The Large Cent's Last Years
Dr. G. G. Wilkins explains why the big copper large cent died. He covers its weight cut in 1795, the copper shortage that left no cents dated 1815, the Act of February 21, 1857, and the Flying Eagle and bronze Indian Head cents that replaced it. He also tells how Barnaby caught a traveling counterfeiter of cast cents. Blue Ridge slang historian Clara Higgins explains the phrase 'red cent' and tells new family stories about a storekeeper who hoarded coppers in a churn and a funeral that went wrong. Wilkins then covers copper still-craft and why fruit brandies need careful cuts, debunks the penny-in-the-jar poison test, and answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg.
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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 your hairy carcass down. That is a chipmunk, not a revenue man. You ate the last revenue man's hat, and you have been breaking wind pure felt ever since. Lie down, you four-hundred-pound sack of bad decisions.
♦ Bear grunts once, chain drags across frozen dirt, a heavy body flops down
Wilkins: Thank you. Same to you, sir.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, sinners, and any Merrimack County deputy pressing his ear to the knothole in my wall. 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, New Hampshire. I am your host, Doctor George G. Wilkins: tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor, stamper of coin, and a man the county sheriff has introduced to the inside of his jail twice and regretted both times. Tonight we hold a funeral for the big copper, the old large cent. It was the coin that bought your grandfather's tobacco, held your grandmother's eyelids shut, and took my punch better than any coin ever struck. Why did Americans give up a coin you could stop a door with? Stay and find out.
♪ Theme swells, then fades under crackle
Announcer: A quick word, friends! The Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960 and hammered out of heavy-gauge pure copper, is the flagship of Moonshine Stills! Order yours at moonshinestill.com, or call at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield!
♦ Wax crackle, a log shifts in the stove
♪ Short fiddle sting, segment bumper
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. The Large Cent's Last Years.
Wilkins: Hold one up to the lamp with me, friends.
♦ A heavy copper coin dropped onto a pine table, a deep wobbling spin before it settles
Wilkins: Hear that? A sound with some self-respect. The United States large cent was first struck in 1793, and those first ones weighed 208 grains of copper, nearly half an ounce. In 1795 Congress cut it to 168 grains, the only time in history the government took less of anything. It stayed at 168 grains until the day it died. It had heft, like a farm wife's hand on the back of your neck in church. Put ten of them in your trouser pocket and every woman on Main Street assumes you are a more prosperous man than you are.
Wilkins: Here is a fact to win you a drink at the tavern in Barnstead. There is no large cent dated 1815. Not one. During the War of 1812 the British blockade cut off the copper planchets, the blank discs, that our Mint had been buying from Matthew Boulton's works in Birmingham, England. So for a whole year America struck no cents, and Pittsfield hardly noticed, because Pittsfield has never had one anyhow.
Wilkins: Then copper started to climb. By the 1850s the metal in one large cent cost the Mint close to a full cent, and at times more, once you added rolling, cutting, striking, and the wages of the men in Philadelphia who think a hard day's work is lifting a pen. A copper that costs more than a cent to make is like a son-in-law: the more you put into him, the less he is worth. The merchants hated them too. A storekeeper in Concord would get paid three dollars in coppers, and by the time he counted three hundred of the damned things his customer had died, remarried, and come back for more molasses. Banks would not touch them by the bushel. And down South and out West the people trading in Spanish silver bits looked at our big red cent like a cow looks at a church organ.
Wilkins: So came the Act of February 21, 1857. Congress abolished the large cent, and the poor little half cent with it, and authorized a small cent of 72 grains, eighty-eight parts copper and twelve parts nickel. The same act ended the legal-tender standing of Spanish and other foreign silver, those worn-down reales and pistareens we had all been making change with since the Revolution. The Mint, under its Director, Mister James Ross Snowden, traded the new Flying Eagle cent for old coppers and old Spanish silver, and folks lined up at the Philadelphia Mint like it was a free hanging with cake after.
Wilkins: The Flying Eagle was struck for circulation in 1857 and 1858, and then Mister Longacre gave us the Indian Head cent in 1859. A handsome coin, but so light a man's purse feels like it has been gelded. Then the war came. Every man, woman, and Baptist in the Union hid their hard money in the mattress, and merchants struck their own penny tokens by the millions, until Washington made private one- and two-cent coins against the law on June 8, 1864. That spring, by the Act of April 22, 1864, they made the cent thinner yet: bronze, 48 grains, ninety-five parts copper with tin and zinc. The same act gave us the two-cent piece with 'In God We Trust' stamped on it, which I take to mean the Treasury no longer trusts anybody else.
