Courting in 1860s New England: Sparking, Courting Candles and Kissing Bridges

Sparking in the Cold Parlour

There is a distillation older than copper and older than corn, and every reader of this magazine has watched it at work in his own family: two young fools, one lantern, and a pair of parents who will not go to bed. I set it down here as I would set down any other experiment, apparatus first and consequences after.

In the Suncook Valley we do not call it courting. We call it sparking, and a boy goes sparking of a Sunday night. He washes behind his ears for the first time since the Mexican War, greases his hair with lard till the cats follow him, puts on his one good collar, and walks the turnpike to her father's door with a lantern in his fist. He is shown into the parlour, the best room, which nobody uses but the minister, the dead, and the young man come sparking. It is as cold as a tomb and smells of horsehair sofa and camphor. He sits at one end of the sofa, the girl at the other, and her mother sits in the doorway knitting a sock that has been the same sock since Polk was President. The father is in the kitchen, loudly cleaning a gun he does not need cleaned.

You will have heard of the courting candle, a spiral of black iron in which the old man twists the candle up or down to set how long the boy may stay. I believe about half of it. The historians say it is an ordinary candlestick that grew a romance in the retelling, and I side with them, for I never met a New Hampshire father who would spend a whole candle on a boy. A courting candle burns about as long as a young man's nerve, and a good deal longer than his conversation.

Then there is the whispering rod, or courting stick, a hollow tube six feet long or better. The girl puts one end to her ear, the boy his lips to the other, and they whisper down it with the whole family sitting by the fire. Most boys have exactly six feet of nothing to say. One fellow over in Chichester got so worked up he sneezed into it and blew a pint of snuff and worse into the girl's ear. She married a Gilmanton man the next spring.

In my grandfather's day there was bundling. Winters were cold, firewood was dear, and a boy who had walked eight miles through the drifts could not well be thrown back into them at midnight. So the young pair went into one bed, fully dressed, the girl sometimes sewn into a sack to her armpits and a board nailed down the middle. It was a bed, a board, and a mother's prayer, and of the three only the board was trusted. The preachers of the last century roared against it, and the custom mostly died before I cut my first tooth. I will only observe that New England has a great many seven-month babies on its gravestones, every one a fine big healthy child.

Red Ears, Kissing Bridges and the Lamp in the Window

If a boy could not get her alone in the parlour, he got her alone at work. Come October the neighbourhood piled into a barn to strip corn by lantern light, and the law of the husking bee was this: find a red ear and you may kiss the girl of your choice. I have seen a sly young man from Loudon bring his own red ear in his coat. The girls were no fools; a girl who found one hid it in her apron and waited to see who was worth it. The singing school served as well. The music was dreadful, but the walk home two by two down the dark road was splendid, and the singing master knew it, which is why he was paid in cider.

Best of all was the sleigh: a buffalo robe, a cold night, and an excuse. Every road in this valley has a covered bridge, and the young folks call them kissing bridges, for in those dark seconds you are hidden from God, from Mother, and from every gossiping biddy in the village. A smart lad drove through at a crawl; a smarter one trained his horse to stop in the middle. A horse named Deacon down Epsom way stopped on the Suncook bridge so regular that three marriages came of it, and when he died the families clubbed together for a headstone.

The lantern is the hero of this tale. Your grandmother's was pierced tin, throwing speckles of stars across the snow. Lately we have kerosene, and it changed courting forever, for under a candle any boy looks handsome, but under a bright coal-oil lamp a father can see him plain, and half the matches in New Hampshire were called off on the spot. The lamp was the telegraph of love besides: in the east window, Father is asleep; in the west window, Father is awake and loading; blown out, go home and try again next Sabbath.

The mill girls had it harder, kept in company boardinghouses locked at ten o'clock sharp, so that at five minutes to ten the street sounded like a henhouse with a fox in it. Then came the war, and courting went into the mailbag, with a carte de visite no bigger than a playing card tucked in every letter, and the lace-paper valentines Miss Esther Howland of Worcester made famous. I bought one in 1858 for a girl in Barnstead. She sent it back with my spelling corrected.

Love Tokens and a Bear Named Barnaby

I confess I have made a pretty penny off love, and a pretty dime besides. A young man brings a silver dime to my anvil; I file its face smooth, punch in his initials and hers, with a little heart if he pays extra, and she wears it on a chain. One long drink of water from Epsom bought two identical tokens reading 'Forever Thine,' one, he said, as a spare. He gave one to each of the Bickford sisters, Prudence and Temperance, who compared necklaces in the meetinghouse pew and finished his courting on the church steps with a hymnal apiece. He came to me Monday for two teeth to be pulled, and I charged him half, since he had done half my work.

