Copper Prices Then and Now: What a Pound of Copper Bought from Paul Revere to 1864

My bear Barnaby lay sulking under the window as I set down these lines. He had taken the drip of clear spirit into the jar for a dinner bell, and I had told him that at the present rates for bear grease he would fetch less at the Concord tannery than my copper worm. He has not forgiven me. All the same, he gave me the question for this article. What is a pound of the red metal worth? What did it buy your grandfather, and what does it buy you in this year of eighteen sixty-five? Every man who works a still is a natural philosopher at his own apparatus, and he ought to know the price of the metal his experiments are made in. The usual caution belongs here as well: making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law, and what follows is offered for history and learning only.

A Metal We Bought from King George

When this republic was young, a man who wanted sheet copper fit for a kettle or a ship's bottom bought it from the English, and most of it came off the smelters around Swansea in Wales. We had fought a war to be shed of King George and were still buying his kettles. Then in eighteen-oh-one Paul Revere, the very man of the midnight ride, set up one of the first copper rolling mills in America at Canton, Massachusetts. He sheathed the hull of the frigate Constitution with his copper and put more of it on the dome of the State House in Boston. He was a patriot by night and a merchant by morning, and that is the whole Yankee character in one sentence.

In those days copper was a luxury metal. A farmer who owned a copper kettle willed it to his eldest son, right after the farm and right before the wife. A still was often the dearest thing a country family owned after the land, and smiths priced one the way a butcher prices a ham, by the pound of metal plus the labor. Then in eighteen forty-one Douglass Houghton, the state geologist of Michigan, wrote up the copper country around Lake Superior, and the rush was on. Copper lies in that rock as pure native metal, and men had to chisel some of the boulders apart by hand like a frozen side of beef. By the fifties Lake Superior copper led the whole country, and a pound sat comfortably in the low twenties of cents.

By my own ledger, in those fat years before the war a pound of good sheet copper traded about even for a day and a half of hired farm labor, or a pair of plump hens, or one middling sermon from a preacher who was trying to get paid. A pound of copper used to buy a Christmas goose. Now it buys the goose, the stuffing, and the preacher to say grace over it.

The Death of the Big Cent and the Wartime Jump

Now consider the big copper cent, the one I strike with my steel punch to read G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. From seventeen ninety-five to eighteen fifty-seven it weighed one hundred sixty-eight grains. There are seven thousand grains to the pound, so if you work it out on your slate you get forty-one or forty-two large cents to the pound. While copper sold for twenty-some cents, Uncle Sam made a tidy profit coining it. The price crept up, the mint grew tired of losing its shirt, and in eighteen fifty-seven Congress killed the big cent and the half cent stone dead. In their place came the little Flying Eagle of copper and nickel, no bigger than a lady's shirt button. People called it the nick. I called it an insult.

Then came the war. Cannon want bronze, cartridges and fittings want brass, and every percussion cap on every musket wants a pinch of copper. By eighteen sixty-four, quoted in Mr. Chase's greenback paper, Lake copper in New York had climbed past forty cents a pound, about double its price before the shooting started. Mark the arithmetic, alchemist. Once copper sells above forty-two cents, a pound of old big cents is worth more melted than spent. I do not say any man in Pittsfield fed his grandmother's penny jar to the furnace. I say only that I knew a fellow who did, and that he bought a new wagon wheel with the difference, and that in a dim mirror he looks a good deal like me. That same year the government shrank the cent again, to a thin bronze coin of forty-eight grains. It also brought out a new bronze two-cent piece, the first coin in this nation to carry the words In God We Trust.

Prices like those draw thieves. Word went round that my worm weighed better than nine pounds, and a Concord junk peddler came creeping up my back path one moonless night with a sack and a hacksaw. Barnaby took the seat of his trousers and a good deal of what was in them. Doctor Berry over in Barnstead stitched him with linen thread and said the man would whistle every time he sat down for the rest of his natural life.

My Still, Weighed Like a Hog

The newspapers never printed this part of my first arrest, because the newspapers never print the part where I win. The sheriff carted off my still on a hay wagon as evidence, a kettle I had fed for twelve years. After the trial the county could not lawfully drink out of it, so the board decided to sell it for scrap. They weighed it on the grain scale at the feed store like a hog at the fair, and I have never been so insulted on behalf of a kettle. When it was posted for auction by the pound, nobody in Pittsfield dared bid, partly out of respect and partly because Barnaby has a long memory. So my cousin from Gilmanton stood up in his Sunday hat and bid eleven cents a pound. The auctioneer saw nothing but men staring at their own boots and called it sold. The still was home at Fort Wilkins the next week for less than I had paid for the metal, and the county was proud of turning a profit on me.

