The Ledger Wilkins Never Showed the Tax Man
Dr. G. G. Wilkins opens his secret account book, which he keeps bound inside a hymnal cover, and goes through who owed him, who paid in coin and who paid in chickens. Along the way he covers how country daybooks and ledgers were kept and why the 1862 Revenue Act made a Yankee tradesman hide his books, and he tells how Barnaby wrecked a nosy assistant assessor. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister tells new stories from his family's foundry books, and in the call-in segment Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC, about hickory ash and red oak shavings in the thump keg before knocking down the blue-flame test.
▶ Listen in the Radio Moonshine app
Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby! Settle your four hundred pounds of flea-ridden mutton down! That's not a revenue man, you shaggy fool, that's the wind, and the wind has never owed me a nickel. Lie down, or I'll trade you to the Concord fur man for half a bushel of rutabagas.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags heavily through the dirt
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners and debtors, and I know some of you are all three. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. I'm your host, Dr. G. G. Wilkins: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, and the man your mother warned you about while she was buying from me out the back window.
♦ A heavy leather-bound book thumps onto a plank table, a puff of dust
Wilkins: Tonight I've done what I swore on my granddaddy's forceps I'd never do. I've dug up the book. Tonight's program is The Ledger Wilkins Never Showed the Tax Man. Who owed me, who paid in coin, who paid in chickens, and who's still running from me with teeth he hasn't paid for. Stay by your set. Some of you are in here.
♪ Theme fades under
Announcer: A quick word, friends! The Flame-Flow still, protected under U.S. Patent 10,561,960, is handcrafted from heavy-gauge pure copper and built for a lifetime of honest work. See it at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Short banjo sting
The Country Ledger And The Tax Man'S Appetite
♦ Wax crackle, a quill scratching paper, a kettle ticking on the stove
Wilkins: Young sprouts think a ledger is a Boston bank invention. No sir. A country tradesman kept two books. First the daybook, where every sale goes in the minute it happens. Tuesday morning: one bicuspid, Ezekiel Huckins, twenty-five cents. Tuesday evening: one jar of medicinal tincture, a gentleman who asked me not to write his name, so I wrote it bigger.
Wilkins: Then on a rainy day you post it all into the ledger proper, where every customer gets his own page. Left column, Dr., for debtor. Right column, Cr., for creditor. When the two match, the man's square. When they don't, and in Pittsfield they never do, you've got a man who crosses the street when he sees you coming.
Wilkins: Hardly any of it was paid in hard money. A country account ran on credit all year and got settled once a year, twice if the harvest was kind, and it got settled in kind: cordwood, butter, salt pork, a week's haying, homespun wool. Hens. Lord in heaven, the hens. And my father's books were still kept in shillings and pence long after Washington got his face on the dollar. A New England shilling was one-sixth of a dollar, sixteen cents and two-thirds, and I've yet to meet the man who could pay me two-thirds of a cent.
Wilkins: Then came the war, and Mr. Lincoln's Congress needed money the way a drowning man needs a rope. The Revenue Act of 1862 taxed a man's income: three percent over six hundred dollars, five percent over ten thousand, not that anybody on Route 28 has seen ten thousand dollars outside a fever dream. It licensed the trades, distillers and liquor dealers among them, and it stamped the paperwork. A receipt for over twenty dollars needed a two-cent stamp. I've never written a receipt over twenty dollars, on account of nobody in Pittsfield has ever paid a debt over twenty dollars.
Wilkins: And here's what curls my whiskers. Those income lists were public. The newspapers printed them. Imagine my ledger laid open on the store counter for every gossiping hen-wife in Merrimack County to read. I'd sooner show my bare backside at the Congregational social.
♦ Book slapped shut
Wilkins: So I hid it in plain sight, bound inside a Methodist hymnal, because no tax man in New Hampshire has opened a hymnal since his christening. And I kept it in code. A gallon is an upper molar, a quart is a lower, and the dregs are wisdom teeth, since nobody wants them. Trouble is, by my books I've pulled four hundred and twelve teeth from forty men, which means either my bookkeeping is in code or every man in Pittsfield has ten mouths.