Wilkins: And here is the last joke on the big copper. The minute it stopped being money, people started collecting it. The American Numismatic Society was founded in New York in 1858. Gentlemen in silk waistcoats now pay a dollar for a cent they would not have bent down to pick up out of a horse stall ten years ago. Barnaby collects coins too, and his collection is kept in the one cabinet no numismatist on earth wants to open.
♦ Bear grunts outside, chain clinks
Wilkins: He heard me. Sensitive about his digestion.
♪ Banjo bumper, quick and ornery
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Legends, Outlaws, and the Counterfeit Professor.
Wilkins: Every coin that dies leaves a crowd of crooks behind it, like crows on a dead ox. In the summer of 1858, when the big cents were still passing hand to hand up here and the Flying Eagle was a rumor, a peddler came up the turnpike from the Gilmanton side in a red-wheeled wagon. He called himself Professor Lucius Fogg. He was a professor all right: he professed to be honest, and his coins professed to be copper. He sold liniment, Bibles, and ladies' garters, all from the same crate, which tells you something about the ladies of Gilmanton.
Wilkins: He bought a jar of my best and a bag of horse nails and paid me in big coppers, twenty-three of them, counted out real slow onto my anvil. Now, I have hammered copper since I was tall enough to be burned by it. Copper has a nose, a color, and a voice. These cents were too even in their wear, too greasy in the hand, and they had the color of a boiled turnip somebody painted red. So I picked one up and rang it on the anvil horn.
♦ A dull, dead clack of metal on steel, no ring
Wilkins: That is the sound of a liar. Now a true large cent.
♦ Bright, singing ring of struck copper on the anvil horn, humming away
Wilkins: Hear the difference? Struck copper sings. Cast lead and brass sit there like a drunk in a pew. The professor had poured his own cents in a sand mold behind some barn in Belknap County. I told him so, kindly, with the forceps in my hand. He grabbed his sack and ran, and he ran the wrong direction, straight past the still-house window.
♦ Chain snaps taut, a bear's roar, a man's high scream
Wilkins: Barnaby had been dozing in the dirt the way a deacon dozes through a sermon, one eye half open for the collection plate. He swatted the sack first. It split, and cents flew across the yard like grapeshot. Then he got the professor's left calf, just below the knee. He bit into it like a deacon biting a pickled egg when he thinks the minister isn't looking. There was a wet, tearing sound like ripping old sailcloth, then a pop, and the professor's boot came off with his foot still trying to be in it. Barnaby stood there chewing a mouthful of trouser wool and Gilmanton calf meat, with a look on his face as though it needed salt. The professor howled in a key I have only heard from a fox in a trap and a Methodist choir in January.
Wilkins: Being a professional man, I stitched him up. I poured clear spirit on the wound, and he screamed a hymn in reverse. I sewed him with waxed fiddle string, the only time that string ever made a man sing on key. Then I sent for the sheriff, which is a thing I do not do lightly, as the sheriff and I have a history. He arrived, looked at the professor, looked at the bear, looked at me, and said, 'Wilkins, I have finally found a man worse than you.' I took it as a compliment.
Wilkins: The epilogue is not for the dinner table, so put your fork down. Barnaby had swallowed some of those cents. Over the next week I followed him to the woodpile every morning with a stick and a tin plate and fished out eleven counterfeit coppers. It was the only time lead money came out the far end of a bear worth less than when it went in. I keep them in a jar on the shelf, labeled 'Evidence, Twice Processed.'
♦ Bear snorts, a low contented rumble
Wilkins: Now, I have with me a lady who came all the way up from the Blue Ridge of Virginia by rail, coach, and a stagecoach driver she has threatened to geld twice since Manchester. She knows every name a mountain man ever gave his liquor and every coin he paid for it with. Please welcome Missus Clara Higgins.
Clara: Thank you, Doctor. I'll say this: your stagecoach driver drives like he's being paid by the pothole, and your bear smells like a wet Baptist.
Wilkins: He was baptized in the Suncook, ma'am, against his will and mine. Tonight we are burying the big copper cent. What did your mountain people call it?
Clara: Well, everybody everywhere said 'not worth a red cent,' and that's on account of the copper's color. A red cent was the bottom of the purse. But in my family the big copper was a 'mule's eye.' Hold one up and tell me it don't look like a mule fixing to kick you.
