Iron Rails to Pittsfield: The Suncook Valley Railroad and the End of the Back-Road Runner
In 1869 the Suncook Valley Railroad steams into Pittsfield, New Hampshire, and moonshine history changes for good. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins works his copper still while Barnaby the bear bawls back at the train whistle, and he explains how waybills, station agents, the telegraph and the 1868 whiskey tax cut squeezed the back-road runner off the map. Blue Ridge herbalist Clara Higgins adds Appalachian stories about outsmarting the rails, and the mailbag covers thump keg distilling and the old 'blue flame means it's safe' myth.
In this episode
- How the Suncook Valley Railroad changed Civil War era moonshine running in New Hampshire
- Waybills, bills of lading and station agents: why railroad paperwork hurt bootleggers
- How the telegraph took away the moonshiner's head start on the revenue men
- The 1868 whiskey tax cut from $2 to 50 cents and the new tax stamp rules
- Barnaby the pet bear vs. the railroad surveyor: a Pittsfield legend
- Clara Higgins on Virginia mountain folk who dodged the railroads, plus old railroad slang for liquor
- Mailbag: do hickory ashes or red oak shavings in a thump keg clean out bad heads?
- Debunking the 'blue flame means it's safe' moonshine myth
Dr. G. G. Wilkins watches the Suncook Valley Railroad steam into Pittsfield and asks what depot platforms, freight waybills, station agents and the telegraph wire mean for runners who lived on slow, muddy back roads. Blue Ridge herbalist Clara Higgins brings new stories of Virginia mountain folk who learned to cheat, dodge and joke their way past the railroads, plus a handful of old railroad-era slang words for liquor. In the mailbag, Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC asks whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in a thump keg clean out bad heads, and Wilkins knocks down the old 'blue flame means it's safe' rhyme between strikes on 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
♦ Far-off locomotive whistle drifting down the valley; Barnaby answers with a long, mournful bawl
Wilkins: Barnaby. BARNABY. Hush now, you mangy great sack of lard. That ain't a she-bear calling you from the woods, it's the four-forty out of Suncook, and she don't want you. She's made of iron and burns cordwood, and you have neither the boiler nor the bank account to court her. Lie down. Lie DOWN. There's a ham bone in it for you if you quit hollering before the jar fills.
♦ Bear grunt, chain dragging, a heavy body flopping onto boards
Wilkins: Thank you. That bear has heard that whistle every day for a month and answers it every time, so I believe the poor fool thinks he's courting her.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, sinners, and the two or three revenue men I know are listening with a pencil out. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, stamper of coins, and the most patient man ever arrested in Merrimack County. I'm talking to you from the log walls of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. I've got a jar dripping, a bear sulking, and a cheek full of tobacco, so pull your chair up to the stove.
♪ Theme swells, then fades under
Wilkins: Tonight we're talking about the iron horse. The Suncook Valley Railroad has come to Pittsfield, and the man who used to make his living on a dark back road at two in the morning with his horse's hooves wrapped in rags has got a mighty serious problem. But first a word from the folks who keep the lamps lit around here.
♦ Quick brass bell ring
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Your grandfather's kettle is honest work, but the age of iron and steam calls for the Flame-Flow still, protected under U.S. Patent 10,561,960, built of heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper by Moonshine Stills! See it at moonshinestill.com, or visit the Fort Wilkins Showroom right on Route 28 in Pittsfield!
♦ Wax crackle
♪ Short fiddle bridge, sawing and bright
Wilkins: Segment the first. History. Let me paint it for you. For the whole of my life, freight came up this valley one way, on a wagon behind a horse or a yoke of oxen, sunk to the hubs in Suncook mud from March to May and choking in dust from June to September. A load of cotton bales for the Pittsfield mill came up from Suncook village through Epsom and Chichester at about the speed of a Baptist sermon, and with about as many stops to water the animals.
♦ Creak of wagon wheels, ox lowing, whip crack
Wilkins: Now that slowness was a curse to every honest merchant and a blessing to every dishonest one, and I've been both before dinner. If it takes a load of shingles two days to reach Concord, nobody can say for certain what else rode under the shingles or where it got off. A road like that's full of barns, woodlots, cellar holes, and cousins. A man with a jug could vanish into the alders like a tooth into a drunk man's gums.
