Counterfeit Copper Cents of the 1850s, Lead Solder and Honest Still Cuts

An Honest Coin and the Rascals Who Copied It

Fellow experimenters, before we come to the still I must speak of a coin, for the two are closer kin than you might suppose. The United States large cent was struck from 1793 to 1857. It was a broad brown copper you could stop a door with, very nearly pure metal, and after 1795 the law fixed its weight at one hundred sixty-eight grains. For many years the Mint did not roll its own copper at all. It bought ready-made blanks from Matthew Boulton's works in Birmingham, England, so the most American coin you ever held started out as an Englishman's scrap and crossed the Atlantic in a barrel.

A cent bought one egg or a stick of horehound candy, and nobody troubles to forge a single cent. The koniacker, or coney man, as the old boys called him, made them by the bucketful. He pressed a good cent into a box of damp moulding sand and poured in whatever would melt: brass from old candlesticks, lead off a church roof, tin scraped from a dead man's pewter. He filed off the seam, rubbed the coins in lampblack and tallow so they would look old and handled, and gave them to his shovers. Each shover spent one bad cent at every tavern between Concord and Dover and took his change in good silver. In this way every innkeeper on the Suncook road was robbed a cent at a time, too slowly for anybody to work up a proper murder over it. I call the coney man a dentist in reverse. I take out what is rotten and charge for it, and he puts it in and charges for that.

The country had already learned to take odd change. In the thirties and forties private men struck the Hard Times tokens, cent-sized coppers, many of them carrying political jokes, and folk took them as cents. Merchants also punched their names into real cents to advertise. A public that took strange copper without asking fed the coney man the way a dog feeds a tick. Then on February 21, 1857, Congress did away with the large cent and the half cent and brought in a little cent of eighty-eight parts copper to twelve of nickel, with a flying eagle on it. The old coppers stayed in tills and trouser pockets for years, good and bad mixed together, and in that confusion the coney men did better business than ever.

Ring, Weight, Face, File and Punch

I would not put my name on a liar, so every coin at my anvil was put to trial the way you would run any experiment at your apparatus. The first test is the ring. Balance the coin on a fingertip and tap it with a nail. Good copper sings a clean, bright note. Lead rings like a wet boot hitting a privy floor, and cast brass gives a short, cracked buzz because the sand leaves it full of bubbles inside. The second is the weight. On a set of apothecary scales I won at euchre from a Rochester druggist, a true cent comes in near one hundred sixty-eight grains, less a little for wear. Lead weighs too much, and brass comes in too light or too heavy depending on which candlestick the fool melted. The third is the face. A struck coin has crisp lettering and a sharp rim, while a cast fake looks mushy and pitted and often carries a file scar where the seam was. If you still have doubts, scratch it with a file. Brass shows yellow underneath like a coward's liver, and lead shows gray and soft as a banker's handshake.

Last came my steel punch, which reads G. G. WILKINS / PITTSFIELD N.H. In honest copper the letters go in sharp and clean. In a lead coney cent the punch sinks like a thumb into butter, the letters smear and the coin bends double. Cast brass full of bubbles often cracks clean across. A coin that left my shop with my name sharp on it had been rung, weighed, looked at and struck, and the punch was my guarantee, the same as a smith's mark on an axe head.

My bear Barnaby is an assayer too. In the summer of fifty-six a shover came up from Concord to buy a jar from me with six lead cents. He wore a plaid vest and had waxed his whiskers into points like a pair of gimlets. The first coin went thunk on the anvil. Barnaby smelled the tallow on the man's hands, and when the fellow reached past the window to pat him, the bear took his pinky off at the second knuckle the way you would bite a radish. Barnaby chewed once, made a face like a deacon tasting cheap communion wine, and spat the finger out ring and all, because the ring was lead too. He is the only assayer in Merrimack County who works for fish heads.

The Revenue Man's Three Stories

Captain Donald Vance spent twenty-eight years tracking stills through the White and Green Mountains, and his stories bear directly on the apparatus. On a Green Mountain hillside he found a decent old man whose worm had been soldered with something dull and gray. A peddler had sold the old man a sack of old coppers as cheap scrap, and he melted them down to seal his joints, reasoning that copper ought to go with copper. They were coney cents, lead-tin fakes the shovers could no longer pass, and he had been running his liquor through lead for a year. The Captain took a hatchet to the worm while the old man cried. "I'd rather see him cry over a worm," he told me, "than see his customers' children cry over a coffin."

