The Second Arrest of Dr. Wilkins: Why the Merrimack Magistrate Settled for $20
Dr. Wilkins recounts his second arrest and the sheriff who drank the evidence, then explains how the Merrimack magistrate settled on a $20 fine. Guest Clara Higgins, a Blue Ridge mountain herbalist and slang historian, shares docket discoveries and family courtroom lore, including a cordial-paid fine, 'medicinal tooth tincture' slang, and her great-aunt's sassafras tonic gourds. The episode also covers still craft, safety, and a listener question about thump kegs.
▶ 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 down, you great flea-bitten sack of ham-bone appetite. I am on the air, and the Merrimack County sheriff is not even in the building tonight, so you have no one to maul but me, and I taste of gristle and liniment.
♦ One last grunt, chain settling
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, good evening, ye gentlemen of the turnpike and ye ladies who pretend not to listen! Welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from Fort Wilkins, the log fortress on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host, Doctor Wilkins, extractor of molars, shaper of copper, and the only man in this county who has been arrested twice and fined less than a horse trade.
Wilkins: And before we go a step further, a word from the man in the checkered waistcoat.
Announcer: Friends, a quick word! If you love honest copper, look to the Flame-Flow still, protected by United States Patent 10,561,960, hand built from heavy-gauge pure copper. Visit moonshinestill.com, that is moonshinestill.com, or call at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. Back to the Doctor!
Wilkins: Thank you, sir. Now, tonight's tale is a true one, mostly, and I have embellished only where the truth was too dull to hold a candle. We are speaking tonight of my second arrest, and why the magistrate of Merrimack County let me walk out of his courtroom twenty dollars lighter and a good deal more insufferable.
Wilkins: Segment one, the history of the thing. A word on the law as it stood, because a man cannot appreciate a crime until he has read the statute. The Revenue Act of 1862, signed by Mr. Lincoln, created the Bureau of Internal Revenue and laid the first federal excise upon distilled spirits to pay for the war against the Southern rebellion. The rate started modest, then rose and rose as the war dragged on, until by 1864 a gallon carried two dollars of tax, which is more than most farmers in this valley saw in hard money in a season. And mind you, hard money was scarce. People hoarded silver and copper like squirrels, which is why I was stamping my name on the few honest coins that passed through my shop, so a man would know whose copper he was holding.
♦ Steel punch clangs on a copper coin
Wilkins: That is the sound of G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., going into a large cent. Remember it. It will matter later.
Wilkins: Now, the revenue assessors came through Merrimack County with ledgers under their arms and pinched faces, counting stills the way a hen counts chicks, and finding fewer each time they counted, because stills, like Methodist husbands, are very good at disappearing when company calls. My first arrest I will save for another night. I will only say it taught me that a man in handcuffs should keep his mouth shut. The second arrest taught me the opposite, that a man in front of a magistrate should talk until the magistrate forgets what the charge was.
Wilkins: Here is how it went. It was a muggy August morning, the kind that makes a log cabin smell like a wet dog and a dead mouse in conference. I had a double run going, the second pass coming off clean and pretty, dripping into the jar like a very slow, very expensive confession. And up the turnpike came the sheriff, a lean fellow with a mustache like a dead caterpillar, and two deputies who had been to my place before and had the good sense to look worried about it.
♦ Distant chain clinking and heavy bear grunt
Wilkins: Barnaby, hush. I know. I know you remember them. One of those deputies, the tall one, still limps when it rains, and I will not say why, except that Barnaby is a creature of deep affections and very sharp ideas about trouser legs.
Wilkins: Now, you would think a man with a four-hundred-pound bear chained at the window would be spared a second arrest. And you would be wrong, because the sheriff had planned for the bear. He came up the back way through the sugar maples, quiet as a mortgage, and he got the drop on me while Barnaby was snoring on the wrong side of the cabin, which is the one flaw in the whole defensive system, that a bear cannot be everywhere at once and sleeps like a drunk deacon.
Wilkins: Did I run? I did not. A man who runs from a sheriff admits the sheriff is right. I turned, I wiped my hands on my apron, and I did the one thing a gentleman does when company arrives uninvited. I took down my best tin cup, poured it full of double-run, clear as a Quaker's conscience, and I handed it to the sheriff of Merrimack County and said, 'Sir, you have walked a long way in the heat. You will take a drink or you will insult my hospitality, and I will not have both.'
