Signal Lanterns on the Ridge
Back in 1860s Pittsfield, New Hampshire, moonshiners hid their copper stills from revenue men with a chain of glass lanterns and bull's-eye dark lanterns that ran from the ridgelines down to the still-house windows. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins traces this distilling lookout system back through Paul Revere's steeple lamps and the Civil War signal torches of Albert Myer's wig-wag code. You'll also hear what happened to a deputy who sent a false signal and ran into Barnaby the bear, plus some real thump keg history that clears up old myths about distilling.
In this episode
- How the Suncook Valley moonshine lantern relay warned stills about revenue raids
- Paul Revere's Old North Church lanterns and the history of secret signal codes
- Albert Myer's wig-wag flag and torch signals and the Civil War Signal Corps at Bull Run
- Dark lanterns and bull's-eye lanterns, kerosene dangers and 1860s lighting history
- Revenue officer stories: a hymn board raid warning, a courting lamp and a widow's ledger of revenue horses
- Barnaby the bear vs. the deputy who sent a false all-clear signal
- Hickory ashes and red oak in a thump keg: the potash trade and Tennessee charcoal filtering
- Why the blue-flame proof test for moonshine is a myth
Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins explains how the Suncook Valley lantern relay worked, running from the ridgelines above Pittsfield down to Fort Wilkins, and traces it back through Paul Revere's steeple lamps, Albert Myer's wig-wag torches and the dark lanterns used by both burglars and constables. He also tells how a deputy who tried to send a false signal met Barnaby the bear. Retired revenue officer Captain Donald Vance tells new stories about a Vermont hymn board that worked as a raid warning, a farm girl's courting lamp that shut down three stills, a ram that led him on a four-mile chase with a lantern tied to its horns, and an old widow lookout who kept a ledger on every revenue horse in the county. Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC asks whether hickory ashes and red oak shavings in a thump keg clean out bad heads, and Wilkins answers with the potash trade and the Tennessee charcoal method, then debunks the blue-flame test.
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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 four hundred pounds of flea pasture down. That lantern up on the ridge is not the moon and it is not your supper, and if you rattle that chain once more I will pull every tooth out of your head and sell them to a Concord widow for piano keys.
♦ Bear huffs wetly, chain slumps into the mud
Wilkins: Thank you, your Majesty. He is sulking. He thinks every light on Catamount Hill is a ham being carried home.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, rising and then settling under the voice
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and the few deputies listening at the keyhole with your hats in your hands. You are tuned 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: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, coin-stamper, twice a guest of the county sheriff, and never once a repentant one. Tonight's subject is Signal Lanterns on the Ridge, the lookout system that had the deputies of this county stumbling around in the dark like drunk men hunting for a privy. Before we light the first wick, a quick word.
♪ Bright snare roll and a tin-whistle flourish
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Want to learn vapor, copper and the honest cut from the old Alchemist himself? The Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course is waiting for you. Full particulars at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Flourish ends
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Mind you, distilling spirits for drinking without a federal license is against the law of these United States, and every word tonight is history and learning. Now pour yourself a cider and let's go up the hill.
♪ Fiddle drone, slow and low, under the voice
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. A Light in the Steeple, a Torch on the Hill.
Wilkins: Every Yankee child knows the story. April eighteenth, seventeen seventy-five: two lanterns in the steeple of the Old North Church in Boston. One if by land, two if by sea. The regulars were crossing by water, Paul Revere got on a borrowed horse, and that was the end of King George's patience. Revere hung two lanterns and became immortal. I have hung forty and become a defendant.
♦ Wilkins sips from a tin cup, smacks his lips
Wilkins: But here is the lesson the schoolmarms leave out. Those lanterns were not for show. They were a code agreed beforehand between men who trusted one another and did not trust the government. That is the whole art of the ridge lantern: a little fire, a high place, and a secret.
Wilkins: Now the Army has caught up to the moonshiner, as the Army always does, about eighty years late and holding the wrong end of the stick. A surgeon by the name of Albert Myer worked out a scheme he called wig-wag: one flag by day, one torch by night, swung left and swung right, and every combination of swings is a letter. They made Myer the Army's first signal officer in eighteen sixty, and the Signal Corps became official in sixty-three. At the first battle of Bull Run, in July of sixty-one, a Confederate signal officer named Edward Porter Alexander was up on a hill and saw the glint of Union bayonets marching around his side's flank. He wig-wagged across the valley: Look out for your left, your position is turned. Saved the rebels' bacon that day, God help us. I want you to understand that the Union Army learned what a cornfield lookout in Wilkes County already knew. A man on a hill who can see the road is worth ten men with rifles standing in the road.
