How to Spot a Wilkins Counterstamp
Dr. G. G. Wilkins opens his coin box and teaches collectors how to tell a genuine 'G. G. WILKINS / PITTSFIELD N.H.' hand-punched mark from a forgery. He covers the bulge on the back of the coin, toning inside the letters, host-coin dates, weight, and casting pits, and tells how Barnaby the bear dealt with an Epsom tinker who tried to sell him counterfeit Wilkins cents. Captain Donald Vance of Manchester tells three new revenue-service stories about stamped coins. Wilkins answers a voicemail from Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC, about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and debunks the old bead 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! Sit down, you overstuffed hearth rug. That's the third peddler you've lunged at since supper, and that one only had tin pans. Settle, or I'll pull your other eyetooth and wear it on my watch chain next to the deputy's.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drops slack into the mud, a long wet snort
Wilkins: He's sulking now. Look at him, chin on his paws like a widow at a will reading.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling then settling under the voice
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, and 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, New Hampshire. Catamount Mountain is black against the stars, the Suncook is running cold over the mill dams, and my anvil is still warm. Tonight I am opening my coin box. The topic is How to Spot a Wilkins Counterstamp, which is my name, my mark, and my reputation, hammered into the copper of the Republic. Before we start, a word from the fellow who keeps the lamp oil paid.
♪ Banjo vamp, brisk
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Want the craftsmanship of Fort Wilkins coppersmiths in a size that sits on your table? Ask about the Fort Wilkins 2-Gallon Tabletop Alembic, spun pure copper, made for botanical waters and floral oils. Visit moonshinestill.com!
♪ Vamp resolves on a fiddle flourish
Wilkins: Mind you, friends, making spirits to drink without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and everything I say on this program is history and instruction. I say it plainly so the revenue men can't claim they weren't told.
♪ Fiddle transition, low and mournful, then a single banjo pluck
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. A Man's Name in the Public Pocket.
Wilkins: Here's what a counterstamp is, for those of you raised by Methodists and sheltered from coinage. A merchant, a doctor, a blacksmith, any tradesman with a steel punch and a strong arm, sets a coin on his anvil, sets the punch on the coin, and strikes. Bang. Now his name is sunk into that coin, and the coin goes off on its travels. It buys a loaf in Concord, a nail keg in Epsom, a drink in a Barnstead tavern, a sermon in Gilmanton. Every hand it passes through reads my name. A newspaper notice lasts a week and wraps fish by Friday. A stamped coin lasts a lifetime and ends up in the collection plate.
Wilkins: So a counterstamp is a man's name hammered into the public's pocket, and mine has been in more pockets than a Concord pickpocket's hand.
Wilkins: Now, why copper, and why the big cent? The old United States large cent was a fine broad slab of copper, near as wide as the end of your thumb is long, and soft enough to take a punch without cracking. A merchant could hardly ask for a better billboard. But the Mint struck its last large cents back in '57 and gave us that little copper-nickel Flying Eagle, a coin so small you could lose it in a deacon's beard. Then came the Indian Head. Those little ones are hard, small, and mean to stamp. So the big old cents I stamp are getting rarer every year, which is one reason my mark already brings a premium in the Concord taverns.
Wilkins: I stamp my name on a coin the way a tomcat marks a fence post, except my method is louder and smells better.
Wilkins: Silver comes into it too. For years the Spanish and Mexican silver, pieces of eight, two-real pieces, the little half reales, passed in New Hampshire the same as Uncle Sam's own. Then Congress, by the Act of February 21, 1857, stripped all that foreign silver of its standing as legal tender. Washington's Congress outlawed my foreign silver in '57, and the silver did not notice, because silver has never once read a newspaper. Those coins still go hand to hand along the turnpike, and plenty of them have gone under my punch.
Wilkins: And just last year, by the Act of June 8, 1864, Congress forbade any private person to issue one-cent or two-cent pieces meant to pass as money. They went after the tavern keepers and grocers who were striking their own little copper store cards to make up for the shortage of change. Mark the difference, friends, because it matters to a collector. A token is a whole new coin a man strikes himself. A counterstamp is a punch on a coin the government already made. I never made money. I only signed it, the way a man signs a letter, except my pen weighs four pounds and I swing it overhand.
Wilkins: The large cent was big enough to stamp your name on, plug a knothole with, or throw at a revenue man, and I have done all three on the same Tuesday.