Copper in the Blue Ridge Hollers

Miss Clara Higgins, an herbalist of the Blue Ridge of Virginia, tells me the war treated Southern kettles worse still. In 'sixty-three the Confederate ordnance men were scraping the country for copper to make percussion caps. After the Union took the Ducktown mines in Tennessee, every copper pot in Virginia had a price on its head. When her great-great-grandmother Tabitha heard the agents were two farms down the road, she had her boys pull the still off the furnace while it was still warm, bury it in the hog wallow, and drive all six hogs back on top of it. She met the agents at the gate with a dented tin washtub, swore it was the only metal on the place, and took a Confederate dollar for it. The still had to be scrubbed with sand and lye ashes three days running, and the first batch out of it tasted faintly of bacon. People came from two counties over to try the bacon whiskey.

Miss Higgins also told of a ship-breaker's son out of Norfolk who hauled the green copper sheathing of old sailing ships up the James River and hammered it into a still. Sheathing like that is what gave us the word copper-bottomed. His still carried barnacle scars, and on one side part of a ship's name could be read backward in the metal. They called that still Nancy for fifty years. Before the war, she said, the tinkers traded copper for persimmon brandy at a fixed rate. "One pint of good persimmon brandy for one pound of copper. Everybody knew it, like you know the price of salt." In 'sixty-two the tinkers came through asking two pints a pound. Her grandaddy tested every new still by tapping it with a hickory nut before he paid. Good sheet copper all in one piece rings like a little church bell, and patched or cheap metal goes thunk like a gourd. A still that had been patched and cheated on he called tin-hearted, and a clean first run he called new-penny likker.

Where Copper Earns Its Keep

Now to the alchemy proper. Copper does its work wherever the vapor touches it, because copper takes up sulfur. The rotten-egg and cabbage-water smells rising off a mash meet bright copper and stay behind on the metal. So the copper in your helmet, vapor pipe and worm counts for more than the copper in your pot bottom. A man who can afford only so much copper should put it where the vapor runs, and keep it bright.

Corn in this valley was done this way in my father's time. Crack it coarse, as you would for hens, and cook it in hot water a good while, stirring so it does not scorch, until it is a thick porridge. Cool it to warm-bath heat and stir in your malt. Malt carries a ferment that turns the corn starch to sugar. Once the mash is sweet, cool it further, pitch your yeast, and let it work three, four or five days under a cover that breathes, until it tastes sour-dry. The wash you get is weak stuff, a few parts in a hundred of spirit.

Keep your fire low. A hard fire pukes mash into the vapor pipe and smears the good and the bad together. Never walk off from a lit still, because alcohol vapor is fire looking for a home. The foreshots come first and carry the wood-spirit that blinds men. For every twenty gallons of wash I throw away at least a pint or so, and more if my nose says so. The heads follow and smell of varnish and glue. Catch the run in small numbered jars and wait to judge them until they have aired. Then smell and taste each one with water to find where the varnish stops and the sweetness starts. The hearts are your treasure. The tails come oily and wet-dog and go cloudy with water, so set them aside for the next run. Heads and foreshots get thrown out every time. Afterward, give the copper a warm rinse and a scrub, put vinegar and salt on the dull spots, and rinse again. You paid war prices for that metal.

Two Myths Flattened on the Anvil

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, wrote that his uncle swears by hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Hickory ash is full of potash, and water run through potash makes lye. Lye is caustic, it foams, and it does nothing for the bad stuff. Mountain folk call the result washday likker. Red oak is no better. Coopers use white oak for whiskey barrels because its pores are plugged inside the wood, while red oak is open enough to blow through and goes only into slack barrels for flour and nails. The thump keg is a second boiling. It strengthens the spirit, but it scrubs nothing out. The only cure for bad heads is to cut them out.

Last is the copper cent dropped into a jar to purify the spirit, which mountain folk call pennying the jar. Copper does its good work only when hot vapor passes over bright metal. A cold penny sitting in spirit gives up a little of its copper and every grain of the grime it has picked up in pockets, privies and collection plates. A green tint means dissolved copper you are about to drink. A man who drops a penny in his jar has paid a cent for the privilege of drinking a cent. Keep your copper clean and your fire low.