Wilkins: Let me read you some pages. Widow Mercy Plunkett, hill road above the mill pond. Debtor: three molars, one with considerable shrieking. Creditor: six hens. One of those hens crowed every blessed morning at four, so either I was cheated or that was the most ambitious chicken in Merrimack County. I stewed it for insubordination, and it was tougher than a Concord lawyer's conscience.
Wilkins: Obadiah Crumb. Debtor: one bicuspid and two quarts, in my code, since 1859. Creditor: nothing. Not a penny, not a pullet, not a kind word. Four dollars and thirty-seven cents, seven years running. I've charged him interest in insults, and he's now the most thoroughly insulted man in the Suncook Valley. Obadiah, I know you're listening, because your wife told me you are, and your face looks like a boiled boot that lost an argument with a harrow.
Wilkins: Lemuel Tibbetts. Debtor: one jaw set crooked after he fell off his own roof on the Fourth of July. Creditor: his good wife paid in the finest-looking tarts in Pittsfield. I mean the pies, Lemuel, so put down the pitchfork.
Wilkins: And Hiram Scroggs of Barnstead, my rival in the tincture line, came to me with an abscess so foul that when I lanced it a fly dropped dead off the windowsill. Creditor: one pig. That pig was in a family way and gave me nine more, so I'm the only creditor in New Hampshire ever paid interest by a sow.
♪ Fiddle flourish, fades
The Assessor Who Came For The Book, With Guest Silas 'Hacksaw' Mcallister
♦ Wax crackle, Barnaby snoring outside, chain shifting
Wilkins: A hymnal won't keep a secret forever, not in a town where gossip outruns the Concord stage. In the autumn of 1863 a young assistant assessor named Phineas Gatch came up the turnpike on a swaybacked mare, with a satchel, a tin inkwell on a string round his neck, and a face like a parsnip that had just heard bad news. He'd heard I had a book.
Wilkins: I told him my income was mostly chickens and he could count them in the yard. He didn't care for that, and he went sniffing round to the log window. I failed to mention who lived under that window. I've never been much for small talk.
♦ Low bear growl rising, chain snapping taut
Wilkins: Barnaby came off his straw like a landslide in a fur coat. He took the satchel first and shook it like a terrier shakes a rat, and the government's papers went up like a snowstorm. Then he took the inkwell, and Mr. Gatch was still on the end of the string. Barnaby swung him round twice like a church bell before it broke, and Gatch landed in my manure pile with a sound like a wet sack of meal falling off a hay wagon.
Wilkins: Barnaby swallowed the inkwell whole. Then he took the man's hat, and with it a patch of scalp the size of a silver dollar. A scalp bleeds like a stuck shoat, friends, any barber will tell you, and that boy painted my woodpile red from one end to the other. As he went over the rail fence, Barnaby peeled off the seat of his trousers, long underwear and all, and Merrimack County got its first look at an honest government accounting. That's the only time in history the government paid me. Barnaby had a blue tongue for a week, like a bear that had been kissing a Boston schoolteacher, and he passed that inkwell some days later in a condition no longer fit for correspondence.
♦ Door creaks, heavy boots on plank floor, a leather apron rustling
Wilkins: Speaking of men who keep honest books, which I don't, here's the master coppersmith of the Fort Wilkins foundry, Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister. Sit down, Silas, and mind that chair. The last fellow who sat in it owed me money, and I loosened a leg.
Silas: Evening, Doctor. I'll stand, if it's all the same. Your chairs and your books have the same reputation.
Wilkins: Ha! A coppersmith gets paid in all manner of trash, same as a dentist. What's the strangest thing anyone tried to put on your family's books?
Silas: When I was a boy a man brought my father a polished kettle he swore was copper. He wanted it weighed and put down as credit on a new pot. My father didn't say a word. He drew a file once across the bottom and it showed yellow underneath. Brass. Then he turned it over, and the seams were patched with dull gray stuff, soft as cheese under his thumbnail.
Wilkins: Lead.
Silas: Lead. My father handed it back and said, I'll not write poison in my book, and I'll not put it in any man's vessel. The fellow said nobody'd know the difference. My father said the man who drinks from it will know, about the time his hands start shaking, and the undertaker will know after him.
Wilkins: Your father had a tongue like a cold chisel.
