tolls on a road I'd never driven. He stepped over Barnaby's chain to knock at my door. Barnaby took that collector by the seat of his breeches and kept the seat. I heard the wool tear like a sail in a gale, and then a wet sort of pop, and then the fellow came round the corner of the house at a dead run with his bare backside hanging out in the cold air, bleeding like a stuck shoat. I stitched up the rest of him in my tooth chair with horsehair thread, eleven stitches, and the son of a gun haggled me down on the eleventh. Barnaby kept that seat of the breeches in his den all winter like a trophy.
♦ Barnaby grunts through the window
Wilkins: He remembers. Now, friends, I promised you a guest, and she's come a long way from the Blue Ridge of Virginia to sit in my smoky cabin. A lady herbalist and a scholar of every rough word a mountain man ever said over a jug. Miss Clara Higgins, welcome to Fort Wilkins.
Clara: Well, thank you kindly, Doctor. I'll say this: your bear growled at me on the way in, and I growled right back, and now we have an understanding.
Wilkins: Then you've done better than every deputy in Merrimack County. Clara, you've got a mouth on you like a fresh-honed scalpel, and I mean that as the highest compliment a dentist can pay. Now, tell me, did your Virginia folk run spirit by stage as well?
Clara: Oh, Lord, did they. Down the Valley Turnpike, through the Shenandoah, there was a stage driver my people called Hoot Cragg. They called him Hoot because he never stopped, Doctor: never stopped talking, never stopped drinking, never stopped hooting at his horses like an owl in heat. Hoot found out that if you tie black crape on a coach, a toll keeper won't stop it. It's a mourning coach, you see. Nobody wants to be the man who stopped a grieving widow and made her pay toll on her husband's corpse.
Wilkins: Ha! That's low and that's beautiful.
Clara: Hoot kept that crape tied on for near a year. Folks along the road started to wonder how one widow could lose so many husbands. In the boot, under the widow's trunks, there were three kegs of apple brandy. And the widow? She was Hoot's sister-in-law, and she wept on command, Doctor. She could squeeze out tears like you'd wring a dishrag. One keeper got curious and lifted a trunk lid, and she wailed so loud his own hound ran off into the woods and didn't come back till Tuesday.
Wilkins: I'd pay to have that woman at my trials. Now, these runners, did they talk among themselves on the road?
Clara: They talked with the whip. Hoot had a code. Two cracks meant the gate keeper ahead was friendly and had been paid off. Three cracks meant revenue men were waiting at the next gate, so every still in the hollow went dark. Then one summer a young driver took the route, a boy who didn't know a thing about it, and he just loved to crack that whip. Crack, crack, crack, for the fun of it, all the way up the valley. Three cracks every quarter mile. Doctor, he emptied a whole hollow. Grown men left their mash cooking and ran into the woods with their pants half-buttoned. One fellow hid in a hog wallow for two days. The boy never knew what he'd done. He just wondered why the road was so quiet that week.
Wilkins: There's a lesson in that for the Merrimack sheriff. Give a fool a whip and he'll do your work for you. Now, I had a nervous mule on my own run. Was there ever a mule in your family's story?
Clara: Was there ever. My granddaddy had a mule named Persimmon, ornery and scared both at once, and he would not cross a covered bridge. Hated the dark inside. There was a bridge over the North River, and Granddaddy needed to get two kegs over it with a revenue man somewhere behind him. Persimmon planted his feet. Granddaddy beat him, cussed him, called him every name there is, and some I've had to study. And then my granny, who was riding along, just started singing 'Shall We Gather at the River.'
Wilkins: That's a new hymn. Robert Lowry put it out just last year.
Clara: Brand new, and Granny loved it. Soon as she sang, that mule's ears pricked up, and he went across that bridge at a dead run with the kegs bouncing on his back. After that, they couldn't get him over a bridge without the whole family singing it, all three verses. Granddaddy used to say Persimmon had better taste in hymns than the choir.