Wilkins: Then in this year of 1869, here she comes. The Suncook Valley Railroad, up the river from Suncook village through Epsom and Chichester into Pittsfield, running in harness with the Concord Railroad, which owns everything in this state that ain't nailed down and has a lien on the nails.
♦ Distant locomotive chuffing, bell clanging, steam hiss
Wilkins: I was down to the depot the first day she came in. Half the town turned out in their Sunday clothes. The band from the mill played something that might have been a march or might have been a fistfight. Children screamed, horses bolted, and old Widow somebody fainted dead away into a barrel of salt cod and came up smelling like the Grand Banks. And that locomotive came round the bend like a fire-breathing iron hog that drinks water, eats wood, and screams like a widow at a reading of the will, and is still more sober than the Concord Railroad board of directors.
Wilkins: Now I'll give the devil his due. The railroad is a marvel for commerce. Cotton cloth from the Pittsfield mill goes down the line in hours, not days. Flour comes up cheaper. Coal, kerosene, nails, and the Boston papers come up while they're still warm. The mail comes up on the cars, so a letter from Concord gets to me before the gossip it carries is stale, which is a mercy to the gossips. And the sheet copper for my work comes up from the Boston rolling mills cheaper and faster than it ever did by wagon, which helps every honest coppersmith and apothecary in the valley, and me besides.
Wilkins: But here's the burr in the saddle blanket. A railroad runs on paper. Every crate that goes on the cars gets a bill of lading. Every car carries a waybill. The station agent writes it all in a ledger fat as a parson's wife: what it is, who sent it, who it's going to, what it weighs. Waybills are the Gospel of the railroad, every sinner's freight written down in a book and the agent playing Saint Peter with a pencil behind his ear.
♦ Pen scratching on ledger paper
Wilkins: And the agent at Pittsfield weighs every crate like it owes him money, and the way his face looks, most of them do. A crate of 'dry goods' that sloshes when you tip it on the hand truck is a crate that gets opened. A barrel marked 'vinegar' that a man's nose says ain't vinegar is a barrel that gets a visit.
Wilkins: Then there's the wire. Alongside the rails they've strung the telegraph, and that singing wire moves news faster than any horse God ever made. Time was, a deputy rode out of Concord with a warrant and you had a half a day's warning from some boy on a fast pony. Now the warrant gets here before the deputy's had his breakfast. The telegraph is a great step forward for mankind and a damned nuisance for any man with a jug in his wagon.
Wilkins: And as if the railroad wasn't misery enough for the back-road runner, Congress pulled the rug out from under him besides. Last July, the summer of 1868, Washington cut the whiskey tax from two dollars a gallon down to fifty cents. Fifty cents! That's the first time Washington ever took less from a New Hampshire man without him having to hit somebody. They tightened the screws while they were at it, with tax stamps on every package, every distiller registered, and revenue men poking at the paperwork. When the legal stuff gets cheap and the illegal stuff gets watched, the profit in a midnight jug shrinks like a deputy in the Suncook in April.
Wilkins: So you see, friends, the back-road runner didn't get caught all at once. He got squeezed. The railroad took the honest freight off the road, so a lone wagon at night stands out like a whore in a choir loft. The waybill took away his excuses. The telegraph took away his head start. And Congress took away his margin. A runner used to need a fast horse and a slow sheriff. Now he needs a fast horse, a slow sheriff, a blind station agent, and a telegraph man with no fingers, and I can only ever find two of those at once.
♦ Barnaby grunts and chain clinks
Wilkins: Barnaby agrees with me. Barnaby has his own feelings about the railroad, and I'll tell you why after this tune.
♪ Banjo breakdown, quick and rattling
Wilkins: Segment the second. Legends, outlaws, and the iron road. Before the rails ever came to Pittsfield, they sent the surveyors. A railroad surveyor is a young fellow from Concord with clean boots, a brass compass, a Gunter's chain sixty-six feet long, and the firm conviction that God put the hills in the wrong place. This one was named, well, I won't say his name, for his mother may still be living, but he had whiskers like a muskrat that died of grief.
Wilkins: He was running his line along the back of my lot and drove a stake about four foot inside the circle Barnaby can reach on his chain. I hollered to him from the still-house window. I said, son, you've staked a claim in the bear's parlor. He looked at Barnaby, who was lying in the sun like a big black haystack, and he said, 'that animal's asleep, doctor.' I said, so's a powder keg, son, right up until it ain't.