Wilkins: Now, lanterns. The pierced-tin lantern your grandmother kept, the kind folks call a Paul Revere lantern, is useless for signaling. It throws light about the way a Whig politician gives a speech: little holes of brightness, and everything else dark as a coal bin. From a mile off it is a smudge. A signal lantern wants glass panes. Better yet, it wants a shutter.
♦ Metal shutter sliding open and shut, click-clack, click-clack
Wilkins: That, friends, is a dark lantern, also called a bull's-eye. It has a thick lens in front and a sliding shutter that hides the flame completely. The night watch in Boston carries one, and so does every second-story thief in Boston. It is the only object in the Commonwealth that serves both the law and the burglar equally well, apart from a lawyer.
Wilkins: And what do we burn in them? Ever since a Pennsylvania man named Drake struck oil at Titusville in August of fifty-nine, it has been kerosene, coal oil, cheap and bright, and the whalers can go hang. But listen to me. Kerosene cut with naphtha, which every crooked merchant in Concord sells, is like a deputy cut with whiskey: perfectly calm until somebody brings a match near it. I have seen a lamp go up in a farmhouse on Berry Pond Road like a Chinese firecracker. It took the curtains, the cat's eyebrows and the farmer's whole Sunday disposition. Buy honest oil or don't light a lamp at all.
♦ Wind across a ridge, a distant whip-poor-will
Wilkins: So here is how the Suncook ridge was worked, and I can say it now that the war is over and the statute of limitations has gone to bed drunk. We had boys posted on Catamount Hill and on the high pasture over the turnpike, each with a glass lantern, a shutter, and a square of red bottle-glass. One steady white light meant the road is clear, carry on. Two lights side by side meant riders on the turnpike, likely just a doctor or a drummer selling corsets. A red light meant a revenue man. And a light that blinked out and stayed out meant douse your fire, sink your copper in the millpond, and go home and kiss your wife like you've been there all evening. The light went down the valley from hill to barn loft to still-house window faster than a horse could gallop, and the sheriff would come up the turnpike to find nothing but warm ashes and a bear licking his own behind.
Wilkins: My lantern boys were paid in jars, wool socks and dirty jokes, and only the socks ever came back.
♪ Banjo sting, then a low, ominous fiddle
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. The Deputy Who Borrowed My Light.
Wilkins: Now a story, and it is grim, so put the children to bed or let them stay up and learn something about consequences.
Wilkins: There was a deputy, and I won't give his name because his mother is still living and she makes a fine mince pie. One October night he climbed Catamount with his own lantern, meaning to send a false all-clear down the valley so the boys would light their fires and he could catch them red-handed. He had worked out our code. That much I'll grant him; he was smarter than a bucket. But he worked it out wrong. He was flashing a steady white light, which meant all clear, and he was flashing it from the wrong ledge, which happens to be the ledge right above this cabin.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, chain clinks
Wilkins: Yes, you remember. Barnaby saw a light moving on the hill. He thought it was a ham coming home, the way he always does. He pulled his stake. I had driven it eighteen inches into frozen clay and he drew it out like a rotten molar. Up he went. Folks, a bear at night sounds like a hogshead rolling through a cornfield, all crashing and grunting, with a low wet huff like a bellows full of mud. The deputy heard it, turned around, and swung his lantern at the noise. That was his error. Kerosene smells like supper to a bear who's been fed off a greasy plate.
♦ Cloth tearing, a man's high scream, a lantern clattering down rock
Wilkins: Barnaby opened that deputy's britches the way I open a stubborn jaw: no ceremony at all, and a sound like a boot pulled out of a cranberry bog. He did not eat the man. I want to be fair to the bear. But the lantern had spilled oil down the deputy's coat and back, and Barnaby set to licking it off him with a tongue like a wet wood rasp. The deputy lay on that ledge face-down for most of an hour with a bear going over him the way a cat goes over a cream pan. He came down the hill at dawn with no seat in his trousers, his hair standing straight up, and the smell of a Nantucket whale-boat. He had a pink stripe up his back that the county surgeon called the worst rash he ever saw on a Christian. The deputy himself testified that the bear had been 'thorough.' And the lantern? I still have it. I keep tooth-oil in it.
