Coos County Sugar Sleds of 1864: Smuggling Sugar Over Crawford Notch

The Winter the Sugar Came by Sled

The snow lies to the windowsills here at Fort Wilkins, on the Suncook Valley Turnpike in Pittsfield, and the stove roars like a foundry. Barnaby, the black bear who keeps his own counsel on a chain outside my cabin window, grunts his complaints at the cold. It is weather that brings to mind the winter of 1864, the coldest, meanest, thirstiest season this old tooth-puller, blacksmith and stubborn alchemist ever lived through. So draw your chair to the stove, friend, mind the draft, and hear the tale of the Coos County sugar sleds.

The war had pinched sugar until it squeaked. The Union blockade had shut the Southern coast, the armies had chewed up the cane fields of Louisiana, and what sugar remained cost a Concord banker's patience and a farmer's last good cow. A man who wanted a clean, quick wash for his still looked at that price and felt his heart sink into his boots.

For the distiller, sugar is a marvellous substance, I will grant it. It is nearly pure fermentable sweetness. It works fast and it works clean, and it yields a thin, light, neutral spirit without the great fuss of grain and malt. But it must come from somewhere. In the winter of 1864 it came from the north, over the mountains, by horse sled, through Crawford Notch.

Through the Gash in the Mountains

Crawford Notch is no gentle country lane. It is a narrow gash through the White Mountains, with granite walls on both sides and a steep, slow road clawing up the middle. Every teamster who ever took a load through that pass remembered the Willey slide of 1826, when a whole family ran out of their house in the dark and the mountain came down on them anyway. Those woodsmen thought on it every mile, and you may think on it the next time you grumble about a cold hand.

As the tale was told to me (and I will not swear to every word, for tall tales stretch like taffy in a warm room), a crew of Coos County woodsmen took to hauling sugar by horse sled in the dead of January. They loaded burlap sacks of cane sugar, three and four hundredweight to a sled, covered the lot with a tarpaulin, a few spruce boughs and a good coat of lies, and set off over the Notch with the snow coming sideways.

One of them, a big raw-boned fellow I shall call Ephraim, for his true name is better left in the drift, drove through a blizzard so thick he could not see his own horse's ears. He steered by the sound of the runners and the smell of the horse. Partway along, he swore, the horse stopped, turned its head about, and looked at him as a man looks at a fool. Ephraim got down, walked forward, and found the beast standing one step from a ravine that would have swallowed sled, sugar and Ephraim together. He kissed that horse square on the nose, and the horse bit him for it.

There is a grim side to the story, and I will not sugar it over, if you will pardon the word. Silas Tarbell, a man I knew a little, lost two toes and the tip of his nose in the cold of one night on the north slope. The frost turned them black as plug tobacco. He told me the toes did not hurt at all, which is the worst of it, for the cold takes the feeling first and the flesh second. I took those toes off myself, with a pair of forceps meant for molars and a good deal of whiskey for the nerves, his and mine. The work was cleaner than the cursing.

And the sheriff? The county deputies were no fools, but they were cold, and a cold deputy is a thoughtful deputy. The horse knew the road better than the driver, the driver knew the tavern better than the road, and the sheriff knew neither, which is how the sugar got through. A New Hampshire woodsman will cross the Notch in a blizzard for a bag of sugar and then complain the whole way about its price. That is a national treasure.

A Coppersmith's Curiosities

My visitor at the fort this winter was Mr. Silas "Hacksaw" McAllister of Pittsfield, the third-generation smith who hammers copper for my own foundry. He builds pots, swan necks and dephlegmators by hand, holds patents on his cooling coils, and has never once been rude to the bear, which makes him a better man than I. He pokes through other men's barns like a magistrate looking for a scandal, though he says he finds only curiosities.

Some years back he was helping a man clear a loft in Lancaster and found a copper sap bucket hanging on a nail. To the eye it was an ordinary sugarbush bucket, but it sat wrong in his hand. He rapped the bottom with a knuckle and got back a dead little thud with no ring to it. There was a false bottom soldered in about two inches above the true one. A sugar bucket with a secret cellar! A smith's mark no bigger than a thumbnail was stamped under the rim, and Silas chased it the better part of a year until he traced it to a shop in Littleton working in the 1860s. The hammer marks were even and the seams clean. Whoever that smith was, he knew his metal, and he knew better than to ask what the bucket was for.

