Brass in the Pocket: Trade Tokens and Local Money in the Suncook Valley
When hard money vanished during the Civil War, New Hampshire hill towns kept trading with brass tokens, store cards, potash and butter, and moonshiners took payment in all of it. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins tells the history of local money from Pine Tree shillings to the 1864 token ban. He also explains how hickory ash and red oak change what happens in a copper still's thump keg. Retired revenue officer Captain Donald Vance adds a warning about a lead-soldered still found by following a trail of lead drink-tokens, a hidden danger in old-time distilling.
In this episode
- Civil War store cards and patriotic tokens, and why Congress banned private pennies in 1864
- Pine Tree shillings, Spanish bits, and where the phrase 'two bits' comes from
- Hard Times tokens from the 1830s and the Andrew Jackson jackass satire
- Country store book accounts paid in potash, butter, and maple sugar in Pittsfield, NH
- Lead drink-tokens that led to a poisonous lead-soldered moonshine still
- Hickory ash and red oak in the thump keg: potash chemistry and porous oak grain
- Busting the coin-biting and blue-flame moonshine myths at the blacksmith's anvil
- Counterstamped copper cents used as ads, and a counterfeiter who cast tokens from melted spoons
Dr. G. G. Wilkins explains how small New England towns kept trading when hard money ran short. He covers Pine Tree shillings, Spanish bits, Hard Times tokens, country-store book accounts paid in potash and butter, and the flood of Civil War store cards that Congress banned in 1864. Retired revenue officer Captain Donald Vance tells new stories: a trail of lead drink-tokens that led him to a poisonous lead-soldered still, a tavern wife's 'GOOD FOR NOTHING' tokens, and a logging shanty insulated with camp scrip. Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ashes and red oak in the thump keg with the chemistry of potash and the porous grain of red oak, then knocks down the coin-biting and blue-flame myths at 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 your hairy carcass down. You rattle that chain once more and I'll pay you in brass tokens instead of ham, and you'll learn what it's like to be a mill hand on the Suncook. Stop looking at the jar. Don't you look at the jar, you black-bottomed, flea-farming tax assessor.
♦ Bear huffs wetly, chain drops into the dirt with a heavy clank
Wilkins: There. He's laid down on the woodpile like a sack of wet wool with teeth in it.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling then settling under
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, rivals, and any revenue man with his ear pressed to the chinking. 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. Dentist, blacksmith, inventor, coiner of opinions, and a twice-arrested man with no regrets worth confessing. Tonight's subject is close to my heart and closer to my anvil: trade tokens and local money. When Washington lets the veins run dry, a little hill town still has to keep its blood moving, and tonight I'll tell you how we did it with brass, copper, butter, potash, and outright cheek.
♪ Theme fades under
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Hard money comes and goes, but good copper lasts a lifetime. See the Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, handcrafted in pure copper, at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Commodity, Coin, And Counter: A History Of Hill-Town Money
Wilkins: Let's begin before any of us were born, back when New England had no money at all to speak of. The old Puritans paid their debts in corn, in beaver, in shell beads, in nails, and in whatever a man could carry without his back giving out. A cow was a fortune and a goose was small change, and making change for a goose took a hatchet.
Wilkins: Then in 1652 the Massachusetts Bay Colony did a thing that'd get a man hanged today. They opened their own mint, without so much as a by-your-leave from the King, and put a silversmith named John Hull in charge of it. He struck the Pine Tree shilling, a thin silver coin with a scraggly little tree on it, and for his trouble he kept one shilling out of every twenty he coined. That makes John Hull the first honest tax collector in America. At least he told you his cut up front.
♦ Wilkins sets a jar down hard on a plank table
Wilkins: The old story says Hull's daughter Hannah was married off with her own weight in Pine Tree shillings for a dowry. They sat that girl on one pan of a scale and piled silver on the other till the beam came level. Her husband, a Mr. Sewall, spent the rest of his days praying she'd put on weight.