♦ Wilkins sets a heavy lantern down on the plank table
Wilkins: The deputy who stole my signal lantern carried it like a choirboy and left it like a widow.
♪ Fiddle turns warm, a few bars of a camp-meeting tune
Wilkins: Now my guest tonight has carried a lantern on the other side of the law. He tracked copper for the Internal Revenue across the White Mountains and the Green Mountains, and they tell me he is the only revenue man in New England who ever got a thank-you note from a moonshiner. Please welcome, all the way from Manchester, Captain Donald Vance. Sit down, Captain, mind the bear grease on that chair.
♦ Heavy boots, chair scraping, a deep chuckle
Captain: Evening, Doctor. I've sat in worse. I once sat on a hornet's nest on a stakeout in Bethel, and the hornets had better manners than you.
Wilkins: Captain, you have the face of a man who has been lied to by every farmer in two states and believed half of them out of sheer good manners.
Captain: And you have the face of a man who has been arrested twice and enjoyed both of them.
Wilkins: The second time they served pie. So tell me, Captain, the lanterns. When you rode up a valley at night and saw a light wink out on the ridge, what did you think?
Captain: I thought, well, Donald, there goes supper. A revenue man reading a lantern code is like a goat reading Latin: he knows something's being said, and he suspects it's about him. But let me tell you, Doctor, not every signal in these hills was a lantern.
Wilkins: Go on.
Captain: There was a meetinghouse in the Green Mountains, a little white clapboard church with a hymn board up front, the kind with the wooden number cards. I rode into that town on a Sunday and noticed half the congregation's eyes went straight to that board before they ever looked at the preacher. Hymn One Hundred Twelve. I asked around after, very friendly. Hymn One Hundred Twelve, it turns out, meant the revenue men are in the county.
Wilkins: The Lord's own telegraph.
Captain: And all over the hills that afternoon, smoke stopped curling out of the hollows like somebody had pinched out the candles. Now I could have kicked in doors till Michaelmas. Instead I stood up in the pew and sang One Hundred Twelve with the rest of them, all four verses, loud and on key. Then I rode home. A man who'll sing his own warning deserves a day off.
Wilkins: That is a Christian act, and I am suspicious of it. What else?
Captain: Courting lamps. You know a girl in these parts will set a lamp in her window when she wants a certain young man to know her father's gone to bed.
Wilkins: I know it very well, Captain. I've climbed under a few of those windows and out of a few more.
Captain: Well, there was a farm girl over in a hollow near Woodstock who had a beau across the ridge. Every Saturday night she put a lamp in the gable window, set behind a red glass preserve jar so he'd know it was hers. And three different outfits below that ridge had agreed among themselves that a red light high on that side meant a revenue raid. For a month, every Saturday night, those three stills went dark. The men sat home cursing the government. I wasn't within forty miles of the place. It was love. Love shut down more whiskey in that valley than I did in a year.
Wilkins: A courting lamp and a lookout lamp look the same from a mile off, and they both warn you trouble is coming up the road. Did the girl marry the boy?
Captain: She did, and the distillers came to the wedding and toasted her with the jars they hadn't made.
♦ Wilkins slaps the table, laughs
Wilkins: Now tell me, Captain, did you ever get fooled outright? Did a lantern ever make an ass of you?
Captain: Doctor, I chased a lantern four miles over a ridge under Monadnock one November night, me and two county men. It bobbed along the ledges, stopped, went on, stopped again, just like a lookout moving between posts. We crept up through the juniper on our bellies. Juniper, Doctor, is the devil's own bedding. And when we finally jumped it, the light was tied with baling twine to the horns of a big old Cotswold ram.
Wilkins: Ha!
Captain: That ram looked at us like we owed him money. Then he lowered his head and butted the youngest deputy clean off the ledge into a cow pond. Ice on it too. Splash, crack, and language I wouldn't repeat in a sporting house. Some joker had loosed that ram on purpose to draw us up the mountain while the real work went on two valleys over.
Wilkins: That ram kept better lantern discipline than half the lookouts I ever paid. One last one, Captain. Who was the best lookout you ever met?