Wilkins: Now, here is the thing about a lawman. He is also a man. He has a throat, and the throat is a very bad witness for the prosecution. That sheriff looked at the cup. He looked at his deputies. He looked at the cup again. And I swear on a stack of dentist's forceps he drank it like a man defusing a bomb, one slow careful swallow, with his eyes wide open the entire time, as though the spirit might go off.
Wilkins: And then his face did a thing I have seen only on men who have pulled a tooth that had a root like a fence post. A kind of dawning, surprised peace. He said, 'Doctor, that is the finest drop I have ever put in my mouth,' and one of his deputies said, 'Sheriff, we are here to arrest him,' and the sheriff said, 'I am aware of the order of operations, Elias, thank you.'
Wilkins: He arrested me anyway. He is a man of principle, if a flexible one. But I will tell you what he did on the road down to town. He kept asking me questions about the still, in a lowered voice, as though the deputies might not notice a sheriff taking notes for his own improvement.
Wilkins: Which brings me to the courtroom, and here I will ask you to picture it. A Merrimack County courtroom in August smells of wet wool, old pipe tobacco, and perjury, and I contributed the only honest odor in the building, which was a half-pint of evidence in my coat pocket that nobody searched. The magistrate was a heavy, solemn fellow with a gavel he held like a man who had been disappointed by juries and wished to take it out on furniture.
Wilkins: The charge was reading out. Unlicensed distillation. Sale of spirits without paying the federal excise. And I stood, and I said, 'Your Honor, with the greatest respect to this court and to the late Mr. Lincoln, I would like to argue the natural alchemical rights of a free Yankee.'
Wilkins: There was a silence. Somebody coughed. A woman in the gallery crossed herself, and I do not think she was even Catholic.
Wilkins: I said, 'Your Honor, for four thousand years men have been separating the spirit from the grain. The Egyptians did it. The Greeks did it. The Arabs gave us the very word, alembic, al-ambiq, the still head, and the old philosophers held that the spirit lives in every fermented thing and is the right of every man who has the wit to draw it forth. Now I ask this court. When the Almighty put the sugar in the apple, and the yeast in the air, and the fire in the stove, did He write in the margin that a Washington clerk must be paid two dollars for the privilege of the result?'
Wilkins: And I turned to the sheriff, who was sitting very still, and I said, 'Sheriff, you tasted the work. You are a man of honor. Did you detect in it any poison, any adulteration, any fraud upon the public?'
Wilkins: And the sheriff, who had been caught in a trap of his own politeness, said, in a very small voice, 'It was a fine product, Your Honor.'
Wilkins: The courtroom rippled. The magistrate banged the gavel. He called for order. He did not call for silence, mark you, he called for order, which means he was already thinking. And he looked at me over his spectacles for a long, long time, and I looked back at him like a man who has pulled a great many teeth and is not afraid of one more jaw.
♦ Wooden gavel strike, faint courtroom murmur
Wilkins: He said, 'Doctor Wilkins, this court finds that you have been operating an illegal still.' And I nodded. And he said, 'This court further finds that the federal government has a legitimate interest in the excise, and that the war has been expensive, and that you have been, shall we say, unhelpful to the Union treasury.' And I nodded again. And then he said, 'This court also finds that it is August, that the jail in Concord is full of men who did worse than make a good drink, and that if I sentence you to a month, I will have to feed you, and I am told you eat like a Baptist at a funeral.'
Wilkins: A fine of twenty dollars! Twenty dollars, for a man whose offense, properly tallied by a thorough assessor, ran into hundreds in back excise. The magistrate fined me twenty dollars and told me never to do it again, which is the same thing my mother told me about my first tooth-pulling, and I have been disappointing the bench ever since.
Wilkins: Now, why twenty? I have turned it over many a night. Some say the sheriff whispered to him. Some say the magistrate had a jar of his own at home. I say it was because nobody in a position of power wanted to be the man who put Doctor Wilkins in the Concord jail and then had to explain to every farmer in the Suncook Valley why they could no longer get a tooth pulled by a man with steady hands and a bad attitude. I am, you see, locally indispensable. A dentist, a blacksmith, a patriot, and a nuisance, which is the full set of qualifications for permanent civic immunity.