♦ Low, rumbling bear growl building
Wilkins: He bent over to tie off his chain. Bent RIGHT over, posterior presented to the heavens and to Barnaby. Now, friends, a bear don't run like a dog. A bear goes from asleep to on top of you the way a stove lid goes from cold to blistering, and you don't see it happen, you just find out about it. Barnaby came off that ground with a sound like a sack of wet grain splitting, and he hit the end of his chain the same instant his teeth hit the seat of that boy's trousers.
♦ Ripping cloth, a high scream, chain snapping taut with a clang
Wilkins: The wool came away, and the drawers came away, and a strip of that boy's hide came away with them about the size of a hymnbook. Barnaby sat back on his haunches, chewing, with a look on his face like a deacon tasting a new pie, and the surveyor went down the turnpike toward Chichester with his bare backside shining like a fresh-polished cent and bleeding a little trail on the road, howling something about the Lord and the Concord Railroad, and I couldn't tell which one he was cussing.
Wilkins: Barnaby kept the chain. He kept the compass. He ate the compass needle, I believe, for he walked in circles for two days after. I stitched up that boy's hindquarter on my dentist chair with silk thread and a jar for courage, and he held still better than most men with a molar out, I'll say that for him. And when the final line was laid, the Suncook Valley Railroad had moved forty rods east. Nobody at the Concord office will tell you why there's a curve there, but I know, and Barnaby knows, and the surveyor sits on a pillow to this day.
♦ Bear grunt, satisfied
Wilkins: Now I'll mention, for the deputies taking notes, that I've been arrested twice by the Merrimack County sheriff, and I've told those stories elsewhere, so I won't bore you. I'll only say the railroad means if they arrest me a third time they can haul me to Concord on the cars, and I hope they'll pay my fare, since they never pay anything else.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And here's one the railroad gave me for free. A few weeks back I stamped a copper cent at this anvil, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and spent it at the depot for a newspaper. That cent rode the cars to Concord, passed through God knows how many pockets, saloons, and collection plates, and three weeks later a conductor on the up train handed it back to me in my change with no notion whose name was on it. My cent rode to Concord and back faster than I could, and it came home in better shape than I did after my last visit to the county seat.
Wilkins: Now, friends, I've got a guest tonight who knows a thing or two about railroads and the ways mountain people learned to cheat them. She's come all the way from the Blue Ridge of Virginia, which is a long way to travel to sit in a log fort next to a bear. She's an herbalist and a collector of mountain talk. Miss Clara Higgins, welcome to Fort Wilkins.
Clara: Well, thank you, Doctor. I'll say this. I've been in a lot of cabins, but I've never been in one where the bear had better manners than the host.
Wilkins: Ha! She's been here four minutes and she's already insulted me. Barnaby, you hear that? You've got an admirer.
♦ Bear grunt
Clara: He's a fine-looking animal. Got a little thread hanging off his lip, though.
Wilkins: That's from the surveyor's drawers. He's saving it. Miss Higgins, you folks down in Virginia had the cars long before we did up here. Tell me how the mountain people took to it.
Clara: Oh, Doctor, about how a cat takes to a bath. The Virginia and Tennessee came through the valley in the fifties, and the first thing every mountain man did was stand by the tracks and figure how to cheat it. My great-uncle Abner was a small man with a big opinion of himself, and he decided he'd ship his jugs down the line in crates. Now he couldn't mark them liquor, so he stenciled every crate, in big black letters, 'HYMNALS. HANDLE WITH PRAYER.'
Wilkins: Hymnals! Well, that's only half a lie. Every one of them made a man sing.
Clara: That's what he said! So he hauls six crates to the depot at Big Lick, and the agent there, a long, sour fella with a face like a boiled boot, goes to heave one onto the scale and like to rupture himself. He sets it down, wipes his brow, and he looks at Uncle Abner and he says, 'Mister, I been a Christian forty years, and no hymnal ever written weighs as much as a sin.'
♦ Wilkins slaps the table, laughing
Wilkins: Oh, that's a sermon right there. What'd he do with him?
Clara: Kept a jug for his trouble and stamped the rest straight through. Called it the 'choir fee.' Uncle Abner paid the choir fee every month for three years, and that depot agent sang bass at the Methodist church and was said to have the finest low notes in Roanoke County.
Wilkins: I'll wager he did. A railroad agent is just a toll-keeper with a better hat. Now Miss Higgins, did the women take a hand in it? Because up here, half the runners I ever knew were run by their wives.
