From Fort Wilkins: a tooth-forceps jig that grips coin dies, a worm gauge forged from a buggy spring, and the cellar under the anvil where the iron hides when deputies call.
How seacoast runners carried rum and molasses from Portsmouth up the old turnpike to the hill towns, with their gundalows, lantern signals, and wagon tricks.
Dr. G. G. Wilkins recalls the summer of 1863, when the draft wheel came to Pittsfield with riot rumors, $300 arithmetic, a sudden plague of toothaches, and a bear with a broker's hairpiece.
A Pittsfield coppersmith follows sheet copper from the Revere mill to his anvil, and tells how a Barnstead tinsmith's thin, soft-soldered sheet nearly burned his still-house.
How New Hampshire runners slipped past turnpike gates and toll bridges by shunpike, ford and false-bottomed wagon, and how a toll keeper who tried to toll a bear paid dearly.
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▶ Listen liveAlchemist Wilkins traces whiskey from Hamilton's 1791 excise to the Portland Rum Riot, then foretells a dry nation, the Volstead Act, poisoned alcohol and repeal in 1933.
How sulfur-cured rubber gave the working man a set of teeth, how Boston patent men came to collect on every plate, and what one collector met at Fort Wilkins.
The iron horse has reached Pittsfield. Waybills, station agents, the telegraph and the new tax law have squeezed the night runner off the muddy back roads of the Suncook valley.