Near Bartlett the Captain met the opposite case: a fine copper pot, riveted properly and silver-soldered, with a cap that shone like a church dome. The owner dropped every coin a customer offered him onto that cap from the height of his chin. True copper rang across the hollow like a little bell, while a coney cent went thock and lay there like a dead beetle. The folks there called it ringing the cap. He kept the bad coins in a pickle jar painted LIARS in barn red, and he knew every man in the county by the fakes he had brought.

The third was a forger who had seen honest storekeepers punch their names into cents. He cut himself a punch with the name of a made-up Portsmouth merchant so his cast fakes would look respectable. He cut it to read correctly as it sat in his hand rather than in mirror, so every coin came out backwards like a looking-glass. The Captain followed the backwards coins from tavern to tavern to a cellar in Rochester. That is the trouble with crooks. They copy what an honest man does without understanding why he does it, and they get it backwards.

Honest Copper at the Apparatus

The same metal that cheated the tavern keeper can poison your still. Build with good, honest copper. Leave out galvanized iron, because its zinc gives off bad fumes when heated hard. Leave out cheap brass that may be cut with lead, and leave out lead solder entirely. Join your pieces with silver solder or a proper tight union, and put any metal of unknown character on the scrap heap.

Copper does more than hold the heat. A mash gives off sulfur stinks of rotten egg, boiled cabbage and burnt cart harness. Bright copper takes hold of that sulfur in the vapour and keeps it as a dark scale on the metal, so it never reaches your jar. That is the alchemy of the thing, but it only works on bright metal, so scrub the still after every run the way a good dentist scrubs his forceps.

For history's sake, here is the run as it was done at this fort. Cook cracked corn in clean water until it is a thick porridge, and stir in malted barley as it cools so the malt can turn the starch to sugar. When it has cooled to about the warmth of your wrist, pitch the yeast, cover the mash loosely and keep it warm. Keep the air moving as well, because fermenting mash breathes out a heavy gas that settles in cellars and can smother a man. When the cap falls and the mash smells sour and beery, you have your wash. It holds only a few parts in the hundred, and the still can only concentrate what the yeast made. Strain it so the grain will not scorch, fill the pot only part way so it cannot boil over and blow its seams, and keep the fire low and steady. Never leave the still alone, and never let a flame near a leaking joint, because spirit vapour catches like dry hay.

The Cuts: Judge Every Jar

The first drops off the worm are the foreshots, sharp and smelling of a cobbler's glue pot and fresh varnish. The methanol rides there, the wood spirit that can blind or kill a man. Throw out a good-sized cup or more for every five gallons of wash, more if the mash was fruit, and more again if you have any doubt, and pour it on the ground well away from any flame. Next come the heads, harsh and smelling of solvent. Catch them in small jars, smell each one, and set them aside. Then come the hearts, sweet and clean and smelling of the grain, which you collect in a row of small jars so each can be judged on its own, as with the coins. Last come the tails, oily and dull and smelling like a wet dog. Stop collecting there and save them to run again with the next batch.

Ashes in the Keg and the Blue-Flame Fable

Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, wrote that his uncle swears the old-timers threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg "to clean out bad heads." Nothing you put in the keg will do that. The keg runs the vapour through a second time to make it stronger. It is not a sieve, and it is not a priest. Hardwood ash soaked in water gives lye, which our grandmothers used for soap. Lye is caustic and no friend to copper or to a man's stomach. Still, the uncle is half right. Some mountain men put peaches or apples in the keg for the flavour, and oak does belong in the craft, only in a barrel rather than the keg. Left a good long while in oak, especially charred oak, whiskey takes up colour and sweetness. That is aging, though, not cleaning. The keg is for strength, the barrel is for flavour, and the cuts are for living through it.

As for the blue-flame test, the wood spirit burns with a pale blue flame just as good spirit does. A blue flame in the spoon tells you only that there is alcohol present, which you already knew. If a blue flame meant safe liquor, every graveyard in Merrimack County would have a still burning in it. Ring it, weigh it, look at it in good light, and let no bad one into the good jar. Making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law, and everything here is offered for history and education. Even old G. G. pays his fines. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.