Wilkins: After that we lived on Spanish silver. The Spanish milled dollar, the piece of eight, was the real coin of this country for a hundred years. You'd cut it into eight bits with a cold chisel, and that's where your 'two bits' comes from. I've seen men in the Suncook Valley quarter a dollar on a stump with a hatchet so crooked that one fellow got a fat slice and the other got a sliver you could pick your teeth with. Those Spanish coins passed as lawful money right here until Congress shut them out by the Act of February the 21st, 1857. They're still in old men's stockings all over Merrimack County.
Wilkins: Now, the country store. If you want to know how Pittsfield really kept its economy alive, don't look at the mint. Look at the storekeeper's ledger. A farmer up on the hill might go half a year without touching a coin. He'd bring down butter, eggs, rags, shingles, maple sugar, and potash, and the storekeeper would write it in the book on the credit side. Then the man would take home salt, nails, molasses, calico for his wife, and a jug of something medicinal, all written on the debit side. That was a book account. It ran year to year, and some of them ran father to son, debts and all, like a family nose.
Wilkins: Potash deserves its own sermon. Every farm in this valley that cleared land burned the hardwood, and that ash was money. You leach the ash with water, boil the lye down in a big iron kettle, and what's left in the bottom is potash, gray and caustic as a deacon's widow. Merchants bought it by the barrel and shipped it off for soap and glass and bleaching cloth. Many a Pittsfield farm got its first cow from the ashes of its own forest. A Pittsfield farmer can pay his whole year's store account in butter, eggs, and potash and still owe the storekeeper an apology.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, chain scrapes
Wilkins: Then came the Hard Times. In the 1830s Old Hickory went to war with the national bank, the Panic of '37 broke half the country, and hard money hid under every mattress from here to Ohio. The merchants struck their own copper cents, Hard Times tokens we called them, and Lord, were they rude. One showed Jackson as a jackass with the words 'I take the responsibility.' Others carried 'Millions for defence, not one cent for tribute,' which is a fine patriotic sentiment to put on a coin worth exactly one cent. Old Hickory said he took the responsibility, and the token-makers put him on a jackass, which is as fair a portrait of a politician as was ever struck in metal.
Wilkins: And now we come to our own war. When the shooting started in '61, every man with a silver coin buried it and every man with a copper cent sat on it like a broody hen. By '62 you couldn't make change for a nickel's worth of molasses in all of Merrimack County. So the merchants did what Yankee merchants always do. They went into the money business themselves. From 1862 to 1864, storekeepers, saloon men, and grocers all over the North had cent-sized tokens struck by die-sinkers, tens of millions of them. Some were patriotic, with flags and Liberty heads and 'The Union Must and Shall Be Preserved.' Others were store cards: 'Good for One Cent at So-and-So's Dry Goods.' They passed hand to hand like real cents because they were about the same size and nobody had anything better.
Wilkins: The king of them all was a New York saloonkeeper named Gustavus Lindenmueller. He coined his own tokens by the barrel, reputedly near a million of them. He'd pay them out in change at his bar, and half of them never came back to be redeemed. They sat in drawers and pockets and in the bellies of goats all over Manhattan. Lindenmueller coined a million tokens in a New York saloon, which is the only time in history a drunk man made more money than he spent.
Wilkins: Washington finally noticed it had a rival. By the Act of April 22nd, 1864, Congress made a new bronze cent and a two-cent piece. Then by the Act of June 8th, 1864, it forbade any private person from issuing one- or two-cent coins or tokens meant to pass as money. That ended the token trade, officially. Congress outlawed private pennies in June of '64, and I respected that law like a husband respects his mother-in-law: quietly, from a distance, and with no intention of following it.
Wilkins: And just this year, in March of '65, Congress laid a ten-percent tax on state bank notes. That's on top of the National Banking Act of '63. Every little bank in New Hampshire that printed its own pretty paper with a cow or a train or a waterfall on it is going to watch that paper disappear. Mark me, in five years the only local money left in this valley will be what I stamp on my own anvil.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Which brings me to my own contribution to the national treasury. I've told you before that I stamp my name on copper. Tonight I'll tell you why a man does it. It isn't vanity, or not entirely. A counterstamped cent is an advertisement with legs. It goes from my hand to a farmer's purse, to a tavern drawer, to a drover bound for Concord, to a ship's chandler in Portsmouth. Every man who handles it reads 'G. G. WILKINS / PITTSFIELD N.H.' and thinks, by God, that's the fellow who pulls teeth and keeps the bear. Merchants all over this country do it. It's the cheapest handbill ever printed, because the government pays for the paper.
