The Telegraph Arrives in Pittsfield
Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells how the lightning wire came up the Suncook Valley, and how a tooth-pulling dentist who could read Morse by ear heard the Merrimack sheriff's raid plans clicking through a wall before the deputies had even been told. Blue Ridge herbalist and slang historian Clara Higgins brings new stories of Virginia telegraph keys, wartime wire-cutting and mountain code words for the revenue man. In the listener segment, Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and he knocks down the old shake-test bead myth over the ring of his anvil.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby! Settle down, you four-hundred-pound sack of fleas and bad decisions. That clicking is the telegraph, not a woodpecker with a grudge. You cannot eat it, you cannot marry it, and if you chew one more pole the Western Union men will bill me for it. Sit.
♦ Bear huffs, chain settles in the dirt
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, sinners, and you poor county clerks listening in so you can write it all down. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, twice-arrested gentleman and the only man in this valley who has pulled a sheriff's tooth and his warrant in the same week.
Wilkins: Tonight's subject is lightning on a wire. The telegraph has come to Pittsfield, and I am going to tell you how a humble tooth-puller learned the sheriff's raid plans before the sheriff's own deputies did. First, though, a word from the folks who keep my copper shining.
♪ Brief tinny brass flourish
Announcer: A quick word, friends! The Flame-Flow Still, protected under U.S. Patent 10,561,960, is hand-built from heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper. That's American craftsmanship you can see from across the room! Find it at moonshinestill.com.
♪ Theme fades
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Segment the first: history. Now settle in.
Wilkins: In May of eighteen hundred and forty-four, Professor Samuel Morse sat at a little brass key in Washington and tapped out a message to Baltimore: 'What hath God wrought.' A fine Bible verse. If I had been at that key, the first message ever sent by lightning would have been 'Send more jars,' and history would be the better for it.
Wilkins: The wire has crept north ever since, pole by pole, along the turnpikes and now the railroad grades. Up the Merrimack it came, and then the talk started about running it up the Suncook Valley alongside the rail line folks have been promising us since Adam was a boy. They say the cars will reach Pittsfield before the decade is out. I'll believe it when the engine scares my hens.
Wilkins: Here is the thing the wire companies don't paint on their handbills. They charge by the word. You want to tell your sister in Concord that Mother is poorly? That is three words and money out of your pocket, so Yankees have learned to talk like a miser counting change. 'MOTHER POORLY COME.' No hello, no love, no bless your heart. The telegraph is the only gossip in New Hampshire that charges by the word, and it still talks more than the Ladies' Sewing Circle.
Wilkins: Then came the war. Mr. Lincoln, God rest him, practically lived in the War Department telegraph office, sitting up half the night waiting for the sounder to tell him which of our boys had lived and which had not. The Military Telegraph ran wire behind the armies like a spider spinning behind a fly. Both sides cut the other fellow's lines and tapped them and spliced in their own fibs, and the generals wrote in cipher so the Rebs couldn't read it. Mark that, because cipher comes back into my story.
Wilkins: Now to what matters around here. In the early days the operators read the paper tape: dots and dashes punched in a long ribbon like a drunk man's stitching. By the fifties the sharp ones stopped bothering with the tape. They read the clicks by ear, the way you know your wife's footstep from the hired man's. The trade calls it sound reading. A good sound reader can sit across a room, eat his supper and take down every word coming over the wire without looking up from his beans.
Wilkins: Well, friends. Who in this valley spends his whole working day listening hard to small clicking noises? Who can tell a sound molar from a rotten one by tapping it with a steel pick and cocking his ear? It's your humble dentist.
♦ Light metallic tap-tap of a dental pick on a glass jar
Wilkins: A Morse operator and a dentist have the same job: we both tap on things until somebody gives up a secret.
♪ Short fiddle sting
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Segment the second: outlaws, legends and the plain unvarnished truth, give or take a little varnish. Let me tell you how I learned to read lightning.
Wilkins: A few winters back a young fellow named Abner came into my chair. He worked a telegraph key down the line, and he had a lower molar so far gone you could have kept chickens in it. His breath would have wilted a fence post. While I was getting my forceps ready, the poor fellow was so scared he wouldn't stop talking, and what he talked about was his trade. 'Doc,' he says, 'A is dot-dash. B is dash-dot-dot-dot.' He was tapping it out on the arm of my chair with his finger to keep his courage up.
Wilkins: So I made him a bargain. For every letter he taught me, I'd give him a swallow of my medicinal apple and wait one more minute before I pulled. He taught me the whole alphabet, the numbers and half the operators' shorthand in under an hour. By the end he was singing Morse code like a hymn, and when I finally pulled that molar it came out with a sound like a boot leaving a bog. He thanked me, paid in coin and walked out a free man, lighter by one tooth and one alphabet.