Silas: He did. I keep his rule. I keep a scrap ledger. Every pound of copper a man brings in for credit gets weighed, scratched with the file, and written down with where it came from. If I can't say where a sheet of metal's been, it can go into a weathervane. It doesn't go into a pot.
Wilkins: I hear you once turned down money.
Silas: In a manner of speaking. A fellow up from Gilmanton Iron Works paid for a swan-neck repair with a sack of those little pale cents.
Wilkins: White cents. Copper and nickel.
Silas: Eighty-eight parts copper, twelve parts nickel. He figured I'd be glad to melt them down by the pound. I told him the old large cents were near pure copper and these aren't, and I'll not put an alloy into a vessel when I don't know how it'll behave in the seam. So I took them as money, counted at face, and spent every one at the dry goods counter on a new leather apron.
Wilkins: So you're the only man in New Hampshire who ever refused money by spending it. Tell them about the bellows board.
Silas: My grandfather didn't hold with paper. He chalked every debt on the wide board of the foundry bellows, where he'd see it while he pumped. One spring a man who owed three years came round all smiles and offered to oil the bellows for free, by way of goodwill. Grandfather thanked him and went to dinner. When he came back the leather was oiled lovely, and so was the board. One oily rag had wiped out three years of debt, the man's own and four of his cousins'.
Wilkins: That's not a debtor, that's an artist. What did your grandfather do?
Silas: He couldn't prove a thing, so he charged the man for the oil.
Wilkins: Now tell them your chicken story. I've told them mine.
Silas: A Barnstead widow paid for a kettle patch with a laying hen, and the hen got loose in the foundry the same day. We never found her. Weeks later I took a coiled cooling worm down off the high shelf, up by the warm rafters, and warmed it some to check the joints. Doctor, the smell that came out of that coil would have stopped a funeral.
Wilkins: She'd laid in it.
Silas: Right down in the first turn, cooking quietly all that time. I flushed and scrubbed that worm three times, and my apprentice wouldn't come back in till supper. I wrote it in the book: one hen, paid in full, plus one egg, which I'm still trying to give back.
Wilkins: Ha! One more, Silas, and make it sentimental, because my listeners think I've got no heart.
Silas: My grandmother once sold a dented copper pot to a traveling tinker for the price of a new pair of spectacles. Years later she was taking supper in a Concord tavern and saw that same pot hanging in the kitchen, re-hammered smooth. She knew it by my grandfather's mark under the rim. Copper that's honestly made never really dies, Doctor. It just changes hands.
Wilkins: Silas, there's more honesty in your scrap ledger than in every courthouse in Merrimack County. And if Obadiah Crumb ever comes into your shop, you file-test him. I suspect he's mostly brass.
Silas: I'll keep the file handy, Doctor.
♪ Banjo bridge, upbeat
Ad Break
♪ Brassy patent-medicine-show fanfare, a snare roll
Announcer: Step right up, friends, and lend me your ears! Tired of flimsy apparatus that dents, leaks and quits on you? If you love true American craftsmanship, look no further than Moonshine Stills, proud home of the Flame-Flow still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960! The Flame-Flow Flagship is engineered from heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper and joined with precision CNC-machined brass unions, and it's built to maximize convective circulation and deliver unmatched purity. Make your essential oils fragrant, your herbal tinctures pure and your traditional distillation demonstrations the talk of the county! The Flame-Flow Flagship is yours for just eight hundred ninety-nine dollars, a lifetime of copper for less than a season of regrets! See it gleam at the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, or order your setup direct at moonshinestill.com, at https://moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still. Once more, so you don't forget it: moonshinestill.com, products, flame-flow copper still! The Flame-Flow, heavy-gauge copper, a true American original!
♪ Fanfare finishes with a cymbal crash
Copper And The Craft: The Still Keeps Its Own Ledger
♦ Wax crackle, a hammer tapping copper in the far foundry, fire crackling low
Wilkins: Silas has his scrap ledger and I have my hymnal, but the oldest ledger on this property is the still itself, and it keeps honest books whether you like it or not. The foreshots are the debt you never collect, the hearts are the cash in hand, and the tails are a cousin who promises he'll pay you Tuesday. This is history and alchemy tonight, mind you, not a lesson to try in your woodshed.