♦ Wax crackle swells
Wilkins: Now a tale, and it isn't pretty. Two winters ago a fellow drifted up the turnpike from the Massachusetts line. Folks called him Pewter Pete. He'd been casting his own tokens out of melted spoons, organ pipes, and old lead window cames, then tinning them over so they shone like new silver. He tried to buy a jar from me with a fistful of them. Now, I am a dentist. I know metal by the feel of it in my teeth the way a priest knows sin by the smell. I put one between my molars and it bent like cheese. Lead.
Wilkins: I told him to empty his pockets and walk back to Massachusetts. Instead he grabbed the jar off my plank and lit out past the still-house window, straight past Barnaby's chain. He misjudged it by about a yard. Barnaby hooked him by the seat of the trousers. Pete's trousers tore like wet sailcloth in a gale, a long ripping noise I can still hear when I lie awake. That lead money came raining out of him like hailstones out of a tin church. Barnaby had him by one cheek of his hindquarter, and Pete screamed like a dry axle. There was a pop like a wet cork, and Barnaby came away with a mouthful of wool, a fistful of Pete, and eleven lead tokens he swallowed down like gumdrops.
Wilkins: Pete went off down Route 28 with his backside to the winter air and a bite in him shaped like a horseshoe. I sewed him up myself with waxed linen thread at no charge, because I have principles, and he paid me with the one honest coin he had, a Spanish half-real so worn it was nearly a washer. And the tokens? I recovered them three days later by the ancient alchemical method of patience, a shovel, and holding my breath. Lead is poison to a bear same as to a man, so I made Barnaby eat a peck of boiled oats to push it through, and I watched him like a hawk till it came out. Barnaby is the only bank in Merrimack County where deposits and withdrawals come out of opposite ends.
♦ Barnaby grunts, as if insulted
♪ Short fiddle sting
Legends, Outlaws, And Runners, With Guest Captain Donald Vance
Wilkins: Now, local money has made some local legends. There was a storekeeper three miles down the turnpike I'll call Hezekiah, since that was his name and he's long gone to Ohio. In '63 he had a thousand brass store cards struck in Cincinnati: 'Good for One Cent in Goods at Hezekiah's.' He was mighty proud of them and paid them out in change to every soul who came through his door.
Wilkins: Well, every one of them that came my way, I put on the anvil, set my punch dead center, and struck it. 'G. G. WILKINS / PITTSFIELD N.H.' right across his face. By spring half the tokens in the valley carried his name on one side and mine on the other. Every penny he gave in change was a free advertisement for his competition, and he never did figure out why his customers kept coming to me to have their teeth pulled. He came up here in a fury once, waving one of his own tokens with my name on it. I told him that was a partnership, and that he was the silent partner, which was the first time in his life he was silent about anything.
Wilkins: Then there was a runner from Barnstead who carried his takings in hollowed boot heels, tokens and cents stacked in a little brass tube. Walked like a man on stilts, and you could hear him jingle from two fields away. The deputies caught him because he couldn't run. The coin in his heels was so heavy he went down the Suncook bank like a dropped anvil, and they fished him out by his collar with a hay hook. The sheriff confiscated his boots, and to this day I believe that man's boots are the only thing in the county jail that ever paid for its own board.
♦ Heavy boots on a plank floor, a log-cabin door creaking open
Wilkins: Speaking of the law, I have one of its old gun-dogs sitting across the plank from me tonight, and I've hidden the good jar. He's a retired federal revenue officer out of Manchester, a hunter of copper in the hill country, a man who could smell a lit fire box through two feet of snow. Ladies and gentlemen, Captain Donald Vance. Captain, you've got a face like a hard-struck large cent: worn, honest, and worth more than it looks.