Clara: Lord, yes. There was a widow from the Rockfish Gap country, Granny Pruitt everybody called her, though she wasn't but forty. She'd ride the cars to Charlottesville once a month with a stoneware jug wrapped up in a calico shawl, held to her chest like a newborn. Little lace cap on the cork. She'd rock it and hum to it.
Wilkins: A jug baby!
Clara: A jug baby. And the conductor on that run was the kindliest old soul, and he'd tip his hat to her every trip and say, 'How's the little one today, ma'am?' And she'd say, 'Sleepin' sound, sir, praise God.' Well, one trip they hit that sharp curve below the gap and the car lurched, and that jug went GLUG-GLUG-GLUG right out loud, like a deacon after the church supper.
♦ Wilkins wheezing with laughter
Clara: And the conductor stopped, and looked at that bundle a long time, and he said, 'Ma'am, that child's got colic. Best let me hold it a spell.' And he carried that jug to the baggage car, and she got it back at Charlottesville about two fingers lighter, and he never said another word about it till the day he died.
Wilkins: Now that's a Christian railroad man. I've met a few conductors in my time, and every one of them's a sheriff with a better hat and a smaller conscience. You've studied the brandies, too, Miss Higgins. Did the railroad change what the mountain folk were making?
Clara: It did, and in a funny way. When they were grading the line up toward the Blue Ridge tunnels, there were Irish gangs and mountain boys working side by side with picks and black powder, and every fall the wild persimmons would ripen along the cuts. Now a persimmon ain't fit to eat till the frost gets to it. Before that it'll pucker your mouth so tight you could whistle through your ears.
Wilkins: I've had patients like that after a pulling.
Clara: Well, those track gangs learned to wait for frost, then trade the ripe persimmons up the hollow for a nip of persimmon brandy. Persimmons was currency on that grade for a while. And there was one old woman on Afton Mountain who tried to pay her whole federal tax with them. Carried a split-oak basket of persimmons right into the collector's office and set it on his desk.
Wilkins: And did he take it?
Clara: He did not. He said the United States Treasury does not accept fruit. And she said, 'Well, it accepts nuts, don't it? It hired you.'
♦ Wilkins howls, fist on table, Barnaby grunts outside
Wilkins: Oh, Lord, I'm going to steal that. I'm going to tell that to the next revenue man who crosses the turnpike. Now tell me the talk, Miss Higgins. The railroad must've birthed some new words for the stuff.
Clara: Oh, plenty. The brakemen carried a little flask in their coat pocket, right next to where the cinders from the smokestack would collect, so down our way that flask got called 'cinder tea.' And a brakeman who'd had too much cinder tea, walking the car-tops like a hen on a hot griddle, folks said he was 'running on a soft rail.'
Wilkins: Running on a soft rail. That's every deputy in Merrimack County after a church supper.
Clara: And along the grades you'd hear all the old names for the bad stuff. Bust-head. Tanglefoot, for the way it ties a man's feet in knots. Forty-rod, because it'll kill a man at forty rods off. And who-hit-John, which is what a man says when he wakes up in a ditch and can't remember the fight.
Wilkins: Who-hit-John. I've pulled teeth from a dozen Johns and could tell every one of them exactly who hit him, because it was usually his wife. Miss Higgins, you'll stay for the rest of the hour?
Clara: If the bear doesn't mind.
Wilkins: The bear has already decided he likes you better than me, which puts him in the majority. Stay where you are, friends. After this, a word from the shop.
♪ Fiddle sting, rising
♦ Wax crackle, brass hand bell rung three times
Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, step right up, step right up! The age of the iron horse is upon us, the whistle is blowing, and the careful craftsman will not be left at the depot! Do you appreciate authentic American workmanship? Then look no further than Moonshine Stills, proud home of the Flame-Flow still, The Flagship, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960! Every Flame-Flow is handcrafted of heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper, refined pure as a preacher's promise, and fitted with precision CNC-machined brass unions that seal tight and true! Its shape is engineered to maximize convective circulation, so the heat rolls round the pot like a river round a bend, and that means unmatched purity for your essential oils, your herbal tinctures, and your traditional distillation demonstrations! No patched kettle, no salvaged junk, no doubtful metal, only bright, honest copper that'll shine for a generation! And the price, friends: a mere eight hundred ninety-nine dollars for the flagship of the whole line! So don't delay! Visit moonshinestill.com today, that's moonshinestill.com, and go straight to moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still to order your setup direct! Or come see the Flame-Flow with your own two eyes at the Fort Wilkins Showroom, on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, right on the Suncook Valley Turnpike! Once more for the folks in the back: moonshinestill.com! The Flame-Flow still, built of copper and built to last!