Wilkins: Why copper? A man of my trade will tell you three reasons. First, it's soft and willing. A good smith can raise a pot from a flat sheet with nothing but a stake, a hammer and patience, and patch it for three generations after. Second, it carries heat like gossip carries scandal, quick and even. Third, and this is the alchemy, copper keeps the stink out. The foul sulfur vapors that make bad liquor smell like a tannery privy meet the bright copper and stay behind on it, and the copper takes the dark crust for its trouble. So a careless man who lets his pot go green and black has thrown away the very virtue he paid for.
Wilkins: As for the cuts, you know the names: foreshots, heads, hearts and tails. The first part off and the heads after it carry the poison, the wood-spirit that blinds and kills, and in my day an honest man poured them out on the ground and never let a drop go down a throat, not a customer's, not a dentist's patient's, and not his own. A man who sells his foreshots is a man who'd pull the wrong tooth to save the time of finding the right one.
Wilkins: Fire is the other creditor that always collects. Alcohol vapor is heavier than air and creeps along a floor toward a lantern like Obadiah Crumb creeps toward a free supper, and half the still-houses in the Suncook Valley that burned in my lifetime burned that way. A wise man keeps his flame away from the vapor and his doors open to the wind.
Wilkins: And never trust metal you can't vouch for, like Silas said. Lead in a seam, a brass patch, salvaged junk of no known parentage: any one of them is a debt that gets paid in a churchyard.
♪ Low fiddle drone, fades
Myths, Slang, And The Call-In Line
♦ Wax crackle, an anvil set down with a ringing thud
Wilkins: Time for the call-in line. I've got a message come all the way from the Carolina hills. Roll it.
♦ Faint hiss and warble of an old recording
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?
♦ Recording clicks off
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Rabbit, I'd bet your uncle's whiskers that he's a fine man and a terrible chemist. Let's take the hickory ash first. Every New England grandmother knows what ash is good for. She leaches it in a barrel, the water runs off brown and slippery, and that's potash lye, which she boils with tallow and makes soap. Ash is a strong alkali, son. Throw it in a thump keg and you'll get a run that tastes like the laundry tub, and it won't touch the poison.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That's one coin for the hickory ash. Cletus, your uncle's hickory ashes will make you soap, and if a man wants to wash his mouth out with his own liquor, that's between him and his Maker.
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Oak gives liquor its color and its bite, true enough, but it takes long months in a barrel to do it. A fistful of shavings in a hot thump keg just stains the run a muddy tea color and puckers your mouth like a sour persimmon. Red oak shavings in a thump keg are like rouge on a dead deacon: the color improves and the condition does not.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And here's the true thing your uncle ought to know. The wood-spirit poison comes mostly out of pectin, the stuff that sets a jelly, and pectin lives in fruit skins and pulp. A man running apple pomace or peach peelings makes a good deal more of that poison than a man running grain, so the fruit man has the most reason of all to throw out his foreshots and heads. No ash, no shaving, no prayer will take it out for him.
Wilkins: While we're at it, let me bury another myth. Plenty of fellows dip a spoon in the jar, set it alight, and if it burns blue they call it pure and drink hearty. Friends, the wood-spirit burns with a pale blue flame too, so faint you can hardly see it by day. The blue flame tells you the stuff will burn. It tells you nothing about whether you will. The blue-flame test is a fine way to tell whether your liquor will burn, and no way at all to tell whether you will.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, ringing long
Wilkins: That's three coins stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., one for each myth in your uncle's head, Rabbit. A big Fort Wilkins hello to you and all the folks in Wilkesboro and Wilkes County. Write us again, and tell your uncle to keep his ashes for his soap kettle.
♪ Fiddle and banjo reel, brief
Sign-Off
Announcer: Before you go, friends! The Flame-Flow still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper, handcrafted to last. See it at moonshinestill.com or at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield!
♦ Wax crackle, fire burning low
Wilkins: Well, neighbors, you've seen the book now, and if your name was in it, you know where to find me. Bring coin if you have it and hens if you don't, and no more pigs in a family way. If you'd like to learn the old craft properly, its history, its copper and its honest cuts, sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course and learn it from a man who's made every mistake so you don't have to. Mind the law of your own day: everything on this program is for history and education, and distilling spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States. Barnaby, say goodnight to the folks.
♦ Barnaby grumbles sleepily
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme fades out under wax cylinder crackle