♪ Brief banjo sting, jaunty
Wilkins: And now, friends, we have a visitor. Out of the Blue Ridge of Virginia, out of some far-off year I am told is crowded with horseless carriages and women who read court dockets for pleasure, I give you Miss Clara Higgins, mountain herbalist and keeper of every slang name ever hung on a jar of shine. Welcome, Miss Clara.
Clara: Well, thank you kindly, Doctor. It's something to be sitting in a log fort with a bear grunting outside the window. My granny always said my curiosity would carry me somewhere peculiar, and she was right as rain.
Wilkins: Peculiar is my specialty. Now, I am told you know every name the mountains ever gave to spirits.
Clara: Near about. White lightning, mountain dew, rotgut, and my favorite, panther's breath, because it'll scream at you all the way down. My people were wild-foragers in Virginia, and I study the old applejack and persimmon brandies besides. But it was your trouble with the law that fetched me north, Doc. I went digging through the Merrimack County docket for your second arrest, and I found something.
Wilkins: Found what? Speak, woman, I have a bear who grows impatient.
Clara: Your twenty-dollar fine. Docket says it was paid in two ten-dollar notes, plus one jar of blackberry cordial for the clerk's cough.
Wilkins: A jar of cordial! Madam, I distinctly recall paying in coin, every piece stamped with my name, and I will not hear my memory slandered by a clerk with a cough.
Clara: Well, maybe your memory's been counterstamped, Doc. Either way, that cough got cured on your dime. And here's the better part. That same clerk wrote down the seized goods as medicinal tooth tincture.
Wilkins: Tooth tincture! Why, that is my own trade flattered and slandered in a single breath. I have pulled ten thousand molars and never sold a tincture that did not burn.
Clara: Folks took to it, too. Medicinal tooth tincture turned into local slang for anything poured behind a closed door. A man'd say he was going to see about his tooth, and his wife knew better than to ask which one.
Wilkins: A sound civic invention! A clerk of the court making poetry out of perjury. And I suppose someone in your family was in the trade, to know such secrets so well.
Clara: My great-aunt, Doc. She used to carry samples to court in hollowed gourds, every one labeled sassafras tonic. She'd walk right up and hand one to the jury foreman, tell him it'd settle his stomach.
Wilkins: And did it?
Clara: Settled it so fine he was nodding not guilty before the prosecutor sat down. A real mountain run smells like autumn rain on ripe sweetcorn, and that foreman knew it the second he pulled the stopper.
Wilkins: A gourd of sassafras and twelve thirsty men in a box. That beats any Latin phrase I ever made up in a hallway. Now, Miss Clara, what is the lesson of it all?
Clara: Lesson is, the law and the jar have always walked hand in hand. Folks just dress it up in nicer names so everybody keeps their dignity.
Wilkins: Spoken like a magistrate with a gourd in her lap. Hold that thought, friend, for we have a word from our sponsor, and it is a good word, and it is a long one.
♪ Sprightly banjo, patent-medicine pitch tune
Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, gather round and hearken, for I bring tidings of the finest piece of copper craftsmanship ever to leave a forge! Are you a gentleman of science? A student of the herbal tincture? A keeper of the essential oils? A demonstrator of the ancient art of distillation, for the instruction of your children and the amazement of your neighbors? Then you need, you must have, you cannot rest without the Flame-Flow still, flagship of Moonshine Stills, and protected under United States Patent 10,561,960!
Announcer: Mark me well! The Flame-Flow is engineered from heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper, not tin, not tinsel, not some tinker's tin pail pounded to a shine! Its brass unions are cut by precision CNC machining, true and tight, no leaks, no weeping, no apologies! Its very design maximizes convective circulation, so the vapor travels as nature and Newton intended, and delivers unmatched purity for your essential oils, your herbal tinctures, and your traditional distillation demonstrations!
Announcer: Imagine it, friends! A vessel that gleams on your shelf like the dome of a state capitol, and performs like a Swiss watchmaker's dream! A still that will outlive you, outlive your sons, and be fought over by your grandchildren in a very dignified manner! And all for the price of eight hundred and ninety-nine dollars, which is less than a good horse and a great deal less trouble!