Wilkins: I practiced every night after that. I tapped on the anvil. I tapped on the bedpost until my wife asked whether I was sending for help. I practiced so hard that Barnaby learned it too, or at least he learned that three short knocks on the cabin wall means supper. He has never once come running for 'Revenue Man,' which proves he is smarter than half the deputies in this county.
Wilkins: Now, the sheriff. You've heard about my two arrests on this program, so I won't plow that field again. The sheriff had decided the trouble with his raids on Fort Wilkins was loose talk. Every time he rode out, the whole valley knew it before his horse was saddled. Somebody in the tavern, somebody's wife, somebody's wife's cousin. So he got clever. He would send his orders by wire from the county seat to a substation down the line, in a cipher he invented himself, and tell his deputies only when they were already mounted.
Wilkins: Now picture this. The substation that winter was a back room behind a general store, and the wall between that room and the store was one board thick, with gaps you could pass a dime through. And who happened to be in that store every Tuesday buying coffee, tobacco and horseshoe nails and lingering over the cracker barrel longer than any man needs to? Me. With an ear trained on teeth and a head full of Abner's alphabet.
♦ Faint telegraph sounder clicking, muffled as if through a wall
Wilkins: Click, clickety, click. Now the sheriff's grand cipher was this: he spelled every word backwards. That was it. That was the whole fortress of secrecy. 'DIAR SNIKLIW YADSRUHT.' The man spent a week inventing a code that a bright child working a slate could break. Worse yet, he spelled 'raid' with two D's, and he paid for the extra letter out of county money, which is the most generous thing he has ever done with a dollar.
Wilkins: So I bought my nails, tipped my hat to the storekeeper and went home and got ready. By Thursday morning, when four deputies came up Route 28 with their warrant, I had nothing at Fort Wilkins but a cold kettle full of turnip soup, a dental chair, a fresh-swept floor and Barnaby lying across the doorway like a hairy hearthrug that has been known to bite.
Wilkins: And here is the finest part. The sheriff hadn't told his deputies where they were going until they were in the saddle, so I knew where they were bound before they did. I had a pot of coffee on for them. The lead deputy, a long, sour fellow with a face like a hatchet somebody gave up on, looks at me and says, 'How did you know we were coming?' And I said, 'Deputy, I didn't know a thing. I simply have a feeling in my teeth when the weather turns foul.' He searched my woodshed and the privy, and he came out of the privy considerably less curious than he went in.
Wilkins: I have pulled teeth that told me more than a deputy, and the teeth were in better shape afterward. And as for the secrecy of that plan: the sheriff's raid plan was so secret that only he, his deputies, the operator, the operator's wife, me and the bear knew about it.
♦ Barnaby grunts approvingly
Wilkins: Now, I promised you company tonight, and she has come a long way. She came up from the Blue Ridge of Virginia by rail, stage and one very unhappy mule. She's a mountain herbalist, a historian of old-time talk and a woman who knows more names for a jar of corn than I know names for a sore tooth. Please welcome Miss Clara Higgins.
♪ Quick banjo roll
Clara: Thank you, Doctor. I'll say this for your bear: he's got better manners than the conductor on the Lynchburg line, and he smells about the same.
Wilkins: Ha! Don't let him hear you, he's sensitive about his toilet. Miss Higgins, you heard my story about reading the wire through the wall. Did the lightning post reach your hills the same way?
Clara: Lightning post. That's what my granny's people called it, Doctor, the lightning post, on account of they reckoned a man was fool enough to stand under a pole in a storm and get his letters delivered direct. And when the revenue man started following those poles up into the hollers, folks took to calling him the wire-walker. 'Wire-walker's coming,' and every child on the ridge knew to run tell Daddy.
Wilkins: The wire-walker. I like that. It sounds like a sideshow act, and the revenue man is about as useful.
Clara: Now let me tell you about Mrs. Talley. She was a widow woman who kept the key at a little depot down below our ridge after the war. Sharp as a tack and twice as mean if you crossed her. Whenever men in city boots and new hats stepped off the train asking too many questions about the weather up the mountain, she'd sit down at that key, sweet as pie, and tap out four words to the next station up: COW SICK SEND DOCTOR.
Wilkins: Ha!
Clara: Wasn't a cow in it, Doctor. Not a sick one, anyhow. But the boy at the next station would run up the holler hollering for the doctor, and the doctor's name was understood. Within the hour every fire on that ridge was out, every barrel was in the creek and every man was sitting on his porch whittling like he'd been born doing it. Those revenue men used to say that ridge had the sickest cows in Virginia and the healthiest-looking farmers.