♦ Brass bell, two rings
♪ Banjo flourish
Wilkins: Segment the third. Copper and the craft. And I'll say before I start, for the tax men and the parsons both, that making distilled spirit to drink without a federal permit is against United States law, and what I tell you here is history and education, the way a dentist might teach you how a tooth is built without handing you the forceps.
♦ Copper pot tapped with a knuckle, a deep ringing tone
Wilkins: Now, the railroad brought cheaper copper sheet up from the Boston mills, and I'm glad of it, because a man who builds his pot of scrap and salvaged junk is a man whose customers go to the burying ground before their time. Clean copper and nothing doubtful. No lead solder in a seam. Lead is a slow poison, and it will put a man in the ground with his teeth falling out and his wits gone sooner than any bear will.
Clara: My grandmother used to say you can tell a careless still by the graveyard behind it.
Wilkins: Your grandmother was a wise woman. Now, the work goes in stages, and you take each one in order. First you make the mash. Cracked corn, or rye, or apples crushed to pomace, whatever the country gives you. Cook the grain with water to loose the starch, let it cool till you can hold your hand in it, and give it yeast. Then it sits and works, bubbling and stinking like a tannery privy, for some days, until it has made a weak sour beer. We call that the wash. Keep the place aired out while it works, for that froth breathes out a gas that'll lay a man down quiet in a closed cellar.
Wilkins: Then comes the still. The wash goes in the pot, the fire goes under it, and you keep that fire LOW. Low and steady, friends, not roaring. Alcohol vapor catches fire faster than gossip in a sewing circle, and a leaky joint near an open flame has burned more still-houses in this county than every sheriff together ever raided. Check your joints with your nose and your eyes before you light, and keep a bucket of sand by the door.
♦ Fire crackling, slow drip into jar
Wilkins: Now the copper does its alchemy. The vapor rising off a mash carries sulfur in it, the stink of rotten eggs and burnt cabbage. When that vapor touches bright copper, the copper grabs the sulfur and holds it fast, and it stays behind on the metal as a dark crust while the cleaner vapor goes on. That's the real reason a copper still makes a sweeter spirit, and not some old wives' tale about tradition. But it only works when the copper is bright, so you scrub your pot after every run, the way you scrub your teeth, if you have any left. A still left crusted is a still that's gone to sleep.
Wilkins: Then the cuts, and here's where the honest man and the murderer part ways. What comes out first, the foreshots and the heads, is sharp-smelling stuff, like glue and fingernail varnish and a Concord lawyer's breath. That's where your methanol runs heaviest, the wood alcohol that blinds men and kills them. It gets THROWN OUT. Not sold, not drunk, not saved for your brother-in-law. Out. Pure methanol boils a deal cooler than good spirit, but in a real pot the two smear together, so you can't trust it all to come off in one tidy spoonful. That's why a careful man throws out more than he thinks he needs to and catches his run in a row of small jars rather than one big jug, so he can smell and taste his way along jar by jar and set aside anything doubtful.
Clara: And with fruit, Doctor, you have to be even more careful.
Wilkins: That's God's truth, and you'd know it better than I would with your persimmons. Fruit carries pectin, and pectin makes more of the bad alcohol than plain grain ever does. Apple brandy and persimmon brandy are fine and noble drinks, but they want a more generous cut at the front end, not a stingier one.
Wilkins: After the heads come the hearts, the sweet clean middle of the run, and that's what a craftsman is proud of. Then the tails, which come oily and flat and smell like a wet dog in a hay barn. Set those aside to run again. The art of it is in your nose, your patience, and your honesty, and no machine or trick or patent powder will do it for you.
♦ Jar lid screwed down
Wilkins: Keep your fire low, keep your copper bright, and throw out your heads like you were throwing a revenue man out of your kitchen, with enthusiasm and no regrets.
♪ Fiddle and banjo interlude, plaintive
Wilkins: Segment the fourth. Myths, mail, and a voice on the wire. We've had a recorded call come in from the Carolina mountains, and I'm going to play it for you now. Spin it up, there.
