Counterstamp Collectors Today
Dr. G. G. Wilkins looks at the new coin-collecting fever of the 1860s. He covers the 1857 Coinage Act, the first collectors' societies, and the gentlemen with magnifying glasses who now hunt his 'G. G. WILKINS / PITTSFIELD N.H.' mark, and he teaches listeners to tell a real hammer-struck counterstamp from a forgery. Then he tells the grisly tale of a Boston sharper who tried to steal his punch from under Barnaby's nose. Blue Ridge slang historian Clara Higgins brings new stories of mountain coin slang, a password penny and dime charms. After that comes a cider-brandy run with honest cuts, and Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg while busting the shake-bead myth over the anvil.
▶ Listen in the Radio Moonshine app
Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby! Settle your carcass down, you flea-bit sack of lard. That's the jar dripping, not the dinner bell. ... He's rattling that chain like a deacon rattles a collection box. Barnaby has two moods: asleep and fixing to eat somebody, and only one of them needs a priest.
♦ Bear grunt, chain drops slack against the log wall
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, you thirsty heathens, 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, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host, Doctor George G. Wilkins: tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor, and the only man in this county with two arrests and no regrets. Tonight we talk about money. Not making it, since I've never been much good at keeping it. We talk about collecting it: the gentlemen with brass spyglasses screwed into their eye sockets who've lately taken to hunting the little coins I hammered my name into. Counterstamp collectors, they call themselves. I call them lunatics with good manners. But first, a quick word.
♪ Brief bright banjo flourish
Announcer: Friends and neighbors, a quick word! The Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960, is hand-built from heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper for essential oils, herbal tinctures and traditional distillation demonstrations. See it at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28, or order direct at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Flourish ends
♪ Slow fiddle bridge, low and woody
Wilkins: Segment the first: the history. Gather close, because this is the part where you learn something, and Lord knows most of you need it.
Wilkins: It started in February of 1857. Congress, in its infinite wisdom and limited sobriety, passed a Coinage Act that killed off the old large cent. You know the coin: big fat copper disc, near the size of a half dollar, heavy enough to stun a squirrel at twenty paces. The half cent went to the grave with it. In their place the Mint struck a little copper-nickel cent with a flying eagle on its face, eighty-eight parts copper and twelve parts nickel, a coin so thin and pale it looks like it's been sick a fortnight.
Wilkins: Now here's the queer thing about the American: tell him a thing is going away and he'll suddenly love it like a dead mother. The moment those big coppers started vanishing, every clerk, schoolmaster and idle banker's son from Boston to Baltimore began combing his change for the old cents. Dates, varieties, the tilt of Liberty's curls. And that same Act of '57 ended the legal-tender standing of the Spanish silver, the old pillar pieces and reales we'd been spending in this country since before the Revolution. So in one stroke the government made two whole families of coin into curiosities, and curiosities breed collectors the way a manure pile breeds flies.
Wilkins: By '58 the gentlemen had organized. There's a society in New York, the American Numismatic Society they call it, founded that year. And in Philadelphia the Numismatic and Antiquarian Society, same year. Numismatic. It's a Greek word meaning a man who'll go hungry to own a penny he refuses to spend. That is a lunatic with a glass in his eye.
Wilkins: The granddaddy of them all is a Philadelphia fellow named Joseph Mickley. The story goes that Mickley was born in 1799 and wanted a cent from his birth year. Simple enough, you'd think. Except the 1799 cent is scarce as an honest revenue man, and he couldn't find one for love or money, so he kept hunting, and the hunting turned into a cabinet, and the cabinet turned into the most famous coin collection in America. That's how a disease starts, friends: one innocent little itch.
Wilkins: And there's Edward Cogan, also of Philadelphia, who started selling coins at auction in 1858, copper cents mainly, and is reckoned the first man in this country to make an honest living dealing in old money. An honest living dealing in money. I'll let that sit with you a moment while you consider your banker.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle swells, then settles
Wilkins: Now, where does old Wilkins come into it? Those big coppers made a fine billboard. A man running a store or a tavern or a tooth-pulling parlor could take a steel punch with his name cut into the end, lay a cent on the anvil, and strike. Bang! Now that coin is out in the world carrying his name to every pocket it passes through, a little copper drummer that never sleeps, never drinks and never asks for wages. Merchants have been doing it since the twenties and thirties. I did it at my anvil right here: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H.
Wilkins: A man's punch is only as good as how hard he drives it home, and I've had widows on the turnpike ask after the state of mine. I tell them it's tempered, polished, and been used on more coppers than the Concord jail has used on drunks.
