The Coos County Sugar Sleds: Winter Smuggling Across the White Mountains
Alchemist G. G. Wilkins tells the tale of the 1864 Coos County sugar sleds hauling cane sugar over Crawford Notch, then welcomes master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister of Pittsfield. Silas shares a false-bottomed sap bucket he found in a Lancaster barn, his grandfather's tale of singing copper sled runners, and a tall tale of oxen in burlap booties. The episode also covers sugar wash basics, the importance of cuts and fire safety, and a call-in from Rabbit Miller about hickory ash myths.
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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: Settle down, Barnaby, you great shaggy tax-dodger! It is a radio program, not a hog-killing! Back to your ham bone and let the people hear a gentleman talk.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, you thirsty, frostbit, tax-weary souls of New England and beyond! Welcome to 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, a tooth-puller by trade, a blacksmith by habit, and an alchemist by stubbornness. The snow is to the windowsills, the stove is roaring, and the bear is complaining. Let us begin.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, then a short brass sting
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Does your copper work like a lazy Sunday? Then hear this: the Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960, built of heavy-gauge electrolytic copper, circulates heat the way a good stove circulates gossip. Go to moonshinestill.com. That is moonshinestill.com. Now back to the Doctor!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Now then. Tonight's topic is the Coos County Sugar Sleds, and I will tell it straight, for the winter of 1864 was the coldest, meanest, thirstiest season this old man ever lived through. Gather round the stove and mind the draft.
Wilkins: You know the war has pinched sugar until it squeaks. The Union blockade has shut the Southern coast, Louisiana's cane fields are chewed up by armies, and what sugar remains costs a Concord banker's patience and a farmer's last good cow. A man who wants a clean, quick wash for his still looks at that price and feels his heart sink into his boots.
Wilkins: Sugar is a marvelous thing for the distiller, I will grant it. It is nearly pure fermentable sweetness, so it works fast and it works clean, and it makes a thin, light, neutral spirit without a great fuss of grain and malt. But it must come from somewhere, and in the winter of 1864 it came from the north, over the mountains, by horse sled, through Crawford Notch.
Wilkins: Now, Crawford Notch is no gentle country lane. It is a narrow gash through the White Mountains, with granite walls on both sides and a steep, slow road clawing up through the middle of it. Every teamster who ever took a load through that pass remembers the Willey slide of 1826, when a whole family ran out of their house in the dark and the mountain came down anyway. Think on that when you grumble about a cold hand, friends. Those woodsmen thought on it every mile.
Wilkins: The way it was told to me, and I will not swear to every word, for tall tales stretch like taffy in a warm room, a crew of Coos County woodsmen took to hauling sugar bags by horse sled in the dead of January. They loaded the sleds with burlap sacks of cane sugar, three and four hundredweight to a sled, covered the lot with a tarpaulin, a few spruce boughs, and a good coat of lies, and they set off over the Notch with the snow coming sideways.
Wilkins: One of them, a big raw-boned fellow I will call Ephraim, for the real name is better left in the drift, told me he drove a sled through a blizzard so thick he could not see his own horse's ears. He steered by the sound of the runners and by the smell of the horse, and he swore that at one point the horse stopped, turned its head around, and looked at him like a man looking at a fool. Ephraim got down, walked forward, and found the horse standing one step from a ravine that would have swallowed the sled, the sugar, and Ephraim together. He said he kissed that horse square on the nose and the horse bit him for it.
Wilkins: There is a grim side to it, friends, and I will not sugar it over, if you will pardon the word. A man named Silas Tarbell, who I knew a little, lost two toes and the tip of his nose that winter. The frost took them black as plug tobacco, and he lost them in the cold of one night on the north slope. He told me the toes did not hurt at all, which is the worst of it, for the cold takes the feeling first and the flesh second. I took his toes off myself, with a pair of forceps meant for molars and a good deal of whiskey for the nerves, mine and his, and I will say the work was cleaner than the cursing.
Wilkins: A New Hampshire woodsman will cross the Notch in a blizzard for a bag of sugar, and then complain the whole way about the price of the sugar. That is a national treasure, that is.
Wilkins: And the sheriff, you ask? The county deputies were not fools, but they were cold, and a cold deputy is a thoughtful deputy. The horse knew the road better than the driver, the driver knew the tavern better than the road, and the sheriff knew neither, which is how the sugar got through. Pass the jar and let us go on.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, then a short fiddle flourish
Wilkins: Now, my friends, I have a visitor at the fort tonight, a gentleman who hammers the copper for my own foundry, a third-generation smith who builds pots, swan necks, and dephlegmators by hand and holds patents on his cooling coils besides. He is a measured, plain-spoken fellow, and he has never once been rude to the bear, which makes him a better man than I. Mr. Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, welcome to the parlor!