Captain: Doctor, I've been insulted by better men, but never by one holding a pair of forceps in his lap. Good evening to your listeners, and good evening to that bear, who I notice is staring at my leg like it's Sunday supper.
Wilkins: He's a fine judge of meat. Sit still and keep your calves under the table. Captain, a revenue man shaking my hand is like a molar shaking hands with the forceps: polite on the surface, but both parties know how this ends.
Captain: Ha! Then let me pull the first tooth. You want to talk local money? I'll tell you about the worst money I ever saw, and it nearly put a whole village in the churchyard.
Wilkins: Go on. Grim stories are the only kind worth telling after dark.
Captain: Up in the Pemigewasset country there was a little village where every tavern and back kitchen was taking a certain kind of drink-token. Gray, dull things stamped 'GOOD FOR ONE PINT.' I picked one up off a barroom floor and it bent between my fingers. I put it to my teeth, the way you do, Doctor, and bit clean through the edge of it.
Wilkins: Lead.
Captain: Lead, soft as a candle end. And when a man is casting his drink-money out of lead, you may be sure he's not particular about what he solders his still with. I asked around and found half the village laid up with the lead colic. Grown men doubled over with bellies tight as drumheads, a gray line on their gums, hands shaking so they couldn't button a coat, and one old fellow who'd gone simple in the head and sat in his barn talking to a harness. I followed those tokens back up the brook to a sugarhouse. Inside was a pot with a worm patched together out of lead pipe and seams slathered with lead solder thick as cake frosting.
Wilkins: God help them. That's no still, that's a coffin with a spout.
Captain: That's what I told the man. I broke that worm up with the back of an axe while he watched, and I made him melt every one of his tokens in his own fire so they'd never pass again. Doctor, I've let old men keep a clean copper pot when they made honest spirit for their own families and did no harm. I never once let a lead outfit stand.
Wilkins: And that's why I'll let you sit at my table, Captain, even with a badge in your past. Clean copper, honest joints, and a man who knows the difference. Now give us something lighter before Barnaby gets melancholy.
Captain: Lighter. Well, over in the Green Mountains there was a tavern that ran entirely on its own brass tokens, struck with the keeper's name and 'GOOD FOR ONE DRINK.' Fine big man, red face, drank more than he sold. His wife ran the books, and she'd figured out he was drinking up every cent the house made. So she had a second batch struck, same size, same brass, same name on the front. On the back it said 'GOOD FOR NOTHING.'
♦ Wilkins slaps the plank, laughing
Captain: She'd slip those into his waistcoat pocket every morning. He'd go behind the bar, pay himself a drink, and she'd come over, turn the token in her fingers, read it aloud, and take the cup right out of his hand in front of the whole room. I went in there looking for a still in the cellar and stayed an hour just to watch it happen three times.
Wilkins: That tavern keeper's wife invented the only currency in New England more worthless than a Confederate note. I'd marry that woman if she'd have me and if I wasn't afraid of what she'd stamp on my backside.
Captain: She'd stamp 'PAID' on it, Doctor, and you'd never sit down again. Now here's one about paper. A lumber camp up in the White Mountains paid its men in camp scrip, little paper chits good only at the company store. Woodsmen are practical. That scrip wasn't worth a damn anywhere else, and the winter wind came through the log chinking like a knife. So they pasted it on the walls. Layer after layer, flour paste and scrip, till the inside of that shanty looked like a bank had exploded in it.
Wilkins: Best use for paper money I've ever heard.
Captain: The cook had a still behind the bunkhouse running on potato peelings and spite. When I came to break it up, the camp boss pulled out his knife, and for a second I thought it was going to go bad. He just cut a square yard out of the wall and held it out to me like a quilt. Said there was eighty dollars of company money in that patch if I'd look the other way. I told him I couldn't spend it anywhere but his own store, and he said that was the beauty of it.
Wilkins: That was the only shanty in the White Mountains where a man could warm his hands and his bank balance at the same wall. Did you take the bribe?
Captain: I took the still, Doctor. I left him the wall. A man needs insulation.