Wilkins: And now, God help me, the coin men want them. I had a letter last month from a gentleman in Philadelphia offering three dollars, three dollars, for a cent I stamped. One cent. Bearing my name. Which I likely stamped while hung over, since I do my best smithing hung over. That makes my hangover the most valuable thing I ever produced, and I've produced eleven children's worth of trouble in this county.
♪ Banjo picks up, sly and quick
Wilkins: Segment the second: legends, outlaws and thieves. And this one is a thief. When word got around that my stamped coppers fetched coin-cabinet prices, I got a visitor. Spring of last year. A Boston fellow, waxed mustache like two drowned rat tails, checked trousers so loud you could hear them from the Suncook bridge, and a card reading 'Dealer in Antiquities and Rare Specie.' He wanted to buy my punch. Not the coins, mind you: the punch itself. Offered me eight dollars.
Wilkins: I knew straight off what he was about. A man who owns the punch can strike Wilkins coppers until doomsday and sell every one to some Philadelphia lunatic as the genuine article. So I told him the punch wasn't for sale and invited him to take his checked trousers back down Route 28 at whatever pace pleased him.
Wilkins: He took the trousers away. Then he brought them back. Two in the morning, three nights later. I heard the latch on my shop shutter go, the soft scrape of a fellow who thinks he's quiet, and I lay in my bunk grinning, because the shop window sits exactly eleven feet from Barnaby's chain stake, and Barnaby's chain is twelve feet long.
♦ Bear grunt, deep and slow, chain clinking
Wilkins: First thing I heard was the bear's breathing change. A bear asleep breathes like a bellows with the croup. A bear awake and interested breathes like a man about to say grace over a ham. Then a little squeak, like a mouse stepping on a tack. That was Boston, seeing two eyes the size of saucers come up out of the dark.
Wilkins: Barnaby took him by the seat. Not gently. Four hundred pounds of bear closes his jaw on a set of checked trousers and everything inside them, and he shakes, the way a terrier shakes a rat, side to side. I could hear it from my bed: cloth tearing like a sail in a gale, coins jingling out of the man's pockets, that Boston voice going up and up until it hit a note I've only heard from a pig at a slaughtering. And a wet, smacking noise I won't describe in full, except to say the bear got a mouthful of something that wasn't trousers.
Wilkins: By the time I got the lantern lit and came round with the ham bone, Barnaby had him pinned against the woodpile, licking his chops, and Boston was hanging off the logs with one boot on, half a coat, no trousers at all, and a backside that looked like a butcher's block on a Saturday. There was a bite out of his left haunch you could have set a teacup in. Blood down both legs, his long underwear in ribbons on the grass, and he had soiled himself so thoroughly that Barnaby, God bless him, backed off sneezing.
Wilkins: I traded the bear the ham bone for the man. Barnaby took the trade and spat the fellow's other boot onto the ground as though it was Boston-made, which it was. I'll admit the bear has better taste than half the Statehouse. I sewed up the Boston backside on my tooth-pulling chair with fishing silk and a curved needle, nine stitches, while he bawled for his mother and offered me forty dollars to stop. I charged him fifty. Then I pulled a cracked molar he'd split clenching his jaw during the ordeal, on the house, because I am at heart a charitable man.
Wilkins: He left Fort Wilkins lighter by a pound of meat and a ton of pride. And here's the kicker: in the grass by the woodpile the next morning I found eleven of my own stamped cents that had fallen out of his pockets. He'd been buying them up along the turnpike for a nickel apiece to sell in Boston. I stamped my name on them once, and Barnaby got them back for me a second time. That bear is a better banker than anybody in Concord.
♦ Bear grunt, satisfied
Wilkins: The sheriff arrested me twice for liquor and never once thought to arrest the punch, which did all the advertising. Well, enough of me. I've got company tonight, all the way up from the Blue Ridge of Virginia, a woman who knows every name for shine there ever was and some that oughtn't to be said in front of a mule. Miss Clara Higgins, welcome to Fort Wilkins.
Clara: Well, thank you, Doctor. I'll say your bear is bigger than they told me, and your stories are nastier, and I've enjoyed every bit of both.
Wilkins: Ha! A woman of taste. Now, Clara, you told me before we started that my coppers have wandered farther than I ever have.