Wilkins: So, collector, when you're down in the cellar of some Chichester estate sale, or picking through a tavern cash box, or a gentleman in a stovepipe hat offers you a Wilkins cent at a price that makes your molars ache, here is my guide. First rule: turn the coin over. My punch hits the face, but the BACK of the coin tells you the truth. I'll explain that properly in the craft hour, but tuck it away now. The back of the coin never lies, which is more than you can say for the front of most men.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, ring decays
Wilkins: That's how it ought to sound. Like a church bell that's had a drink.
♪ Fiddle reel, quick and rough, fades under
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, chain clink outside
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Forgers, Fools, and the Seat of a Tinker's Britches.
Wilkins: Where a man's mark is worth something, somebody will try to forge it. Two springs ago a tinker came up the turnpike from Epsom. I won't name him, because his mother is still living and has suffered enough. He had a cart full of pans, one wall eye, and a leather purse of large cents, every one stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. He meant to sell me my own coins, rare, he said, at a nickel apiece.
Wilkins: I dumped them out on the bench and I knew before the last one stopped spinning. The letters were bright as a new bride's teeth down in the bottoms, while the coins were brown as old saddle leather. Every one stood at the same depth, like a regiment of drunk soldiers, all leaning the same way. And when I turned them over, the backs were smooth as a baby's cheek. No flattening, no bulge, nothing. That man had struck them on a feather pillow, or else he'd done it with a tack hammer and a prayer.
Wilkins: I told him so, and he called me a liar, a quack, and a horse-leech in that order, which I'll allow are three of my better qualities. Then he snatched up his purse and lit out the side door, the one past Barnaby's window.
♦ Distant chain snapping taut, a roar, a man's high yelp
Wilkins: Now, Barnaby doesn't know a genuine punch from a forgery, but he knows the taste of a liar, and he says it's mostly boot leather and fear. He caught the fellow at the full stretch of his chain, which reaches exactly to the rain barrel, and he took the tail of that tinker's coat in his jaws, then the seat of his britches, then a good handful of what was under them. I heard the cloth go first, a long rip like a sail splitting in a gale. Then a wet sound like a man biting into a cold Baldwin apple. That tinker hopped ten yards on one leg, screaming in a key I've only heard from a sow at slaughter, with blood running down into his boot and squelching every step. His backside looked like two boiled puddings that had lost an argument with a hay rake. I stitched him up myself on the kitchen table, eleven stitches of silk thread, while he bit down on a pine stick and called on saints the Baptists don't even admit exist. I charged him for the stitches and kept the counterfeit cents as my fee for the insult. Barnaby kept a piece of the britches and slept on it for a week like a child with a blanket.
♦ Bear grunt, satisfied
Wilkins: Speaking of men who hunt forgers and fools, my guest tonight has hunted plenty of both, and caught a good many with my name on them. He's up from Manchester, the mill city on the Merrimack, lately of the federal revenue service, and a man I'm happy to have at my table so long as he keeps his notebook in his pocket. Captain Donald Vance, welcome to Fort Wilkins.
Captain: Thank you, Doctor. I'll keep my notebook in my pocket if you keep that bear on his chain. I've heard what he did to the tinker. Half of Epsom has heard it. The tinker tells it in the taverns standing up, because he still can't sit.
Wilkins: Ha! Captain, let's get to it. A revenue man wouldn't collect coins for pleasure. Where does a Wilkins cent turn up in your work?
Captain: Everywhere I don't expect it, Doctor. Your coins get around like a traveling preacher with a bad reputation. The strangest was in Plymouth. We had word of a false-bottomed cider press in a barn there, the press working two jobs, apples on top and something stronger underneath. The barn belonged to the treasurer of the county temperance society. A deacon. Wore his pledge ribbon on his lapel like a medal from Gettysburg.
Wilkins: Oh, I love him already.
Captain: We found the press, sure enough, and under the floor of his bedroom we found a wool stocking packed so tight with large cents it stood up on its own. I poured them out on his wife's quilt, and Doctor, a good third of them carried your mark. I asked where a temperance man came by so much Pittsfield copper. It came out that he'd been running a lecture tour against the evils of drink, town to town, with a collection plate at every hall, and selling jugs out the back of the wagon once the lamps were out. The coins in the plate and the coins for the jugs went into the same stocking.
Wilkins: The temperance lecturer took a pledge against drink and a collection against conscience, and only kept the second one. Did he hang?
Captain: He was fined and he resigned. His wife kept the quilt and threw out the deacon, which I thought was the fairest sentence handed down in Grafton County that year.
Wilkins: Now, Captain, I know you've chased forgers of my particular mark. Tell the folks about the Manchester man.