Wilkins: Now tell me true, Captain. When did you first hear the name of Wilkins? Don't spare my feelings. I keep my feelings in a jar with the foreshots and pour them on the ground.
Captain: I'll tell you exactly. There was an old farmer over in Belknap County, and when the tax came on he swore he'd pay it to the penny and not a penny more. He came into the collector's office carrying a nail keg on his shoulder. He tipped it out on the desk, and it was large cents, hundreds of them, green and brown and worn smooth. And nearly every one had the same stamp hammered across Liberty's face: 'G. G. WILKINS / PITTSFIELD N.H.' The collector said, who in blazes is G. G. Wilkins? And the old man said, he's the fellow who made it worth paying.
Wilkins: Ha! That's not a tax payment, that's a testimonial. I ought to have that keg bronzed.
Captain: The collector spent three days counting them and swore your name in his sleep for a week. One more, Doctor, and then I'll let you have your show back. Up in Sandwich Notch there lived a hermit who couldn't read a word, and he kept his whole account with the store on a hickory tally stick. Every time he bought something, he cut a notch; every time he paid in pelts or potash, he whittled one off with his jackknife. The storekeeper accused him of shorting the account, so they put the stick next to the storekeeper's ledger. That old man's stick matched the book to the penny, and the storekeeper's own figures were off by two dollars in his own favor.
Wilkins: So the illiterate hermit was the only honest bookkeeper in the Notch.
Captain: The honest bookkeeping I ever saw in the hill country, and I've audited men with Harvard diplomas. I asked to buy the stick and he wouldn't sell it. Said it was his bank, and banks don't sell themselves.
Wilkins: Captain Donald Vance, you're a credit to a discredited profession. Stay put, finish that cider, and keep your legs away from the window.
Captain: I'll take the cider, Doctor. You keep the bear.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, chain drags
♪ Banjo bridge, bright and quick
Ad Break
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♪ Fiddle flourish
Copper And The Craft: The Metallurgy Of Coin And Kettle
Wilkins: Back at the anvil. You may wonder what a lecture on tokens has to do with a still. I'll tell you. It's all the same red metal, and a man who knows coin knows copper. Take the new bronze cent of '64. It weighs forty-eight grains, about the weight of a fat horsefly that's been at the cider, and it's about ninety-five parts copper to five parts tin and zinc. It replaced the old copper-nickel cent, the white cent, that we'd had since '57, which was thick and hard as a deacon's heart and wore out the dies at the mint something terrible. The bronze strikes sweeter and wears better.
Wilkins: Brass is copper alloyed with zinc. That's what Hezekiah's tokens were, and it's what a good union or fitting may be made of. Bronze is copper with tin. Pure copper is the king of them all for a still, and here's why. Of all the common metals, copper carries heat better than any except silver, and nobody but a Boston banker builds his still out of silver. Put your fire under a copper pot and the heat spreads through the whole bottom like gossip through a sewing circle, with no hot spots to scorch your mash.
Wilkins: The second reason is alchemy, the real kind. When you boil a mash, sulfur rides up in the vapor, those rotten-egg and burnt-cabbage reeks. Bright copper grabs that sulfur and holds it, so the stink stays on the metal and out of your jar. Here's the part men forget: it works best where the hot vapor touches the copper. That's in the cap, the vapor pipe, and the worm. A copper pot with an iron cap is like a dentist with one hand. He'll get the job done, but it won't be pretty.
Wilkins: Now, a warning I'll shout from the roof. Never put galvanized iron in the hot path of a still. Galvanized is iron dipped in zinc. Zinc leaches into a sour wash and into hot spirit, and heated zinc throws off fumes that'll give you the shakes and a fever that feels like your bones are being rung like a bell. And no lead, ever. You heard the Captain. Lead pipe, lead solder, lead patches: that's how a village ends up talking to harnesses.
♦ Wilkins taps a copper pot with a knuckle, a deep ringing note
Wilkins: Now I'll tell you how it was done in this valley, step by step, the way my granddad's generation did it. Mark this well: this is history and learning. Making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and everything on this program is for historical and educational purposes only.