Silas: Thank you kindly, Doctor. Warm in here. Smells of woodsmoke and bear.
Wilkins: That is the bear, Silas, and it is the only perfume he owns. Now, they call you Hacksaw, and I have heard you poke through other men's barns like a magistrate looking for a scandal. What have you dug up?
Silas: Nothing scandalous, Doctor, only curious. A few years back I was helping a man clear a loft in Lancaster, and I found a copper sap bucket hanging on a nail. Looked like any sugarbush bucket. But it sat wrong in my hand. I rapped the bottom with a knuckle and it gave back a dead little thud, no ring to it. False bottom, soldered in about two inches above the real one.
Wilkins: A sugar bucket with a secret cellar! A bucket that lies like a Concord lawyer! And who made such a rascal?
Silas: There was a smith's mark stamped under the rim, small as a thumbnail. I chased it the better part of a year and traced it to a shop in Littleton, working in the 1860s. Good work, too. Even hammer marks, clean seams. Whoever he was, he knew his metal, and he knew better than to ask what it was for.
Wilkins: A craftsman with a flexible conscience, the very best kind! Now, tonight I have been telling the people of the sleds over Crawford Notch. Did your kin ever speak of the winter trade?
Silas: My grandfather did. He worked copper before me. He said some of the sled runners were shod with thin copper strips, and in thirty-below cold those strips would sing, a high, ringing note, clear as a finger on a wineglass. The teamsters could hear one another through a blizzard when they could not see their own mittens.
Wilkins: A convoy that hums like a church choir! Mind you, the sheriff has ears too, Silas. A singing smuggler is a smuggler with a bell round his neck.
Silas: That is the trouble, Doctor, and I will not pretend otherwise. Copper does not care who is listening. Which may be why there is the other story, the opposite one. I cannot vouch for it, mind. A Coos County teamster supposedly crossed the Notch with his oxen wearing burlap booties stuffed with straw, so no one heard the sled coming.
Wilkins: Oxen in slippers like a duchess in her parlor! I would have paid a dollar to see the sheriff's face, if he had been able to see anything at all. And you believe it?
Silas: I believe a man will go to great lengths for a sack of sugar, Doctor. Whether the oxen went along willingly, I could not say.
♦ Barnaby grunting and chain clinking
Wilkins: That is Barnaby, offering his professional opinion of oxen. Tell me, Silas, you are a man who loves a weld and despises a lazy joint. What is the first thing a young fellow should look to when he buys a fitting?
Silas: Use your nose before your eyes, Doctor. If you smell solder fumes instead of flux, throw that fitting in the scrap bin. Bad metal and bad joints do not announce themselves, and a still is no place to learn it the hard way.
Wilkins: Ha! A sermon in one sentence, and better than any parson I have paid. Friends, Mr. Silas McAllister of Pittsfield, New Hampshire, master coppersmith. Give him a round of applause, and mind you keep it down, Barnaby is listening.
Silas: Thank you, Doctor. And thank you for keeping that bear out of the foundry.
Wilkins: The bear is a fine critic, Silas, but a poor apprentice. Now, a word from our sponsor, and then back to the craft.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, then a bright brass fanfare
Announcer: Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, friends and neighbors, one and all! Are you tired of a still that sulks like a mule in the mud? Are you weary of copper so thin it wobbles like a drunk on a Saturday? Then hear this, for I bring you the Flame-Flow Still, the flagship of Moonshine Stills, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960!
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♦ Wax cylinder crackle, then a short brass sting
Wilkins: Thank you, Announcer, you silver-tongued scoundrel. Now to the craft, friends, for tonight I mean to talk about copper and the sugar wash, since that is what the sleds were carrying.
Wilkins: Let us begin with the wash. A sugar wash is the simplest thing in the world, and I will tell it in an old man's plain words. You dissolve your sugar in warm water, warm, not hot, for hot water will kill the yeast and cold water will put it to sleep. A good ratio, as an old hand told me, is about two pounds of sugar to a gallon of water for a modest wash. Stir until the sugar is gone, let it cool to the temperature of a warm bath, and pitch your yeast.
Wilkins: Now here is a lesson the winter of 1864 taught me hard. Yeast hates the cold. A mash set out in an unheated shed in a Coos County January will sit there like a sulking mule and do nothing at all. The fermenter wants to be kept warm, near the stove but never on it, and wrapped in a blanket if you must. When the cold got into a fermenter that winter, the whole batch went dead and sour, and a man could curse until his beard froze and the yeast would not budge.