♦ Wax cylinder scratch, whir, a tinny voice with crackle
Cletus: Alchemist, this here's Cletus Miller, folks call me Rabbit, from down in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. 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 scratch ends
Wilkins: Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro! Bless you, son, and bless your uncle too, because every family in America has got one uncle who swears by something, and it's usually something he set fire to. Let me take this apart for you, and I'll stamp a cent while I think.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now, wood ash is mostly potash. When the old settlers in this valley cleared their land, they burned the hardwood, leached the ash with water in a hopper, boiled it down in a kettle, and sold it as potash and pearlash to make soap and glass. That was hard cash in New Hampshire in my grandfather's time. And potash is alkaline, a base. If your run's gone sour and sharp with acid, a little ash will cancel some of that sourness and knock off the bite. So your uncle ain't entirely crazy. He's tasting something.
Clara: My granddaddy did the same with lye, and his liquor tasted like he'd washed his long johns in it.
Wilkins: That's the other side of it! Potash makes good soap and bad whiskey, and I've met men who couldn't tell which one they were washing with. But here's the part that matters, Rabbit, so listen close. Ash does NOTHING to the methanol. Not a thing. Methanol don't care how alkaline your thump keg is. It doesn't settle out, doesn't get eaten, doesn't get filtered. It rides on through the doubler and into your jar just as deadly as it went in. The only way to keep it out of a man's belly is to cut your foreshots and heads and throw them away, every run.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And red oak shavings in the keg give you color and a little woody flavor, the way a barrel does. They make a jar look older and more respectable, like a widower in a new coat, but under the coat it's the same man. Rabbit, a fistful of hickory ash in your thump keg is like a pinch of salt in your grave: it might improve the flavor, but you're still in the grave.
Wilkins: Now while we're in the myth business, let's go after the old rhyme every fool on every porch in America has said to me. They pour a spoonful, set a match to it, and if it burns blue, they say it's good, and if it burns red or yellow, they say, 'lead burns red and makes you dead.'
♦ Match strike, faint whoosh
Wilkins: Rubbish. Good spirit burns a pale blue that you can hardly see. Methanol, the poison, burns a pale blue that you can hardly see. The flame can't tell them apart, so it can't tell you either. A blue flame proves your liquor will burn. So will a Methodist hymnal, and nobody drinks one of those for his health. And as for lead, it'll make you dead all right, but it'll do it in any color of flame you like, including plaid. The only cure is clean copper with no lead in it and an honest cut.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There. That one's for Rabbit. G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., stamped fresh, and I'll put it in the mail on the down train tomorrow, which is the one good thing I'll say about the railroad tonight. Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, you've got a sharp mind and a suspicious nature, and both will keep you alive. Tell your uncle I said hello, and tell him to put the ashes back in the soap kettle where they belong.
Clara: And tell him to keep his shavings for the kindling box.
Wilkins: Hear, hear. Now one more word from the shop before we bank the fire.
♦ Quick brass bell ring
Announcer: A quick word before the lamps go down! Built by hand of heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper and protected under U.S. Patent 10,561,960, the Flame-Flow still from Moonshine Stills is waiting for you at moonshinestill.com! Order today, or visit the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield!
♪ Theme returns softly, parlor banjo and fiddle
Wilkins: Well, friends, that's the hour. Miss Clara Higgins of the Blue Ridge, you've been the best company I've had in this fort since the bear, and you smell considerably better.
Clara: I'll take that as a compliment, Doctor, since I've met the bear.
Wilkins: You should. Now if you want to learn this craft the right way, the way of patience and clean copper and honest cuts, and the history behind it, then look into the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you the stills and the mashes and the cuts from the foreshots to the tails, I'll teach you to respect your fire, and I'll teach you to tell a myth from the truth. All for learning and for history, mind you, and to keep you on the right side of the law and out of the graveyard. And I promise not to pull any of your teeth unless you ask nicely.
Wilkins: The railroad has come to Pittsfield, friends. The road is quieter now. The night runner's hooves have gone soft in the Suncook mud, and the whistle sings where the hoot owl used to. But copper is still copper, and a good cut is still a good cut, and an honest man is still the rarest thing in Merrimack County, rarer even than a sober conductor.
♦ Distant locomotive whistle; Barnaby answers with a low, lovesick moan
Wilkins: Hush, Barnaby. She ain't coming back for you. Nobody ever does.
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 out under wax cylinder crackle