Clara: They have, Doctor. Down in Floyd County, Virginia, there was a still way back up a hollow where you couldn't just walk in. Strangers got shot at, or worse, got sold bad liquor. Now, a tin peddler came through about '59 with one of your stamped Yankee cents in his poke, and the old man who ran the still took a shine to it. He'd never seen a coin with a man's name hammered on it. So he bought it off the peddler for a jar, and after that, the sign to get into that hollow was to show a cent with a name stamped on it. Folks called it the bear penny, on account of the peddler telling them about your Barnaby.
Wilkins: The bear penny! My cent was a password in Virginia? Clara, I've been arrested in my own county and honored in yours.
Clara: Oh, it got worse. Once word got around, every boy in the hollow was taking a nail and scratching his own name into a cent trying to pass as a stranger with the password. The old man had to go to a second sign, which was whistling a particular hymn wrong in a particular place.
Wilkins: Now that's security. A revenue man will learn your password, but he'll never learn to sing a hymn wrong the right way. Tell me about mountain money talk. I hear y'all have words for coin we don't use up here.
Clara: Oh, Lord, yes. Back home a jar didn't cost cents, it cost fips and levies. A fip was the Spanish half real, worth about six and a quarter cents. The old folks called it a fippenny bit. A levy was the full real, about twelve and a half cents, an elevenpenny bit in the old Pennsylvania reckoning, shortened down to levy. A good jar of persimmon brandy in my granddaddy's time was two levies and a fip, and you'd better have exact change, because nobody up that hollow had made change since Washington.
Wilkins: A fip and a levy. Sounds like a Concord law firm, and they'd charge you about the same for nothing.
Clara: Ha! And here's the thing, Doctor. When Congress said in '57 that Spanish silver was no longer legal tender, the mountains didn't hear about it for years. Or they heard and didn't care. My granddaddy was still pricing liquor in fips and levies at the start of the war. A man would hand him a Yankee dime and he'd scowl at it like it was a sick pup and say, now how many fips is that?
Wilkins: God love him. Now, I hear you've got a family story about silver dimes that's stranger than anything my bear's done.
Clara: My great-uncle Ransom. He was a granny-doctor of sorts, a man who doctored folks with roots and charms. He'd take a silver dime, drill a hole in it with a hot awl, and string it on a thread round your ankle. That was to keep off conjure, which is witchery, and he claimed it'd tell you if your shine was poison. If you drank from a bad jar, he said, the dime on your ankle would turn black by morning.
Wilkins: And did it?
Clara: Every dime he ever hung turned black eventually, Doctor, because silver tarnishes on sweaty skin no matter what you drink. Uncle Ransom took that as proof that everybody in Floyd County was drinking poison, which, to be fair, some of them were. But I'll tell your listeners plain: a dime on your ankle never saved anybody. If the jar's bad, you'll be blind before the silver knows a thing.
Wilkins: Clara, your great-uncle put dimes on ankles; around here we put them in the collection plate, and both do about the same good for a poisoned man. Now, you warned me about something that'll matter to these new coin-cabinet gentlemen.
Clara: I did. Over in Patrick County, there was a persimmon-brandy man called Asa Pruitt. Made the finest persimmon brandy on the Dan River and couldn't spell his own name. He wanted his coins to say who he was, the way yours do, but he hadn't a steel punch. So he'd heat a horseshoe nail red in the forge and hammer it into a copper, line by line, making an A and a P, crooked as a dog's hind leg. Paid off his debts with them. And now I'm hearing that city collectors find those scratched-up coppers and think they're some grand old merchant's mark, and pay good money for what's just Asa signing his liquor bill.
Wilkins: So there's a lesson. A real punch strikes all at once and the letters sink together, clean-walled. A nail scratch goes in a stroke at a time, every line a different depth. Gentlemen collectors, mind Asa Pruitt.
Clara: Mind him. And one more, if you'll let me. My grandmother kept a teacup under a loose floorboard full of stamped coins, every one that came through the hollow with a name on it. Store tokens, cents with a doctor's name, one with a Baltimore oyster house. She said that cup was a better ledger than any book in the county. She could pick up a coin and tell you the peddler who brought it, the year, and what he'd bought with it. When she passed, my mother found forty-one coins in it, and a slip of paper telling who brought each one.
Wilkins: Now that's a collector worth a hundred spyglass gentlemen. She wasn't hunting rarities. She was keeping company with every man who passed. Clara, you're a treasure, and you can stay through the next segment as long as you stay clear of the bear.
Clara: Doctor, I've met mountain men meaner than your bear. I'll take my chances.