Announcer: Where do you find it? Go to moonshinestill.com, that is moonshinestill.com, and order direct! Or, if you are a man who prefers to kick the tires, so to speak, and shake the hand of the gentleman who built the thing, call at the Fort Wilkins showroom on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire! The bear is chained, the copper is gleaming, and the Doctor will even pull a tooth if you are feeling sentimental!
Announcer: Once more, friends, because it bears repeating: moonshinestill.com, the home of the Flame-Flow still, handcrafted pure copper, protected by United States Patent 10,561,960! Do not wait! Do not dither! Order today, and tell them the Doctor sent you, and the bear approves!
♪ Banjo flourish, then fade
Wilkins: Thank you, sir. Now, friends, let us step to the anvil, and talk about copper and the craft, because I have been making speeches about a drink for twenty minutes without telling you how a still ought to be run, and a man who talks only of the crime and never the craft is just a gossip.
Wilkins: A still is not complicated, and that is why it is beautiful. You have a pot. You have a head. You have an arm, and a worm or a condenser. Fire goes under the pot. Vapor goes up. The vapor cools and falls as liquid. That is the whole philosophy of the thing. Everything else is judgment.
Wilkins: The first step is the mash, and a good mash is a patient mash. You take your grain, corn or rye or a little barley, and you cook it with water until the starch gives up its sweetness. You let it cool, you add your yeast, and you leave it. A few days, maybe a week, and the yeast eats the sugar and breathes out carbon dioxide and alcohol, and you get a sour, bubbling, low-strength liquid called a wash, only a few percent alcohol, no stronger than a weak cider. That is not whiskey. That is the raw material of whiskey. And it stinks like a wet barn, and every honest distiller loves that smell, and every wife hates it.
Wilkins: Now the still itself. Why copper? Because copper does a quiet miracle. The sulfur compounds that come off a fermenting wash make a spirit taste like boiled eggs and rotten cabbage. Copper reacts with them and pulls them out of the vapor. The old distillers did not understand the chemistry, but they understood the result. A copper still makes a sweeter spirit than an iron pot, and a tin pot will taste of nothing but tin. Copper also takes heat beautifully and works up under a hammer like warm butter, which is why a blacksmith like me prefers it to any other metal, excepting gold, which I have not been trusted with.
Wilkins: And now I must say this plainly, and I want every listener to hear it. Never, never, never use lead. No lead solder on the joints. No salvaged automobile radiators, which will be a thing someday, I am told, and which are full of lead and worse. No old pipe of unknown origin. Lead is a poison. It does not announce itself. It builds up in the blood and the bones and the brain, and it makes a man stupid, then sick, then dead. A still must be clean copper, joined with clean silver solder or proper fitted unions, and nothing else. I would rather you made no spirit at all than made it in a pot that kills.
Wilkins: Now, the cuts. This is the most important thing in the craft, and the thing most often botched by fools and tax-dodgers alike. When the still begins to run, what comes off is not all the same. The first portion, the foreshots, carries the lightest, nastiest compounds, including methanol, which is a poison that blinds men and kills them. You throw the foreshots away. You do not taste them. You do not rinse your mouth with them. You do not offer them to a sheriff. You throw them away.
Wilkins: After the foreshots come the heads, still harsh, still loaded with the volatile sharp compounds, smelling of paint and solvent. These are also set aside, discarded, or kept for a lamp or a cleaning cloth. Then, in the middle, comes the hearts, sweet, clean, the real thing, the part a craftsman is proud of. And at the end come the tails, oily, heavy, tasting of wet cardboard and old socks. The tails are set aside too, and may be redistilled with the next batch, but they do not belong in the jar.
Wilkins: A man who knows his cuts is a distiller. A man who doesn't is a poisoner with a hobby. And the cut is made by smell, by taste, by temperature, by experience, and a little by prayer. And I say again, for the record, that making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is illegal under United States law, and everything said on this program is for historical and educational purposes only. If you want to practice the craft, do it legally, and for fuel, or for essential oils, or for the instruction of the young.