Captain: That one's a short story and a sorry one. There was a die-sinker in Manchester, by the Amoskeag mill yard, who cut steel stamps for the mills: numbers for bobbins, letters for bale tags, that sort of thing. Good hands. Steady as a clock. He got word that Wilkins cents fetched a premium among the curiosity men in Concord and Portsmouth, and he set about cutting himself a punch with your name on it. He struck a few hundred and sold them at the cattle market.
Wilkins: The thieving devil. What gave him away?
Captain: He spelled it wrong, Doctor. P-I-T-T-S-F-E-I-L-D. E before I. A drover from Barnstead brought me one and asked if Pittsfeild was a new town, and if so, did it have a tavern. I went down to the shop and found the punch sitting in a drawer, still oily, next to a dictionary he'd plainly never opened.
Wilkins: A man who can forge a steel punch but can't spell Pittsfield ought to be hanged for the spelling alone. Collectors, mark this well: look at your letters. A forger has to cut every letter fresh, and he'll slip somewhere, in the spelling, the spacing, or the shape of the S. I have stamped ten thousand coins and I have misspelled my own name exactly never, though I have misremembered it a few times on a Saturday night.
Captain: I handed his misspelled cents to the magistrate in a cigar box. The judge read them, laughed so hard he had to call a recess, and fined the man by the coin.
Wilkins: Now, Captain, the folks tell me you carry one of my pieces on your own person. Is that true, or is it tavern gossip?
Captain: It's true, and I'll warn your listeners this story isn't fit for the supper table.
Wilkins: Captain, nothing on this program is fit for the supper table. Out with it.
Captain: Lisbon, up in the White Mountain country, a hard January. We came down on a still-house in a cedar swamp, and the fellow running it had a Spanish two-real piece in his hand, a little silver quarter with G. G. WILKINS punched across the king's face. It was the only proof I had that he'd been buying copper fittings from Merrimack County. He saw me looking at it, and before I could get to him, he popped it in his mouth and swallowed it like a pill.
Wilkins: Oh, no.
Captain: Oh, yes. So I sat outside his outhouse. Three days, Doctor. Snow to my knees, my deputy bringing me coffee and laughing himself sick. Every morning that man went in, groaned like a calving cow, and came out shaking his head. On the third day I heard a little tink against the pail, and I'll tell you, I've never heard a sweeter note from a church organ.
Wilkins: You fished it out?
Captain: With a pair of fireplace tongs and a strong stomach. I scrubbed it in lye soap and boiling water till my hands were raw, and it hangs on my watch chain now. When the young officers in Manchester ask me what patience means in this line of work, I hold it up and let them smell it.
Wilkins: The Captain waited three days at an outhouse door for one Spanish coin, which is more patience than any woman in Merrimack County ever gave me. And I'll say this, Captain. That swallow-and-wait trick shows a man how hard my stamp holds. Three days in a still-man's guts and the letters came out readable. That's a true punch.
Captain: The letters were fine, Doctor. It was everything else about that week that went bad.
Wilkins: Captain Donald Vance, you've been a gentleman and a bloodhound both. Stay at the table, there's a jar of cider for you that I'll swear was taxed.
Captain: I'll take your word on the cider, Doctor, the way I take it on everything else, with a grain of salt and a witness.
♦ Two tin cups clink
♪ Banjo sting
♪ Brassy medicine-show fanfare, tambourine shake
Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, gather close! Have you ever stood at the window of a coppersmith's shop and wished you could carry that craftsmanship home under one arm? Wish no longer! Here is the Fort Wilkins 2-Gallon Tabletop Mini-Still, a compact pure copper tabletop alembic made in the true Fort Wilkins tradition! It is spun from heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper, twenty-ounce stock, so it heats evenly and gleams on any sideboard. The handles are riveted by hand, so they will not loosen in a lifetime of use, and the quick-connect cooling lines go on in a twinkling. It is the finest apparatus going for distilling botanical waters, drawing out essential floral oils of rose, lavender, and mint, and putting on countertop demonstrations that will make your parlor guests gasp. And the price, friends? Only two hundred eighty-nine dollars! Come see it with your own eyes at the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, or visit https://moonshinestill.com/products/tabletop-alembic today! Once more, so you won't forget: https://moonshinestill.com/products/tabletop-alembic. The Fort Wilkins 2-Gallon Tabletop Alembic, available today at moonshinestill.com!
♪ Fanfare button, cymbal crash
♪ Slow fiddle air, firelight warmth
♦ Bellows wheeze, coals brightening, wax crackle
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the Craft. The Anvil, the Punch, and the Pot.