Wilkins: Persimmon the mule had better taste in hymns than half the choir in Pittsfield and a better voice than all of them. Now, you study the old words, Clara. What did the boys in blue and gray call their whiskey? I know they drank a river of it.
Clara: Oh, they had names for it, Doctor. Tanglefoot, because it tangled your feet. Oh-be-joyful, which needs no explanation. And forty-rod, which out West they said would kill a man at forty rods, and some of what I've tasted would do it at fifty. Those words got around in the army, from one camp to another, and when the boys came home they brought the words with them.
Wilkins: And one more, then I'll let you go. Toll keepers. Did your folk ever bribe one?
Clara: My great-uncle Asa did, but not with money. There was a toll keeper on the Staunton pike, nosiest man God ever let draw breath. Asa wanted to get some persimmon brandy past him. So he brought him a basket of persimmons, real nice-looking, but green as a gourd. Now, Doctor, a green persimmon will pucker your mouth like you've eaten the inside of a tannery. That keeper bit one, and his whole face folded up like a purse. He couldn't ask a single question. Just waved them on with his eyes watering, so he could go find a dipper of water.
Wilkins: Ha! A man after my own heart. Clara Higgins, thank you, and don't let Barnaby walk you to your wagon.
Clara: I'll sing him a hymn, Doctor. It works on mules.
♪ Banjo bridge, upbeat
♦ Wax crackle
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♦ Barnaby grunts on cue
♪ Brass flourish, fade
♦ Wax crackle, crackle of a wood fire under copper
Wilkins: Segment the third. Copper and the craft. I'm a blacksmith before I'm a dentist, so let me talk metal first. Copper is a strange and lovely mistress. When you hammer it into shape on the stake, it gets harder with every blow. It stiffens up and gets springy, and if you keep beating it, it'll crack on you like a cheap pocket mirror. So you anneal it. Heat it up good, then plunge it in the water trough, hiss and steam, and it comes out soft as a bishop's handshake. That's the opposite of steel, mind you. Quench steel and it goes hard. Quench copper and it goes soft. Many a country smith ruined a pot because he treated copper like iron.
♦ Hammer on copper sheet, then hissing quench
Wilkins: Now to the work itself, and I'll say it again so the deputy in my woodpile can write it down right: federal law forbids making spirits to drink without a permit. This is history and education, and nothing else. Here's how the old method goes. First, the ferment. Cider, or a grain mash, with yeast, kept warm and well fed. And here's a secret: a starved yeast, worked too hot in a thin mash, belches more brimstone, that rotten-egg stink. Feed your yeast well and the copper has less sulfur to scrub out later. The copper's bright skin will grab the brimstone out of the vapor and hold on to it, but keep that work light by keeping the ferment healthy, and scrub your pot when you're done.
Wilkins: Second, you charge the pot, and never more than two-thirds to three-quarters full. Overfill it, or build too hot a fire, and the wash foams up the neck and into the arm, and it pukes. That's what we call it, puking, and it fouls the whole run, the way a drunk fouls a ballroom. And mind this above all: never seal a still tight. The vapor has to have its road out through the worm. If that worm gets choked or blocked, the pressure builds, and I've seen what a burst pot does. It'll scald the hide off a man's face like peeling a boiled potato. Keep it open, keep the fire low and steady, and keep any flame well away from where the spirit comes out, because that vapor will catch fire faster than gossip.
Wilkins: Third, the first pass is the stripping run. You run it fast, and what you get is low wines, weak and cloudy, all the alcohol and its relations in one sorry bunch. Fourth, the spirit run. Run it slow and catch it in small jars, a dozen, two dozen, never one big crock, so you can keep your fractions apart. And here's why. Methanol boils at about a hundred and forty-eight degrees, ethanol at about a hundred and seventy-three, water at two hundred twelve. So the foreshots come first, sharp and nasty and loaded with methanol. Throw them out. Not in the dog's dish, not in the patient's mouth, not in your mother-in-law's tea. Out. Then come the heads, smelling like varnish and harsh enough to curl your eyelashes, and they go into the slop bucket too. Then the hearts, sweet and clean. That's your keeper. Then the tails, oily and wet-dog smelling. Set them aside.