Captain: A widow woman on a hill farm above Plymouth. Thirty years at a kitchen window with a spyglass and a coffee pot. When I finally walked up to her door she sat me down and opened a ledger, Doctor, a real bound ledger, with every revenue man's horse that had come up her road in thirty years. Color, gait, which shoes, which hoof dragged. She ran her finger down the page and said, 'Your bay mare threw her left hind shoe at the Baker River ford, Captain. You'll want to see a smith.' I looked, and by thunder, she had. I tipped my hat, thanked her for the coffee, and wrote nothing in my report except 'Farrier needed.'
Wilkins: That is the finest police work I ever heard of, and it was done by the other side.
Captain: The best of them always were, Doctor. I shut down poison outfits, the ones running lead pipe and rot. But a woman who keeps a ledger like that, and a man who keeps his copper clean, are craftsmen. You respect a craftsman even when you're paid to catch him.
Wilkins: Captain Donald Vance, gentlemen. Give him a hand, and Barnaby, don't you give him a paw.
♦ Bear grunts, chain clinks
Captain: Thank you, Doctor. Keep that animal's lantern out of reach.
♪ Rousing brass-band fanfare, tinny and antique
Announcer: Step right up, friends, step right up! Are you ready to master the thermodynamics of vapor, the fine art of the cut, and the deep, rich history of American spirits? Then hear this! The Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course, a comprehensive eight-week Historical and Technical Distilling Academy from Fort Wilkins Academy! You'll learn straight from master distillers, coppersmiths and historians! More than thirty hours of detailed modules! Blueprints for heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper stills, honest metal with no lead and no rot! And live question-and-answer sessions where you can ask the masters themselves! Learn where foreshots go and why hearts are kept. Learn why copper sweetens the vapor and why a low fire makes a better spirit. All for one hundred ninety-nine dollars, friends! One hundred ninety-nine! Come see the copper in person at our showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, if the bear allows it! Enroll today at fortwilkins dot com slash course. That's fortwilkins dot com slash course! Full details are also at moonshinestill dot com slash course. Reserve your seat before the lamps go out!
♪ Fanfare ends with a cymbal crash
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, the fire under a pot still hissing gently
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the Craft: A Still by Lamplight.
Wilkins: My lantern boys watched the road, and somebody had to watch the pot. Here is a whole night's work from mash to jar, told for history's sake. And remember, it's against federal law without a license.
Wilkins: First, the mash. Corn, cracked coarse, cooked in hot water till it goes thick as a Baptist's porridge. But raw corn starch will not ferment. Yeast can't eat starch any more than Barnaby can eat a church pew, though he has tried. You need malt, which is sprouted barley or sprouted corn, dried and ground. Malt carries a ferment the chemists call diastase, and it turns starch into sugar the way a good fiddler turns a sour crowd sweet. Let the cooked mash cool till you can hold your hand in it, stir in the ground malt, and let it sit and sweeten. Cool it further to about blood-warm, pitch in your yeast, cover it loosely, and give it three days to a week in a warm, airy room until the bubbling stops and it tastes sour and dry. That's your wash: beer, more or less, and weak.
Wilkins: Second, the copper. My pot is hammered and riveted, with a helmet and a long neck down to the worm. The reason it's copper and not iron goes beyond looks. Copper drags the stink out of the vapor. And for you fruit men making cherry and plum brandy, it does a second favor: it helps break down certain mischief that comes off the stones of the fruit, and a stone-fruit spirit run through copper comes out cleaner and safer. Use honest copper, pure and heavy, and join it with silver solder or proper fittings. Lead joints have no place on a still, ever.
Wilkins: Third, the fire. Here is the arithmetic. Spirit boils at about one hundred seventy-three degrees by Mr. Fahrenheit's scale, and water at two hundred twelve. Your wash boils in between. Roar the fire and everything comes over at once, a muddle. Keep it low and steady and the run separates itself into parts like a congregation dividing at a church fight.
♦ Slow drip into jar
Wilkins: Fourth, the cuts, and here is where the lantern comes back in. Collect in small jars. Mr. Mason's screw-top jar, patented in fifty-eight, is the best thing that ever happened to an honest distiller. Number every one of them. The first trickle is the foreshots, sharp and solvent-smelling, and it goes on the ground, never in a man's mouth. Then the heads, which smell like a cobbler's glue pot and bring a headache like a mule kick, and they get thrown out as well. When the smell turns sweet and clean and grainy, you're in the hearts, the part you keep. As the run goes on it turns oily, flat and wet-dog smelling. Those are the tails, and you set them aside. Be generous with what you throw away. A man who keeps a jar too early to save a nickel may be buying a coffin later.