Wilkins: I promised to tell you why the back of the coin never lies. Here's the metallurgy of it. Copper is soft, but it isn't water. When my punch comes down, the letters have to push that copper somewhere. Some of it rolls up into a little raised lip along the edges of each letter, like mud squeezed up around a boot heel. The rest is driven straight down through the coin and mashed against the face of my anvil. So on the side opposite my stamp, the coin's own design, whether that's the wreath or the lady's head or the king's arms, goes flat and weak in a patch the shape of my blow. Sometimes it bulges. Sometimes it picks up the grain of the anvil face itself. A man who stamps on a soft surface, or a forger who casts his coins in sand, can't fake that honest bruise. Turn the coin over. If the back is perfect, the front is lying.
Wilkins: Next thing. Copper hardens when you beat on it, same as a deputy's opinion of me. Every blow packs the grain of the metal tighter, and after enough of them, copper turns stiff and brittle and cracks like dry bread. When I'm raising a still pot out of sheet, I heat the copper to a dull red and let it cool, or I dunk it in the trough, and it goes soft again, sweet as pie dough. That's annealing. And mark this, you young smiths: copper is the opposite of steel in the quench. Dunk hot steel and it goes glass-hard. Dunk hot copper and it goes soft. Mix those two up and you'll ruin a week's work.
Wilkins: My punch, now, is steel, and steel has to be tempered just right. I harden the punch end red-hot in the brine, then polish it bright and lay it on a hot iron bar and watch the colors creep along. First a pale straw, then a deeper straw, then bronze, then purple, then blue. Pale straw is hard but brittle, and it'll chip on the first cent. Blue is springy and tough but too soft to hold a crisp letter. I draw my punch to a dark straw, just shy of bronze, and plunge it, and it's held its edge for years. That's why my letters stay sharp from the first coin to the thousandth. A forger who skimps on the temper gets letters that mush and spread as his punch wears, so his late coins don't match his early ones.
Wilkins: Third thing, for the collector, is toning and wear. A coin I stamped ten years ago has been to every tavern from here to Dover since. The high points of the letters wear down along with the rest of the coin, and the bottoms of the letters turn dark brown, the same as the fields. If you see bright salmon-pink copper at the bottom of the letters on a dark old coin, somebody stamped it last Thursday.
Wilkins: Fourth, check the date on the host coin. If a man shows you my mark on a coin dated after my working days, he's selling you a fairy tale with a price tag on it.
Wilkins: Fifth, weigh it. A large cent from the last years of the last century up through '57 was struck to 168 grains. A cast copy is often light, and its surface is grainy and pitted like a pocked cheek, with soft, rounded letter edges, because sand can't hold an edge the way steel can. And I'll add this as a dentist: I've never bitten a coin to test it. A dentist knows better, and I charge two dollars to fix the fellows who don't.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now to the pot itself, since copper is copper whether it's in a coin or a still, and many of you write to ask how it's done. History and instruction only, remember, and it's against the law without a permit.
Wilkins: The old Suncook Valley corn mash goes like this. Crack your corn coarse, like gravel, not flour. Cook it in water till it thickens like porridge. Let it cool down to about blood-warm, then stir in a good portion of malted barley, ground. The malt is what does the work. Its ferments turn the starch of the corn into sugar, and you'll taste the mash go from pasty to sweet in an hour. Cool it further, pitch in your yeast, cover it loose so the gas can get out, and keep it warm and airy. In several days it stops working and settles into a sour, beery wash, and that wash is what goes into the pot.
Wilkins: Fire it slow. Never, ever walk away from a still on the fire. The vapor is flammable as lamp oil, and a sprung joint near an open flame has turned more than one still-house into a funeral pyre. Watch it the way you'd watch a sleeping rattlesnake.
Wilkins: Then the copper earns its keep. The vapor coming off the wash carries sulfur stinks, rotten eggs and boiled cabbage, and as that vapor rolls over hot clean copper, the copper grabs the sulfur and keeps it as a dark sulfide, so the spirit runs out sweeter. That's chemistry, not superstition. So keep your copper scrubbed bright, the same as I keep my punch face polished, because a dirty surface does no work.
Wilkins: Now, the cuts. Collect your run in a long line of small jars, numbered, a dozen or two of them, not one big crock. The first trickle is the foreshots. Throw them out. Don't drink them, don't sell them, don't give them to your mother-in-law however tempted you are. Next come the heads, sharp and solvent-smelling, like a varnish pot or a glue shop. Those carry methanol and other harsh devils, and they go out too. Then come the hearts, clean, sweet, smelling of the grain. Those you keep. Last come the tails, oily and flat, smelling of wet dog and old dishwater. Set them aside. Smell every jar, lay them out in order on the bench, and choose your cut with a clear head. An honest cut is the only thing that keeps the poison out. Nothing else does it.