Silas's grandfather, who worked copper before him, told of sled runners shod with thin copper strips. In thirty-below cold those strips would sing, a high ringing note as clear as a finger on a wineglass, so that teamsters could hear one another through a blizzard when they could not see their own mittens. A convoy that hummed like a church choir is a fine thing, but a singing smuggler is a smuggler with a bell round his neck, for copper does not care who is listening. Perhaps that explains the opposite tale, which Silas would not vouch for: a Coos County teamster who crossed the Notch with his oxen in burlap booties stuffed with straw, so that no one heard the sled coming. Oxen in slippers, like a duchess in her parlour! Silas allows that a man will go to great lengths for a sack of sugar. Whether the oxen went along willingly, he could not say.

He also gave me a sermon in one sentence for any young fellow buying a fitting, and it is better than any I have paid a parson for: "Use your nose before your eyes. If you smell solder fumes instead of flux, throw that fitting in the scrap bin." Bad metal and bad joints do not announce themselves, and the still is no place to learn that the hard way.

The Sugar Wash: A Simple Experiment

Since sugar was the sleds' cargo, let us take it to the apparatus. A sugar wash is the simplest preparation there is. Dissolve your sugar in warm water. It must be warm, not hot, for hot water kills the yeast and cold water puts it to sleep. An old hand told me a good ratio for a modest wash is about two pounds of sugar to the gallon of water. Stir until the sugar is gone, let the liquor cool to the warmth of a bath, and pitch your yeast.

The winter of 1864 taught me this lesson hard: yeast hates the cold. A mash set out in an unheated shed in a Coos County January will sit like a sulking mule and do nothing at all. Keep the fermenter warm, near the stove but never on it, and wrap it in a blanket if you must. When the cold got into the fermenters that winter, whole batches went dead and sour, and a man could curse until his beard froze without the yeast budging an inch.

In a warm room the wash does its work in a week or so. Then charge the pot, never past two-thirds full, for a boiling wash needs room to rise, and bring it up slowly. Slowly, I say! A hard fire makes a poor spirit and a dangerous afternoon.

The Cuts, and the Fire

This part of the work matters more than any other. The first spirit off the still is the foreshots, and the heads follow close behind. They carry methanol and harsh volatile compounds that can blind a man or kill him. Throw them out. Never drink them, never rinse your mouth with them, never use them for anything at all. Next come the hearts, the clean middle of the run and the part worth keeping. Last come the tails, which turn oily and bitter and are set aside. A sugar wash gives a thin, neutral spirit and does not forgive a careless hand. Sugar makes the work quicker, not safer, so the cuts must be made all the same, with a patient eye and a steady fire.

Fire is the great hazard of the still-house. Alcohol vapour burns, and a leaking still near an open flame has burned more log cabins than lightning. Keep your joints tight and your fire low, keep a bucket of water and a bucket of sand within arm's reach, and never leave the still unattended. I have seen a man's whole winter go up in one bright whoosh. Never use lead solder, a salvaged radiator, or any metal you do not know. Lead is a poison and will not announce itself. Use clean copper and sound joints. I remind every reader, too, that making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is illegal under United States law, and these pages are offered for historical and educational purposes only.

Swamp Medicine and the Thump Keg

A letter came from Cletus "Rabbit" Miller of 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?" I give the uncle half a medal and half a lecture. Hickory and oak are good hardwoods, and their charcoal does adsorb some harsh compounds. A proper charcoal filter does real work in its proper place. But raw wood ash tossed into a boiling charge or a thump keg will not remove methanol. That separation is done only by throwing away the foreshots and heads. Ashes in the thump keg are like a preacher's coin in the plate: a fine gesture that proves nothing and cleans nobody's soul.

The legend has a grisly side as well. A decent fellow over in Epsom, with more faith than sense, once threw a shovel of still-glowing ash into his hot thump keg to clean it. The vapours found the spark, and the whole thing went up with a whump you could hear in Pittsfield. He lost his eyebrows, half his beard and the roof of his shed in one bright instant, and he walked about for a month with a face like a boiled ham and a very respectful attitude toward the cuts.

The honest cure for bad heads is to cut them out and throw them away. Barnaby slept through the whole winter of 1864 and woke in spring having missed a war, a tax and a season of my complaining, and I envy him all three. You and I must stay awake at the copper, for good copper sings and a wise man listens to it. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.