Wilkins: And they paid by the word, the same as us. Four words to empty a mountain. That's thrift, Miss Higgins. That's a Yankee virtue gone south.
Clara: Oh, we had thrift long before you Yankees bottled it and put your name on it. But let me tell you about the war, because the war's where the wire got mean. There was a man near my great-granddaddy's place, Lemuel, and Lemuel was a good-hearted soul with no more sense than a fence rail. The Confederate line ran right past his cornfield. Copper was scarce as hen's teeth, and Lemuel needed a new worm for his still, so one night he climbed that pole and cut himself about forty feet of the Confederacy.
Wilkins: He stole the Confederate telegraph to make a worm?
Clara: Well, Doctor, it wasn't all copper, and he found that out the hard way. Half of it was iron and it rusted so bad it made his whole run taste like a horseshoe. But that wasn't his trouble. His trouble was that a Union patrol came through the next week following the cut line, figuring they'd found themselves a Rebel spy. They found Lemuel instead, coiling up their evidence in his shed.
Wilkins: Oh, Lord. Did they hang him?
Clara: They had the rope out, Doctor. And Lemuel, God love him, stood up straight and said, 'Gentlemen, I am no Rebel and no Yankee. I am a Lemuel, and before you hang me, I would be honored if you'd try the first jar off my brand-new apparatus.' Well, it was a cold night, and they were cold men. By morning the sergeant had his arm around Lemuel singing 'Lorena,' and they wrote in their report that the line had been 'damaged by weather.'
Wilkins: Damaged by weather. Lightning in the jar, lightning on the wire: one will run you down the line and the other will run you up a tree. And now tell me, Miss Higgins, I hear tell the mountain folk had their own words for ordering a jar by telegraph without saying jar.
Clara: Oh, they had words for everything, Doctor. A Botetourt County farmer once wired his cousin over in Roanoke to send 'twelve jars persimmon preserves, extra ripe.' Now everybody from the depot clerk to the preacher knew there was no such thing as persimmon preserves extra ripe. Extra ripe meant brandy. Persimmon brandy, the old kind, made after the first frost when the fruit turns sweet as sin and wrinkled as a deacon's elbow.
Wilkins: And did it get through?
Clara: It got through, all but one jar. The clerk who copied that message out figured he'd earned a commission. When the farmer complained, the clerk wired back three words that I'm told are still framed in a Roanoke barbershop: PRESERVES WERE SPOILED.
♦ Wilkins slaps the table, laughing
Wilkins: Spoiled! That clerk had the instincts of a magistrate. Miss Higgins, you're a treasure. Stick around, because Barnaby has taken a shine to you and I'll need you to stand between us when he wants his supper.
Clara: Doctor, I'll stand with the bear. You're the one with the forceps.
♪ Banjo and fiddle bridge
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Segment the third: copper and the craft. Let me speak plainly first, because the law and my conscience both require it. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and everything on this program is for history and education only. Now that the clerks have scribbled that down, let me talk about the metal.
Wilkins: You heard Miss Higgins's tale of Lemuel and his worm of stolen wire. Half of it was iron, and his run tasted like the inside of a horseshoe. There's your lesson. Copper earns its place in a still because it moves heat well, it bends sweetly under the hammer and it takes up the foul sulfur stinks that ride along in the vapor, which leaves the spirit sweeter. Iron rusts. Cheap scrap carries who knows what. And lead solder is poison, plain poison, that can sicken or kill. Many a mountain man has gone to his grave a little at a time from a lead-patched pot, and he blamed the weather the whole way down.
Wilkins: Now the cuts, and I'll keep this short and honest. When a still begins to run, the first spirit to come over is the foreshots, and the heads follow close behind. That early run carries methanol, the wood spirit, along with the harsh volatile stuff that blinds men and kills them. It gets thrown away. All of it. Every time. You don't drink it, you don't sell it, and you don't rub it on a baby's gums. After the heads come the hearts, which are the clean middle of the run, and that's what an honest maker keeps. Last come the tails, oily and dull, and those get set aside.
Wilkins: No trick, charm, powder or prayer will get you out of making those cuts. You'll hear tonight from our caller about one such charm. The cuts are the whole of the safety, and a man who skimps on them for the sake of a fuller jar is a man I wouldn't let near a cow, let alone a customer.
Wilkins: And mind your fire. Alcohol vapor burns, and it burns eager. A seeping joint near an open flame has turned more than one still-house in this county into a bonfire and more than one maker into a sermon. Keep it tight, keep the room aired out, keep the flame steady and low and keep a bucket of water at hand. When I'm in my workshop I treat that vapor the way I treat Barnaby: with respect, at a distance, and never with my back turned.