Now Barnaby, my black bear, who lives round the back of Fort Wilkins. Some years ago I had a hired woman, a strapping widow of twenty-six who split cordwood faster than I could, and every unmarried man from here to Alton came sparking. Most came up the front path with a lantern held high and a ham bone for Barnaby. But one Ezra of Barnstead, all brass buttons and cologne, came round the back through the woodlot on a moonlit night, in a long-tailed coat he had carried a smoked shoulder of pork in the night before. He stepped over the chain in the dark.

Barnaby took the coattails first, then, being a thorough animal, the seat of the breeches, the drawers beneath, and a good half-dollar's worth of what was under the drawers. Ezra went legging it down the Suncook road with his bare hindquarters shining so bright the ladies of Pittsfield thought a second moon had risen over Catamount. I sent salve to Barnstead next morning with a note recommending a feather cushion and repentance. The widow married a Northwood carpenter who came up the front path like a Christian, and Barnaby slept on that coattail two winters running.

A Deacon's Daughter in the Brushy Mountains

Junior Vance of Wilkes County, North Carolina, a runner who has driven more dark roads than any lantern-carrying Romeo in New England, courted Lorene Pruitt, whose father, Deacon Amos Pruitt, sat on the porch every night with a twelve-gauge across one knee and a Bible across the other. Their signal was our own window lamp in a new dress: Junior coasted his machine along the ridge road above the holler and flashed his headlamps twice; Lorene raised the kitchen lamp and set it down, meaning the spring house in fifteen minutes. One night the answer came as an orange flash and a load of birdshot off his fender. The Deacon was answering the mail.

The Deacon made him attend six weeks of summer revival, where Junior got saved twice, once for the Lord and once for Lorene. A rival named Dwayne, a deputy's son, ended nose-first in old man Hollis's hog wallow. And when the ring came, Junior hid it in a quart jar of her mother's apple butter at the church supper, only to see the preacher spread it on his biscuit. Lorene crossed the fellowship hall like a bobcat, hollering, 'Don't you EAT that, that's MINE!' The Deacon looked at the biscuit, looked at Junior, and said, 'Well, I reckon you better ask her proper, then.' She said yes with apple butter on her fingers.

The Lantern in the Still-House

A plain, sober word: running a still to make liquor for drinking without a federal permit is against the law, and what follows is history and schooling only. Most stills are run at night, and lanterns are where fools die. The vapour of spirit is heavier than air and creeps along the floor like a snake looking for a warm boot. I saw a still-house toward Gilmanton go up so; the man got out, but left his eyebrows, his beard, and the skin off the backs of his hands, and held a fork like a crab for the rest of his life. Hang your lantern high on a hook, well back from the still and from the end of the worm. Keep sand and a wet blanket by the door, try every joint with your fingers before lighting, and never let a courting couple bring a candle in.

For the mash, take eight pounds of cracked corn and five gallons of water, cook it an hour or more till thick as porridge, cool it to a hot bath, and stir in two pounds of crushed malted barley, whose ferments turn starch to sugar. Let it sweeten an hour or two, cool to blood-warm, pitch the yeast, and cover it in a warm, airy place. In five to seven days the cap falls and it tastes dry and sour: that is your wash. Apple and pear men, mind yourselves double, for the pectin in fruit breaks down into wood spirit, the blinding methanol, and old Pittsfield applejack men who were careless went blind at fifty.

Fire low and slow. The foreshots go out, a good teacupful at least for every five gallons, and I throw more than the rule. The heads, smelling of nail polish and pear drops, go in their own jars. The hearts come sweet and clean of the grain; catch the run in a dozen or twenty small jars, numbered by wax pencil, and cut by nose and patience. The tails, oily and smelling of wet dog, are saved for the next charge. And copper is the alchemy: it seizes the rotten-egg sulphur where the hot vapour touches it, in cap, vapour pipe and worm, which is why an iron pot with a copper worm beats a copper pot with an iron one.

Ashes, Shavings and the Blue Flame

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro writes that his uncle swears by hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg to clean bad heads. Wood ash is potash, the farm wife's lye; your vapour bubbles through weak lye and comes out tasting of the washboard, with not one drop of wood spirit removed. Only the distiller's own hands, throwing out foreshots and heads, will do that. Red oak, every cooper knows, is full of open pores, which is why white oak holds whiskey and red oak does not. Shavings only paint young liquor brown and bitter. An Epsom peddler sold such stuff as 'Old Suncook Ten-Year,' and a Chichester widow's red oak keg of it wept clean through the staves onto her best Brussels carpet during the wake.

Lastly, the tavern trick of the blue flame on a saucer is hogwash. Wood spirit itself burns a pale blue. A blue flame tells you as much about your liquor as a pretty bonnet tells you about a girl's temper. Make your cuts, keep lead off your still, and trust discipline over parlour tricks. And to every young man walking the turnpike tonight with a lantern in his fist: come up the front path, son. Barnaby is round the back.