Wilkins: Step one, the mash. For a five-gallon batch, the old-timers would take about eight pounds of cracked corn and cook it in five gallons of water, stirring like a madman so it doesn't scorch to the bottom. It turns to a thick, gluey porridge, a sight that would make a hog weep for joy. Corn alone won't ferment worth a damn, because it's all starch and the yeast can't eat starch. So you let it cool to about a hundred and fifty degrees, or as the old men judged it, hot enough you can't hold your finger in it past a quick count of three. Then you stir in two pounds of malted barley. The malt carries a ferment, what the chemists call diastase, that turns starch into sugar. Somewhere between a hundred forty-eight and a hundred fifty-five degrees it does its finest work, and within an hour or two your porridge thins and turns sweet as a Sunday-school picnic.
Wilkins: Step two, cooling and the yeast. Let it fall to about eighty degrees, blood-warm and no hotter, or you'll cook your yeast like boiled lobsters. Pitch in your yeast, cover it with a cloth, and keep it somewhere warm with air moving through. In three to five days the bubbling stops, the cap falls, and you have a sour, beery wash of a few percent strength.
Wilkins: Step three, the stripping run. Strain off the wash, put it in the pot, and run it hard to pull out the spirit roughly. This is low wines, weak and cloudy, not fit for anything but the second pass.
Wilkins: Step four, the spirit run, and here's where honest men are made. Run the low wines again, slow, with the fire low and steady. Now catch what comes off in small jars, one after another, and line them up on the shelf in order like teeth in a jaw.
Wilkins: The first runnings are the foreshots. They smell like a varnish pot, sharp enough to make your eyes water from across the room. That's where the wood spirit is, the methanol, which blinds men and kills them. You throw it out. Every drop, generously, and then some more. Don't drink it, don't sell it, don't rinse a sore tooth with it. Next come the heads, still harsh and solventy, the stuff that gives a man a headache like a mule kicked his skull in from the inside. Out they go too. Then come the hearts, sweet, clean, smooth, the soul of the run. Keep them. Last come the tails, oily and wet-dog-smelling, flat and cloudy. Set them aside for the next run. You judge every jar by your nose and your tongue, never by the clock and never by greed. A man who keeps his heads to stretch the batch is a man who pulls a good tooth and leaves the rotten one.
Wilkins: And the fire. Alcohol vapor burns, and it burns invisible. Keep your joints tight and your collecting jar well away from open flame. Keep a bucket of water and a sack of sand at hand, and never, ever walk away from a running still. I've seen a still-house in Gilmanton go up like a Fourth of July rocket because a fool went out to piss, and when he came back his eyebrows were in the next county. Fire low, joints tight, and eyes open.
♦ Slow drip into glass jar
Wilkins: And afterward, clean that copper. Hot water, a scrub, a little vinegar and salt if she's dull, and rinse it well. Bright copper does the work. Crusted copper is just an expensive bucket.
♪ Banjo bridge
Myths, Slang, And The Listener Call-In Cylinder
Wilkins: The call-in cylinder has come over the mountains, all the way from the Carolina hills, wrapped in a feed sack and smelling faintly of tobacco and wet dog. Let's crank her up.
♦ Wax cylinder hiss, a hand-crank winding, then a thin distant voice
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: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Rabbit, I'll give you the truth, and I'll give it to you through the chemistry of my own valley, because we know about ashes up here. Remember the potash I told you about? Hickory ash is mostly that, potash, the same caustic stuff New England farmers boil down to make lye soap. Throw it in a thump keg full of hot liquor and it'll react with some of the sour acids, sure enough. But it doesn't clean anything out. It just turns your liquor halfway to lye soap, so at least you can wash your mouth out with it after you swear at the taste. It's bitter, slick on the tongue, and if you spill raw ash lye on your hands it'll take the hide right off your knuckles. I once saw a man in Barnstead dip his fingers in a lye kettle on a dare, and his skin came off like the peel off a boiled potato.