♦ Bear grunt, chain clink
Wilkins: Yes, I'm talking about you. Don't be proud.
♪ Patent-medicine brass and drum flourish
Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen! Step right up and listen close! Are you weary of flimsy, patched-together contraptions that pucker, leak and turn green before your very eyes? Then hear me now! Moonshine Stills, the proud home of the Flame-Flow Still, is protected under United States Patent number 10,561,960!
Announcer: The Flame-Flow is hand-built from heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper, the brightest and truest copper money can buy, and fitted with precision-machined brass unions that seal tight and stay tight! It's designed for strong convective circulation and outstanding purity, so whether you're coaxing essential oils from your garden, making fine herbal tinctures or putting on a traditional distillation demonstration for the neighbors, the Flame-Flow does it handsomely, run after run!
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Announcer: Order yours today at moonshinestill.com! That's moonshinestill.com, slash products, slash flame-flow-copper-still! Or come see it gleaming in person at the showroom at Fort Wilkins, on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. The bear doesn't bite paying customers! Once more, friends: moonshinestill.com, the Flame-Flow Still!
♪ Flourish ends with a cymbal crash
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Segment the fourth: myths, slang and the mailbag, or tonight the talking cylinder, since some clever soul has recorded a voice for us. Our caller hails from Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Let's hear him.
♦ Click of a cylinder machine, hiss, then a distant voice
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller writes in. His question, as the cylinder tells 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?'
♦ Cylinder click off
Wilkins: Rabbit, God bless you and your uncle both, and especially his liver. Let me take the hickory first. What do country folk do with hardwood ash? They soak it in a hopper, and the water that drips out the bottom is lye. Potash. Your granny made soap with it, and she soaked corn in it to make hominy. So when your uncle tips a scoop of hickory ash into his thump keg, what he's actually doing is making a weak lye bath. It turns the liquid alkaline and it can foam up something terrible, and none of it lays a finger on the poison in the heads.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There. That one gets my stamp: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., struck right through Liberty's forehead. Rabbit, your uncle's ash bucket will make you a fine bar of soap and a sorry jar of anything else. At least you'll die clean.
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. There's a grain of truth buried in that one, the way there's a grain of corn in a sheriff's speech. Oak gives spirit its color and some of its character, but it does that slowly, over months in a barrel, by aging. A fistful of shavings tossed into a boiling keg for an hour isn't aging and it isn't cleaning. All it gives you is splinters with ambition. The only thing that takes out bad heads is the distiller's own hand throwing them away. Your uncle can't skip that step, and neither can anybody else.
Wilkins: And since my hammer's warm, let's knock down one more old myth: the bead. You've all seen it. Some fellow at a barn dance takes a jar, gives it a hard shake and holds it to the lamplight to watch the bubbles. 'Look at that bead! Big and lasting! That's good liquor!' Friends, the bead tells you roughly how strong the spirit is, and roughly is doing a good deal of work in that sentence. It can't tell you whether there's methanol in the jar. It can't tell you whether the man made honest cuts or whether his pot was patched with lead. A jar can bead like a string of pearls and still blind you.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: If you could judge whiskey by its beads, my late aunt's rosary would be the finest distiller in Merrimack County.
Clara: Doctor, down home we'd say a man who trusts the bead is a man who'd buy a mule by the shine on its shoes.
Wilkins: Ha! Write that one down, Rabbit. Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, this coin I just stamped is going in the post to you, with my compliments and a stern note for your uncle. Tell him the Alchemist says to keep the hickory for the smokehouse and the oak for the barrel cooper, and to throw out his heads like an honest Christian.
♪ Fiddle sting
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Friends, the lamp's burning low and Barnaby's been looking at Miss Higgins's satchel like it owes him money, so it's time to wrap up. Miss Higgins, thank you for coming all this way north to keep company with a dentist, a bear and the worst-spelled raid in New Hampshire history.
Clara: Doctor, it's been a pleasure. Next time I'll send word ahead by the lightning post. Cow sick. Send doctor.
Wilkins: And I'll have the coffee on. Now hear this: if you've a mind to learn the history and the honest science of the old craft properly, the right metals, the right cuts and the right respect for fire, the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course will teach it to you plainly, without swamp medicine or ash buckets. You can ask about it at the Fort Wilkins showroom. And before I go, one last word from my friend at the brass horn.
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Before you turn down that lamp, remember the Flame-Flow Still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, built from heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper. Order yours today at moonshinestill.com!
♪ Theme rises softly, banjo and fiddle
Wilkins: That deputy rode so slow he got there after the news, after the gossip and after the sermon about it. Let that be a lesson to every lawman between here and Concord: the lightning beats the horse, the dentist beats the lightning, and the bear beats everybody. 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