Wilkins: It does. Brown, round, and full of grievance.
Clara: That's just our family word, mind you, not something you'll find in a Philadelphia dictionary. But there was a stillman at a crossroads in our hollow, back in the fifties, who made wild persimmon brandy. You wait for the first frost, gather the fruit soft as a sinner's resolve, mash it and let it work. He priced his brandy at 'two mule's eyes a dram.' And he wouldn't take silver for a dram. Said silver was for weddings and lawyers, and he didn't want to be mixed up in either one.
Wilkins: A man of principle. What happened to the mule's eyes in your valley when the Flying Eagle came along?
Clara: Oh, that's my favorite. There was a storekeeper down the valley, a skinflint so tight he could make a cent scream. In 1857 a drover came through with a fistful of the new little cents, and the storekeeper wouldn't take them. Called them 'bird money' and 'Philadelphia tin.' Said if God meant a cent to be small He'd have made the storekeeper's customers smaller. He went on taking only the old coppers for years, every one he could get.
Wilkins: And where did he keep them, a bank?
Clara: A bank! No sir. When he died his kin tore up the floorboards because the house smelled like an old church bell. Under the counter was a butter churn, a big cedar churn, packed solid with mule's eyes. Near nine thousand cents, by my granny's count. They couldn't lift it. It took two mules to haul it down to the ford, and halfway across the creek one mule just sat down in the water. Wouldn't budge. My granny always said that mule knew exactly what it was pulling, and it took offense.
Wilkins: A storekeeper who keeps nine thousand cents under the floor is not a miser, he is a one-man United States Mint with worse manners. And that mule sat down in the creek like a Concord selectman sitting on a public question. Did they ever get it across?
Clara: Unloaded it a bucket at a time and carried it over by hand, and every cousin in the county showed up to help, which is how about three hundred of those cents never made it to the other bank.
Wilkins: Family is family. Now, the old cents had one more duty, and you have a story about it, I am told.
Clara: I do, and it's a wicked one, so I'll tell it quick before the preacher gets wind of it. In the mountains we laid coins on the eyes of the dead to keep the lids shut until the body set. And the big copper was the coin for it: heavy, wide, and it stayed put. My great-great-uncle was a wild-forager, ginseng and sang root and persimmons, and he died with his boots on in a cold snap. They laid him out in the front room with two big coppers on his eyes.
Wilkins: I can feel this going somewhere.
Clara: A cousin of ours, sorry as a three-legged dog, got to thinking those two big coppers were worth more to the living, so he swapped them for two of the new little Flying Eagles. Light as a moth's wing. Well, it was a warm room, full of people and a hot stove and a good deal of persimmon brandy, and along about the second hymn the old man's left eyelid crept up. Slow, like a window shade. And the Flying Eagle slid right off and rolled under the bench, and there's Uncle staring at the song leader with one eye wide open.
Wilkins: Lord have mercy.
Clara: The song leader went backward over the bench like he'd been shot, and the hymn ended in a word you don't find in the hymnal. My great-granny marched straight over to that cousin, turned his pockets out, found the two mule's eyes, and slapped them back on Uncle herself. Said, 'There. A man ought to be buried with his own money.'
Wilkins: A dead man winking at his own funeral is the most honest thing ever to happen in a Methodist meetinghouse. Clara, you talk so pretty I would let you pull my teeth, and I am the one who usually does the pulling around here.
Clara: Doctor, I've seen your hands. I'd sooner let the bear do it.
Wilkins: The bear charges less, I'll give him that. Stay with us, Clara. When we come back we talk copper and craft, and I want your persimmons in it.
Clara: I'll be right here, keeping one eye on that window.
♦ Bear grunt, chain clink
♪ Brassy medicine-show fanfare, banjo and tambourine
Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, gather 'round! Are you tired of cheap kettles that sour your tinctures and stink up your parlor like a dead skunk in a rain barrel? Then hear this! Moonshine Stills, the proud home of the Flame-Flow Still, its flagship, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960! If you appreciate authentic American craftsmanship, look no further! The Flame-Flow is engineered from heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper, the same honest red metal Doctor Wilkins swears by, finished with precision CNC-machined brass unions that seal tight and true! Its design maximizes convective circulation, so heat rolls through the charge evenly to deliver unmatched purity for essential oils, herbal tinctures, and traditional distillation demonstrations! A fine piece of copper for a parlor, a workshop, or a lecture hall! And the price? Only eight hundred ninety-nine dollars for a still built to outlast its owner! Now don't dawdle. Go straight to moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still to order your Flame-Flow today! That's moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still! Or come see the copper for yourself at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. Mind the bear!