Wilkins: And here's the meat of it, Rabbit, so listen close. Ashes don't separate the wood spirit, the methanol. Neither does anything else you toss into the thump keg. The only thing that saves you from bad heads is throwing out your foreshots and your heads at the spirit run. That's all, and it always will be.
Wilkins: Now, the red oak shavings. Your uncle's got hold of half a truth. Oak does give spirit color, a woody bite, and the sweet vanilla flavor you get from barrel-aged liquor. But the coopers will tell you why red oak isn't used for barrels. Red oak is porous as a fishing net. Its pores run open end to end, and you could blow smoke through a stave of it like a cigar. White oak has its pores plugged up with little growths the wood men call tyloses, and that's why it holds liquor. So red oak shavings in a thump keg might add a touch of color and a pucker of tannin, but they clean out nothing. Rabbit, your uncle's red oak shavings are like a red oak barrel: they look like the genuine article right up until everything you care about leaks out the bottom.
Wilkins: That said, God bless your uncle. Every family in America has a man who swears by something, and it keeps the rest of us humble and amused. Rabbit Miller, of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, this one's for you.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: I just struck a cent for you, Rabbit. It goes in the jar on the shelf with the others, and if you ever come north, you can claim it in person, provided you can get past the bear.
♦ Barnaby grunts loudly
Wilkins: Now, myths, since we're on the subject of money and bad judgment. First myth: biting a coin proves it's genuine. Every gambler on a riverboat does it. The notion is that gold is soft and will take a tooth mark, while a brass counterfeit won't. Here's the trouble. Lead is softer than gold, and Pewter Pete knew it. Gild a lead slug and it bites like a sugarplum. Your tooth mark proves nothing except that you're a fool with a tooth. And I'm the man who sees you on Thursday when that molar cracks down the middle like a split cord of beech. A man who bites a coin to test it is a man who'll be paying me to pull the remains of that tooth by Thursday. Weigh your coin and ring it on a plank, but keep it out of your mouth.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Second myth, and an old one: the blue flame test. Men tip a spoonful of spirit on the stove lid, set a match to it, and if it burns blue they swear it's pure and safe, and if it burns yellow or red there's lead in it. Rubbish. Wood spirit burns blue, same as good spirit. The poison that blinds you lights up just as pretty as the liquor that doesn't. As for lead, a flame won't tell you reliably whether there's lead in it or not. A spoon on a stove is not a chemist. The only safe test is good copper, honest joints, and honest cuts. If blue flames proved a man pure, every Merrimack deputy would have been canonized the first night he set his own whiskers afire.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And a bit of slang before we close, since tokens gave us plenty. When a fellow in this valley says a man is 'not worth a red cent,' he means a cent of copper, the old large cent, red when it's new. When a thing's 'two bits,' that's your quarter of a Spanish dollar. And when a Pittsfield man says another fellow's word is 'good as Hezekiah's brass,' he means you'd best get it counterstamped by somebody honest.
Captain: Doctor, I'd add one more. Out in the hill towns, when they wanted to say a man was crooked, they'd say he was 'cast, not struck.' Molded out of soft metal in somebody's kitchen, like those lead tokens.
Wilkins: Cast, not struck. I'll be using that on the Merrimack sheriff, who once tried to pay a fine in tokens from his brother-in-law's store. The magistrate made him change it at the tavern, where it changed into a hangover.
♪ Theme begins softly under
Sign-Off
Announcer: A quick word before we bid goodnight! For copper as true as a fresh-struck coin, see the Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com, friends!
Wilkins: My thanks to Captain Donald Vance, the most tolerable revenue man ever to sit at my table, for his stories of lead tokens, good-for-nothing husbands, and paper walls.
Captain: Thank you, Doctor. Keep your money honest and your bear fed.
Wilkins: And if you've a mind to learn the old craft properly, the history, the copper, the cuts, the fire, and the reasons behind every step, sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you to read a jar like a ledger and judge copper like a coin. You'll leave knowing more than any sheriff in New England, which isn't saying much, but it's a start. I'll remind you, as I always do: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is illegal under United States law, and everything on this program is for historical and educational purposes only.
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 rises and fades into wax cylinder crackle