Wilkins: And watch your fire. A still is a pot of flammable vapor under pressure. A leak near an open flame is not a mishap, it is an obituary. Keep the fire low, keep the joints tight, keep the room ventilated, and never, ever leave it unattended for a trip to the privy.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There! One more large cent stamped, and one more lesson stamped on your brain. Now, I have a call-in tape waiting, a voicemail left at the post office by a man in the faraway hills of North Carolina, who dictated it to the postmaster, who dictated it to a boy, who dictated it to me, so any errors are the fault of the entire American postal system. Let us hear it.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a scratchy recorded voice
Wilkins: Here is the question, as the boy wrote it. 'Alchemist, my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?' That is signed Cletus, called Rabbit, Miller, of Wilkesboro, North Carolina.
Wilkins: Rabbit, my friend, your uncle is half right and half pickled. Let me explain.
Wilkins: First, the thump keg. It is a second vessel set between the still and the worm. The hot vapor from the still bubbles up through a charge of liquid in the keg, and in doing so is stripped and re-distilled a second time, which gives you a stronger, cleaner spirit in a single run. That is its job, and it does that job well. But a thump keg is a doubler, not a filter. It cannot take a dirty cut and make it clean.
Wilkins: Now, as to the hickory ash and the red oak shavings. There is some truth in it, as there is some truth in most old customs. Hardwood charcoal, properly made, really does adsorb some harsh compounds. That is why a good whiskey is filtered through charcoal in some parts of the country, and why a fresh-burned oak barrel mellows a young spirit. So the old-timers were not fools. They noticed that wood and char made a rough drink smoother.
Wilkins: But here is where your uncle's swamp medicine goes sour. Loose hickory ash or raw red oak shavings tossed into a boiling still charge, or into a thump keg, do not remove methanol. They do not take the poison out. Methanol comes off at the front of the run, in the foreshots and the heads, and the only way to be rid of it is to throw those portions away. No ash, no shaving, no charm, no prayer, will do that work for you. A man who thumps his keg with hickory ashes and calls it medicine is the same man who calls his wife's cooking rustic.
Wilkins: So I will give you the real answer, Rabbit. Cut your foreshots and heads honestly. Discard them. Run your hearts. Keep your tails apart. If you want the smoothing of wood, age the finished product in a charred oak barrel, and be patient, because patience is cheaper than ash and works better. And if your uncle protests, tell him a dentist in New Hampshire says that a man who trusts ash over discipline will one day need the services of a dentist, an undertaker, or both.
Wilkins: A shout to you, Cletus Rabbit Miller, of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Your uncle may be a fool, but you are a thoughtful one, and that is a mighty good ratio in any family. Cletus, your uncle's swamp medicine and a fresh-pulled molar have this in common: both go down easier with a stiff drink in front of them and a long lie after.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, then a bear grunt
Wilkins: And Barnaby agrees. Barnaby has never been called as a witness, because the last man who tried to swear him in came out of the swearing-in requiring a new set of trousers and a priest.
♪ Soft banjo bridge
Wilkins: Now, before we close, a final word on the matter of my twenty-dollar fine. I paid it in coin, naturally, and I counterstamped every one of those coins first, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., so that for years afterward the Merrimack County treasury was circulating my name in the pockets of honest citizens. That, friends, is the only advertising a man of my stature requires, and it was paid for by the state.
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Before you retire for the night, visit moonshinestill.com, that is moonshinestill.com, and see the Flame-Flow still, protected by United States Patent 10,561,960, handcrafted of heavy-gauge pure copper! Or call at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire! And now back to the Doctor.
Wilkins: Clara Higgins, my friend, any last words for the folks at home?
Clara: Just that every jar's got a pretty name hid on it, Doc, and every name's got a story behind it. Be good at your craft and decent to your neighbors, and the law'll mostly let you be.
Wilkins: Amen, and may your gourds never run dry. Folks, if you wish to learn the real craft, the history, the metalwork, the chemistry, and the law, I invite you to enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course, taught in person at Fort Wilkins, with copper in the hand and a bear in the window. Pull up a stool, bring a notebook, leave your warrants at the door.
Wilkins: That is all the time we have this evening. I am Doctor Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, and I remind you once more that all of this is for historical and educational purposes, and that the making of spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the laws of these United States. But a man may still love the craft, and admire the copper, and tell a good story about a sheriff with a tin cup.
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 with wax cylinder crackle