♪ Fanfare button
♦ Wax crackle
♪ Low fiddle drone, segment bumper
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the Craft.
Wilkins: Some of you are thinking, 'Doc, the old cent is near-pure copper, and copper is what a still wants. Why not melt a bushel of mule's eyes and pour myself a pot?' Melting cents to build a still is like pulling your teeth to make a necklace: possible, but a damned fool way to spend your mouth. A still is not cast, it is rolled and hammered from sheet, worked cold and annealed hot until it bends to your will like a deputy at a church supper. Cast copper is porous and brittle and will weep at the seams. And the new bronze cent of 1864 has tin and zinc in it, so you would not even get pure metal. Buy sheet from an honest mill. Join it with rivets and silver solder or a good mechanical union, never lead. And remember that making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States. Everything I say here is history and education, so the sheriff can sleep on his good ear.
Wilkins: Now, the method, start to finish, the way it was done at a country still-house.
♦ Iron spoon scraping the bottom of a kettle
Wilkins: One. Corn is starch, and yeast cannot eat starch any more than Barnaby can eat a hymnal, though he has tried. You cook the cracked corn in water, let it cool to roughly a hundred and fifty degrees, and stir in malted barley or corn you have sprouted and dried. The malt turns that starch into sugar. Hold it warm a good while, stirring, until it tastes sweet on your finger.
Wilkins: Two. Cool the mash below ninety degrees before you add the yeast, or you will cook the little devils alive. Let it work four days to a week in a warm, airy place. That fermentation throws off a heavy gas that will settle in a closed cellar and kill you, so give it air. What you have at the end is a sour, low beer called the wash.
Wilkins: Three. Strain it and charge the pot no more than three-quarters full, so it cannot foam over into the worm. Never seal a still tight. Vapor must always have a free road to the condenser, or the pot becomes a bomb with a copper hat. Run the fire low and patient. A hot fire pukes mash into your spirit and scorches the bottom.
Wilkins: Four, the cuts, which is where honest men and fools part company. The first drips are the foreshots, and you throw them on the ground. Then come the heads. They smell sharp and solvent-like, of acetaldehyde and acetic ether, along with wood spirit. Methanol boils at about a hundred forty-eight degrees and our good ethanol at about a hundred seventy-three, and the early run is where the nastiest of it gathers. You throw away the heads too, every time, with no regret. A man who drinks the foreshots is a man who has decided that being blind is cheaper than spectacles. Then come the hearts, sweet and clean, and you keep them. Last come the tails, oily and wet-dog, which you set aside to run again.
Wilkins: Clara, your persimmons. Tell them why fruit is trickier.
Clara: Fruit's got pectin, Doctor, the stuff that makes a jelly set. Pectin breaks down into wood spirit, so a persimmon or apple or peach mash carries a good deal more methanol than plain corn ever will. My people knew it the hard way. Fruit brandy wants a wide, generous heads cut, and you don't get greedy.
Wilkins: Exactly so. Fruit brandy carries more wood spirit than corn, so the persimmon man has to cut his heads like a dentist with a grudge, wide and without apology.
Clara: My granddaddy said any man who saves his fruit heads to sell is a man who's fixing to meet his customers again at a funeral.
Wilkins: Five, and here is copper's secret. Hot vapor carries sulfur stinks out of the mash, the rotten-egg kind. Bright copper grabs that sulfur and holds it on its own skin as a dark deposit, so it never reaches your jar. Copper is a sacrifice, friends. But that skin goes dull, so after every run you rinse, scrub with vinegar and salt, rinse again thoroughly, and dry. Never let green crust fall into anything you would put in your mouth.
Wilkins: Six, fire. Alcohol vapor burns. Keep the collecting jar well away from the flame, never stand over a leaking joint with a lantern, keep a bucket of sand and a bucket of water by the door, and never walk away from a running still, not for a woman, not for a fiddle, not even to throw a ham bone to the bear.
♦ Bear grunts hopefully
Wilkins: No ham, Barnaby. Go to sleep.
♪ Banjo bumper, rolling
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths, Slang, and the Call-In Tape.
Wilkins: I have a recorded message on the cylinder from the Carolina hills. Roll it, boy.