Wilkins: Now, about applejack. Some fool will tell you you don't need a still at all. Just set your hard cider out in a January freeze and pull off the ice, and what's left is strong. And it is strong. But freezing makes no cuts. Every drop of methanol and fusel oil stays right in the barrel with the good spirit. The old-timers called the result apple palsy: shaking hands, a skull that pounds like my anvil, and a disposition fit for the Devil himself. Freeze your cider into applejack and you keep every devil in the barrel, and you've only frozen the ones that were trying to leave. Cut honest with fire and copper, or don't do it at all.
♪ Fiddle sting
♦ Wax crackle, then the whir of a cylinder phonograph
Wilkins: Segment the fourth. Myths, slang, and the mailbag. We've got a voice on the speaking cylinder, all the way from Wilkesboro in North Carolina. Let's hear him.
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?
♦ Cylinder clicks off
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro! Bless you and your uncle both, Rabbit. Let me get my punch on the anvil, and we'll strike a coin for every truth.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Truth the first, about hickory ash. Wood ash is potash. New Hampshire farmers once burned whole forests to boil down potash and pearlash, and they sold it to the soap-makers and the glass-works and the bakers for leavening. It's an alkali. It's lye's cousin. Throw it into a thump keg and you may soften a little sour acid. That much your uncle has honest. But you'll also make your charge soapy and foamy, and a foamy charge is a puking charge. And it does nothing to the methanol, not a hair. Methanol is gone in the foreshots, or it's in your jar. That's all there is.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Truth the second, about red oak. Red oak's too porous to make a tight barrel. Its pores are wide open, and a red oak barrel will weep spirit like a widow at a wake. That's why the coopers use white oak. Drop red oak shavings into spirit and you'll get tannin, color, and a woody bite, the way a barrel gives spirit its color. That's aging, Rabbit, not cleaning. Rabbit, red oak in a thump keg is like a Boston lawyer at a barn raising: it brings color, it brings bitterness, and it leaks everywhere it goes.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And here's a myth I'll put in the ground with that one: the shake test. You'll see a man take a bottle, shake it, and hold it to the light. If the beads, the bubbles, come up big and hang there a while, he says it's good and strong. Now, the bead does tell you something about strength. Around a hundred proof, that's half alcohol by our American measure, the beads come big and slow. But it tells you nothing about whether the cut was honest. And there are cheats who add bead oil, soap and worse, just to fake a pretty bead on watered-down rotgut. A man who judges his spirit by the bead is a man who judges his bride by her bonnet. Bead oil and a bad cut have married more fools in Merrimack County than the Congregational parson.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: So, Rabbit, your uncle wasn't lying so much as he was hopeful. Thank him for me. And Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, you've earned a counterstamped Wilkins cent, freshly struck and still warm from the anvil. Don't bite it. I charge for that.
♪ Fiddle and banjo swell
Announcer: Before we bid goodnight, a quick word! The Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, pure electrolytic copper, handcrafted to last! Visit moonshinestill.com or the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28!
♪ Theme softens
Wilkins: That's the last of the jar, neighbors. My thanks to Miss Clara Higgins, and to her granny, and to that hymn-loving mule. If you want to learn the old craft the right way, the cuts and the copper and the history, sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you everything a man needs to know, and none of the things that'll land you in the Merrimack jail or the Pittsfield graveyard. As for Orrin Gage, I hear he woke up in a Concord hotel with his pledge card in one boot and my flask in the other, and he's been taking temperance a lot less seriously since. 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