Wilkins: Now listen close, because this is where the lantern can kill you. You will want to hold a light near the receiver to see the drip. Don't. Alcohol vapor is heavier than air. It rolls low across the floor like fog in a cellar hole, and it'll find a flame. Hang your lantern high, glass all round, shutter closed toward the still, and well away from the outlet of the worm. Keep the fire under the pot in a firebox with no gaps, and keep a bucket of sand by the door. I knew a man in Barnstead who held a candle down to check his drip. They found his boots in the brook and his eyebrows in Gilmanton.
Wilkins: Fifth, clean up. Rinse the copper while it's warm and scrub it bright, and your next run will thank you. Feed the cooled spent mash to the hogs, never hot. That's the whole of it: a slow fire, honest copper, numbered jars and a nose you trust more than your thirst.
♪ Banjo jig, quick and cheerful
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths, Slang, and the Mail Sack.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That's a fresh cent with my name hammered into it, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. The Treasury can't keep me off its money. Now we've got a message on the talking cylinder, all the way from the Carolina hills. Roll the tape, boy.
♦ Phonograph cylinder hiss, a click, a faint distant crackle
Wilkins: The caller says: '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?' That's Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina.
♦ Cylinder click off
Wilkins: Rabbit! Wilkes County, where they make whiskey on Sunday and repent on Monday, and some of 'em skip Monday. Let me give your uncle some credit before I take it all back.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Wood ash is potash. Up here we used to boil it down in asheries and sell it by the barrel to soap boilers and glassmakers. That's the only time in history a fire has paid a farmer instead of the insurance man. Potash is powerful alkaline stuff, lye's own cousin. Put it in a wash and it'll kill some of the sourness, the vinegar sharpness, and grab hold of some acids. So the old men noticed a difference and took it for a cure. As for red oak shavings, they give off tannin, color and a woody taste, so the spirit comes out looking tea-brown and older than it is. Rabbit, your uncle's oak shavings make whiskey look ten years older the way a powdered wig makes a scoundrel look like a judge.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now the truth, and it's a hard one. Bad heads are not a stain you can scrub out. They are what comes off the still first, and neither ash nor oak in a thump keg touches the dangerous part. The only cure for bad heads is cutting them out of the run, throwing those jars away and walking off. If your uncle wants a wood cure that really does something, out in Tennessee there are men filtering their new spirit slowly through packed sugar-maple charcoal. They've done it since the eighteen-twenties. It smooths out harshness, but it's done after the still, on spirit already cut properly, not tossed in the keg to make up for laziness. Charcoal can polish good whiskey, but it can't save poison.
Wilkins: So, Rabbit, your uncle isn't a liar. He's half a chemist and half a preacher, which is the most dangerous kind of man there is. Give him my regards, and a stamped Wilkins cent if you ever come north.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And since we're on myths, here's one that goes along with lanterns and flames. The blue flame test. A man pours a spoonful on a plate, puts a match to it, and if it burns blue he calls it safe. Friends, wood alcohol, the poison kind, burns with a pale blue flame you can hardly see, just like good spirit. The flame can't tell your hearts from your heads any better than Barnaby can tell a sheriff from a ham. The blue flame test proves only one thing: that the man holding the match has never read a chemistry book and never intends to. Trust your cuts, your nose and your numbered jars.
♦ Barnaby groans long and low
Wilkins: And a slang word to take to bed: up here, a lookout who falls asleep at his post is said to have trimmed his wick. A man who trims his wick too short runs out of light, and a man who trims it too long gets talked about at the sewing circle.
♪ Snare roll and tin-whistle flourish
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! The Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course: eight weeks covering copper, cuts and real American history, taught by the masters. Your seat is waiting at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Flourish ends
♪ Parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme returns, soft and slow
Wilkins: That's our lantern burned down to the wick, neighbors. My thanks to Captain Donald Vance, the most decent man ever to chase a ram up a mountain, and to Rabbit Miller down in Wilkesboro. If you want to learn the craft the right way, with honest copper, honest cuts and history in every lesson, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course. Eight weeks, over thirty hours, blueprints, and the masters on hand for your questions. And remember, keep your lanterns high and shuttered, keep your lookouts awake, and go easy on any deputy who borrows your light. Barnaby will see to him.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
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 wax cylinder hiss