♦ Cylinder machine whir, heavier crackle, a faint telegraph-wire hiss
Wilkins: This is Mister Cletus Miller, called 'Rabbit', of Wilkesboro, North Carolina.
Cletus: Alchemist, my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?
♦ Cylinder clicks off
Wilkins: Rabbit, God bless you and God bless your uncle, who sounds like the kind of man who fixes a leaky roof by praying at it. Let me take the two halves separately, and I'll strike a cent for each truth.
Wilkins: The hickory ashes first. Soak wood ash in water and you have lye, potash, the same stuff your grandmother boiled with fat to make soap. It is a caustic alkali that will take the skin off your knuckles and the sight out of your eye if you splash it. Now there is a crumb of truth here. Alkali will neutralize some of the sour acids in a wash that has turned, and an old-timer who tasted a little less vinegar in his run might think he had worked a miracle. But it does nothing at all to the wood spirit. The methanol does not care about ashes.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Truth number one, stamped: ashes do not clean out heads.
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Oak gives spirit tannin, color, and a woody taste, the same as a barrel does in a year, only rougher and quicker. Tossed into a thump keg, they will tint it and flavor it. That is seasoning, Rabbit, not cleaning. Red oak shavings give your spirit color the way a new waistcoat gives a horse thief character.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Truth number two, stamped: oak is flavor, not medicine.
Wilkins: And the real question, the bad heads. There is one way to be rid of bad heads, and it is to catch them in a separate jar and throw them away, foreshots first and heads after, every run. No ash, no bark, no Bible verse, no rabbit's foot will do it for you. Your uncle's ashes in the thump keg are like a hymnbook in a bawdy house: nice to have around, but it doesn't change what goes on.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Truth number three, stamped: cuts are the only cure. Rabbit Miller, of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, this is the best question we have had all winter. I am setting aside a fresh counterstamped G. G. Wilkins Pittsfield cent with your name on the paper it's wrapped in. Give your uncle my regards, and keep him away from the lye bucket.
Clara: Doctor, can I add one myth from my side of the mountain? It's about cents.
Wilkins: The floor is yours, and it is cleaner than usual.
Clara: Folks back home swear that if you drop a copper cent in a jar of liquor and it turns green, the liquor's poison. And if it stays red, it's safe to drink.
Wilkins: Oh, I have heard that one in every tavern from Epsom to Alton. Let me break it on the anvil. Copper turns green with verdigris when it meets acid. Vinegar will green a penny, and so will sour cider, sour mash, and the sweat of a nervous deputy. A penny turning green in your jar proves your spirit is sour, which I could have told you by the look on your face. It does not detect wood spirit, and it does not detect lead. A jar of pure poison can leave your penny bright as a bride, and a jar of honest cider can turn it green as a frog.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Myth busted and stamped. The penny is not a doctor. I am the doctor, and I charge more.
Clara: And you're less use, too.
Wilkins: The lady has a mouth like a dull scalpel: it hurts more and takes longer. Clara Higgins, thank you for coming north among us heathens.
Clara: Thank you, Doctor. You keep that bear fed and your coins honest, and come down to the Blue Ridge sometime. I'll feed you persimmon pudding and let the mule's-eye storekeeper's ghost count your change.
Wilkins: I'll bring my own cents. The Merrimack sheriff has arrested me twice, and both times he has left with the same souvenir: a hangover and a counterstamped cent he swears he will never spend.
♦ Bear grunt, chain clink
Announcer: Before you go, friends, a quick word! The Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, is heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper built to last a lifetime! Order today at moonshinestill.com, or visit the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield!
♪ Parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme returns, soft and warm
Wilkins: That about does it for the old big copper, friends. Born in 1793, shaved down in 1795, starved by the British in 1815, priced out of its own skin by the fifties, and put in the ground by Congress in 1857. Now it lives in collectors' cabinets, in churns under storekeepers' floors, on dead men's eyelids, and in my bear's digestion. If you have a few in a jar, keep them. Your grandchildren will curse you if you spend them.
Wilkins: If you want to learn the old craft properly, the copper, the mash, the cuts, the fire, and how not to kill yourself or your neighbors, then enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I teach the history, the metallurgy, and the safe handling of the cuts the way an honest smith should, and I promise to pull no teeth during the lessons unless asked. And mind the law: making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is illegal. Everything on this program is for history and education.
Wilkins: My thanks to Clara Higgins of the Blue Ridge, to Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, and to Barnaby, who did his part in the evidence.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle grows louder
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 cylinder hiss