♪ Fiddle air resolves
♪ Jaunty banjo breakdown, then down under
♦ Wax crackle, a click and whir of a cylinder being changed
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. The Call-In Line, and a Myth Laid on the Anvil.
Wilkins: We've got a message cylinder all the way from North Carolina. I'll crank it up.
♦ Thin, tinny playback hiss
Wilkins: The fellow's name is Cletus Miller, called Rabbit, of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and his question is this: 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?
Wilkins: Rabbit, God bless you, and God bless your uncle, and God help his guts. Let's take it apart like a bad molar, one root at a time.
Wilkins: The ashes first. What is wood ash? Every farm wife in Pittsfield can tell you, because she leaches it in the ash hopper every spring. Ash is potash. Pour water through it and you get lye, and boil lye with fat and you get soap. So when your uncle shovels hickory ash into his doubler, he's putting a soap-maker's alkali into hot spirit. It foams up, it scums, and if it froths over into the worm, his whiskey tastes like a laundry tub. Rabbit, your uncle put lye ash in his doubler and called it purifying, which is how a man ends up with the only whiskey in Carolina that washes your shirt on the way down.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And what it doesn't do is take out the bad heads. The thump keg boils the vapor over again, which makes it stronger, but the methanol and the harsh solvent devils ride right along with the rest. Ash doesn't trap them. The only way to get rid of bad heads is to collect them in jars and throw them out. That's the cut, and only the cut.
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Here the coopers have a lesson for your uncle. Red oak is a fine wood for a barn floor and a poor one for holding liquor. Its pores run open down the grain like straws. You can take a red oak stick, put one end in a cup of soapy water, and blow through the other end, and you'll raise bubbles. White oak has its pores plugged up with little growths inside the wood, so it holds liquid tight, and that's why every whiskey barrel worth its hoops is white oak. Red oak leaks like a selectman at a church supper: everything you pour in comes out somewhere you didn't want it. And shavings boiled a few minutes in a thump keg aren't the same as spirit resting in a charred barrel for seasons. The shavings will give a little color and a raw, sappy bitterness. Clean it won't.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: So, Rabbit, swamp medicine it is. But tell your uncle he's in good company, because half the men in Merrimack County believe something sillier, and that's the myth I'll lay on the anvil tonight: the bead test.
Wilkins: You've all seen it. A man takes a jar, gives it a hard shake, and squints at the bubbles. Big beads that sit up and stay a while, he says, means good strong whiskey. Little beads that vanish quick means weak. And then he says, the beads are fine, so it's safe to drink. It's that last part that's dead wrong. The bead tells you, roughly, how strong a spirit is, and that's all it tells you. It can't tell you about methanol. Methanol is clear, ethanol is clear, and in a shaken jar they bead alike. A jar full of uncut heads will bead as handsome as a jar of hearts and send you blind besides. The bead test tells you how strong it is and nothing about whether it'll kill you, much like a deacon's handshake.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, a final ringing strike
Wilkins: There's the myth stamped and cancelled. Cletus Rabbit Miller, of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, thank you for writing to Fort Wilkins. Give your uncle my regards, take that ash bucket away from him, and give it to your aunt for her soap kettle, where it'll do some good. Keep sending your questions, Rabbit.
Captain: Doctor, if I may. In all my raids I never once found a man poisoned by an honest cut. I found plenty poisoned by a clever trick.
Wilkins: Amen, Captain. Write that on a coin.
♪ Banjo breakdown swells, then slows
♪ Theme returns gently, parlor banjo and fiddle
♦ Wax crackle, fire popping low
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! The Fort Wilkins 2-Gallon Tabletop Alembic: pure spun copper, hand-riveted handles, built for botanical waters and countertop demonstrations. See it today at moonshinestill.com!
Wilkins: Well, friends, the lamp is low and Barnaby is snoring like a sawmill with the gate open. Thank you to Captain Donald Vance of Manchester, who has proved that a revenue man can have a heart, a sense of humor, and an iron stomach all at once.
Captain: Thank you, Doctor. Mind your punch, and mind your bear.
Wilkins: And if you want to learn this craft from the ground up, the mash and the malt, the copper and the fire, and above all the honest cuts, then sign on for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you the way I teach a nervous patient in the chair: slowly, plainly, and with no lies about what's going to hurt. For history and for learning, friends, and always within the law.
Wilkins: As for my coins, collector, here's the whole sermon on one line. Turn it over, look in the letters, check the date, weigh it, and trust the bruise. And if any man offers you a Wilkins cent with Pittsfield spelled wrong, send him up Route 28, and Barnaby and I will discuss it with him at the rain barrel.
Wilkins: 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, then silence