Wilkins: When the wash has done its work, which takes a week or so in a warm room, it is ready for the still. You charge the pot, you never fill it past two-thirds, for a boiling wash needs room to rise, and you bring it up slowly. Slowly, I say! A hard fire makes a poor spirit and a dangerous afternoon.
Wilkins: Now, the cuts. Hear me well, for this is the part that matters more than any other. When the spirit first comes off the still, it is the foreshots, and the heads right after. These carry methanol and harsh volatile compounds that can blind a man or kill him. They are thrown out, never drunk, never used as a mouth rinse, never anything but discarded. Then come the hearts, the clean middle of the run, the part worth the keeping. Last come the tails, which turn oily and bitter, and are set aside.
Wilkins: A sugar wash is a thin, neutral spirit, mind you, and it does not forgive a careless hand. The sugar does not make it safer, only quicker. The cuts must be made all the same, with a patient eye and a steady fire.
Wilkins: And fire, friends, fire is the great hazard of the still-house. Alcohol vapor is flammable, and a leaking still near an open flame has burned more log cabins than lightning. Keep your joints tight, keep your fire low, keep a bucket of water and a bucket of sand within arm's reach, and never leave the still unattended. I have seen a man's whole winter go up in a single bright whoosh, and I have no wish to see another.
Wilkins: One thing more. Never use lead solder, never use a salvaged radiator, never use any metal you do not know. Lead is a poison, and it will not announce itself. Use clean copper and sound joints, and let the craft do its work.
Wilkins: And I must remind you all, as I do every evening, that making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is illegal under United States law. Everything on this program is for historical and educational purposes only. Now, to a letter from the mail.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, then a rattle of paper
Wilkins: We have a voicemail tape tonight, delivered by a boy on a mule and played back on the fort's machine. It comes from Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and I will read it plain.
Wilkins: Rabbit asks: "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: Well, Rabbit, I will give your uncle half a medal and a half a lecture. Hickory and oak are good hardwoods, and their charcoal does adsorb some harsh compounds, that part is true. A good charcoal filter does real work in the proper place. But raw wood ash tossed into a boiling still charge or a thump keg will not remove methanol. Methanol has to be separated by throwing out the foreshots and heads, and nothing in a bucket of ashes will do that work for you.
Wilkins: Rabbit, your uncle puts ashes in his thump keg the way a preacher puts a coin in the plate: a fine gesture that proves nothing and cleans nobody's soul.
Wilkins: Now let me tell you what I have seen, for the hickory ash legend has a grisly side. A fellow I knew over in Epsom, a decent man with more faith than sense, tossed a shovel of hot ash into his thump keg one cold night to clean it. The ash was still glowing, the keg was hot, and the vapors found a spark. The whole thing went up with a whump you could hear in Pittsfield, and he lost his eyebrows, half his beard, and the roof of his shed in one bright instant. He walked about for a month with a face like a boiled ham and a very respectful attitude toward the cuts.
Wilkins: The honest cure for bad heads, Rabbit, is to cut them out and throw them away. That is all. No ash, no shavings, no swamp medicine. Cut clean, keep the hearts, discard the rest.
Wilkins: I will tell you this too. I have seen a man so frozen in a Coos County drift that when he thawed by the stove he sang two verses of a hymn he had meant to sing last Sunday. If you can thaw a man that far, you can certainly keep your thump keg free of foolish ash.
Wilkins: Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, thank you for the postcard, and give your uncle my regards and my warnings. Now, let me mark the occasion in the usual way.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There! "G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H." stamped clean on a copper cent, one for the mail bag and one for the fort. Keep it in your pocket, Rabbit, and think of me when you are tempted by ashes.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, then a short brass sting
Announcer: One more quick word, folks! Winter is long and the demonstration season is short, so equip yourself right! The Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960, heavy-gauge electrolytic copper, handcrafted to last. Go to moonshinestill.com and order yours today. That is moonshinestill.com! Back to the Doctor for the goodnights!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: That is our program for tonight, friends. Barnaby spent the winter of 1864 asleep and woke up in spring having missed a war, a tax, and a whole season of my complaining, and I envy him all three.
Wilkins: If you have a mind to learn the craft properly, with the cuts and the copper and the fire laid out plain, then I invite you to enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course, taught right here at Fort Wilkins, where I will show you the work with my own two hands, the bear permitting. Send a postcard to Fort Wilkins, Route 28, Pittsfield, New Hampshire, or inquire at the showroom.
Wilkins: Remember what Silas McAllister told us tonight: good copper sings, and a wise man listens to it. Our thanks to Mr. McAllister of Pittsfield, to Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, and to every one of you for listening.
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 fading out with antique warmth