♦ Bear grunt, offended
♪ Brassy, galloping banjo vamp for the advertisement
Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen! Step right up and lend me your ears! Are you tired of thin, dented, leaking kettles that rattle like a tinker's cart and sour every batch you put through them? Then hear me now! If you appreciate authentic American craftsmanship, look no further than Moonshine Stills, proud home of the Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960! The Flame-Flow is engineered from heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper, refined pure as a mountain spring, with precision CNC-machined brass unions that seat tight as a drum, so there are no lead joints and no doubtful scrap metal. Its shape is built to maximize convective circulation, gentle, even, rolling heat, and deliver unmatched purity for essential oils, herbal tinctures and traditional distillation demonstrations. Handcrafted! Pure copper! Built to last a lifetime and the next one after! All for just eight hundred and ninety-nine dollars! Visit moonshinestill.com, that's moonshinestill.com, slash products, slash flame-flow-copper-still: https://moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still. Or come see it with your own eyes at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, where the Doctor himself will show you the copper, and the bear will show you the door! Don't wait! Order your Flame-Flow today at moonshinestill.com!
♪ Vamp ends on a bright fiddle stab
♪ Low, warm fiddle drone
Wilkins: Segment the third: copper and the craft. Since we've talked coin all night, let me say plainly: do not melt down cents to build a still. The old large cents were near enough pure copper, but the little copper-nickel ones are twelve parts nickel, and these new bronze cents from '64 are near ninety-five parts copper with tin and zinc thrown in. That's alloy, not still metal, and you'll spend a fortune in pennies to make a kettle worse than a sheet of proper copper from the mill. Whatever you build with, use clean, pure sheet copper, and no lead solder, ever. Lead will poison a man slow and sure.
Wilkins: Here's a thing the coin men never think on. Copper wears away in a still. The sulfur in the vapor eats at the metal where it strikes hardest, in the head and the neck of the arm, and over the years an old still grows thin there like the elbow of a parson's coat. That thinning is the copper doing its job, taking the stink out of your spirit and keeping it on the metal. I've seen a twenty-year still in Barnstead you could read a newspaper through at the neck. When the copper wears thin, patch it or retire it. Don't trust it under fire.
Wilkins: Keep it bright, too. Common vinegar and a fist of salt, rubbed on with a rag, will take tarnish off copper quick as you like. Rinse it well afterward. Bright copper works. Dull copper loafs.
Wilkins: Now, since this is history and education and nothing more, let me walk you through how an old New England cider brandy run went in the old days. Mind you, the law says making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is not allowed, and all of this is for history and learning.
Wilkins: Step one: you start with hard cider, fermented out dry, apples pressed in the fall, the juice left in barrels in a cool cellar until it stops working, a few weeks, sometimes all winter. Hard cider runs weak, maybe six or seven parts in a hundred spirit.
Wilkins: Step two: you charge your copper pot, never more than two-thirds full, so there's room for the boil to roll without puking into the arm.
Wilkins: Step three: low fire. Low and steady. A hot, quick fire scorches the lees and drives everything over in a mess. You'll know you're close when the cap warms and the first drops come down the worm.
Wilkins: Step four, and I'll pull your tooth personally if you skip it: the cuts. Set out a row of small jars, numbered, a dozen or two, so you can see the run change. The first little bit off the worm, the foreshots, you throw out, every drop. Pour it on the ground. Then come the heads: sharp, solvent stink, like glue, or the pear-drop candies at the fair. That's acetone and ethyl acetate and their cousins, and mixed in among them is the methanol, which blinds and kills. And here's the hard truth: you can't smell methanol for certain. It hides in the heads. So you don't keep a jar because it smells passable. You throw out the early run by measure, and generously, and you never drink it, never rub it on a gum, never give it to a neighbor.
Wilkins: Then the hearts, sweet and clean, smelling of apple and warm cellar. That's what the work's for. Then the tails, oily, wet cardboard and wet dog, which old makers set aside to run again with the next charge.
Wilkins: Step five: mind your fire and your air. Alcohol vapor is heavier than air. It'll creep along the floor like a snake looking for a hen-house and find your stove, your lantern, the coal in your pipe, and the whole shed goes up with you inside it. Keep the place open and aired, no open flame near any leak, and never walk away from a running still. Not for supper, not for a sweetheart, not for the sheriff.
Clara: Back home, Doctor, they'd say the still wants a sitter like a baby wants a mama. Walk off and it'll cry, and when a still cries, it burns.
Wilkins: Truer words. Thank you, Clara.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Segment the fourth: myths, slang and the mail. We've got a voicemail on the call-in line. Let me roll the tape.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a scratchy recording begins
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?
♦ Recording clicks off
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Rabbit, your uncle's not the first to swear by it, and he won't be the last to be wrong about it. Let's take his two medicines one at a time.
Wilkins: Hickory ash. What's hickory ash? Ask your mother, Rabbit: it's what you leach with water to make lye for soap. Hardwood ash is strongly alkaline. It'll burn your hands, blind your eyes if it splashes, and eat a pig's carcass down to bones in a kettle if you let it. Now, could a little alkali in the keg tame some of the sour acid that comes over in a sloppy run? Perhaps a mite, and that's likely where the notion came from: a man threw in ash, the jar tasted less sour, and he called it a cure. But methanol isn't an acid, and lye doesn't touch it. Hickory ash in a thump keg is lye-soap for your liquor: you'd come out of the jar cleaner on the outside and deader on the inside.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Red oak shavings. Now that's a different animal. Oak gives up tannin and color and a woody taste, the same as a barrel does slow, and red oak is a rougher, more open-grained wood than the white oak a cooper prefers. So your uncle's jar came out golden and tasting of the woods, and he figured he'd cleaned it. He didn't clean a thing. He dressed it. Red oak shavings in the keg are like rouge on a corpse: a fine color, but he's still dead. The only way to get rid of bad heads is never to keep them. Throw out the foreshots and the heads.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Clara: We had men back home who did the same, Doctor. They'd call that oak-dressed liquor 'barn-painted.' Pretty on the outside, rotten in the rafters.
Wilkins: Barn-painted! I'm stealing that, Clara, and I'll stamp it on a coin. Now, one more myth while I've got the punch hot: the shake-bead. Every man at every tavern from here to Wilkesboro will shake a jar, look at the bubbles, and pronounce it good. Big beads that hang there, strong. Little beads that vanish fast, weak. And there's a grain of truth in it: the bead tells you, roughly, about strength. Roughly. But it tells you nothing, nothing, about whether the stuff will kill you. Methanol beads. A jar full of heads will bead as pretty as the finest hearts. A shake-bead tells you what's in the jar about as well as a man's Sunday coat tells you what's in his heart.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, ring fading
Wilkins: There. Four coins stamped while we talked, and every one goes to Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro. Rabbit, I'm mailing you a G. G. Wilkins copper, struck on air tonight, hammer-fresh. Don't sell it to a Philadelphia lunatic for three dollars. Hold out for four. And tell your uncle he's welcome at Fort Wilkins any time, as long as he leaves his ashes at home and brings his own ham bone for the bear.
Wilkins: And for you coin-cabinet gentlemen out there, here's your free lesson. A true hammer-struck counterstamp often shows on the back of the coin: a flat spot or a soft spot opposite the punch, because the anvil pushes back where the steel drives in. Every hand-cut punch has its little quirks, a letter a hair crooked, a serif nicked, and they show on every coin struck with it, so lay your coin beside one you know is good. If the letters are too perfect, too even, too fresh, be suspicious. And if you find my mark on a coin dated after they bury me, either it's a forgery or I've learned a trick in Hell worth knowing. Which letter on my punch carries the flaw, I'll not say. A man's got to keep a few secrets from the Boston sharpers.
Clara: Doctor, I'll take that secret back to Virginia and tell no one, except maybe my grandmother's teacup.
Wilkins: Your grandmother's teacup is welcome to it. Clara Higgins, thank you for coming all the way north. You're the finest thing to come up Route 28 since the Concord stage stopped losing wheels.
Clara: Thank you, Doctor. And Barnaby, I'll miss you least of all.
♦ Bear grunt, unbothered
♪ Brief bright banjo flourish
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! The Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper, hand-built for essential oils, herbal tinctures and traditional demonstrations. Visit the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield, or order direct at moonshinestill.com. Moonshinestill.com!
♪ Flourish ends
♪ Parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme returns, soft and warm
Wilkins: That's the hour, friends. If tonight's talk of cuts and copper has you hungry for more, sign on for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you the history, the metallurgy, the cuts and the safety of the old craft, every lesson in the open and lawful, and nobody gets bit, unless they've earned it. My punch has struck more copper than a Lowell mill girl has struck bobbins, and it never once asked for a raise, and I've pulled teeth that were worth more than the coins the patients paid me with. I stamped the coins anyway, so they'd remember who robbed whom.
Wilkins: So check your change, mind your fire, and if you find a cent with my name on it, think kindly of an old dentist and his bear.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♦ Wax cylinder crackle fades to silence