Hiding Liquor in Plain Sight: Pickle Crocks, Hay Wagons and a Coffin Full of Jugs

The Molasses Fathers of New England

Any man who stands at his own copper and watches the first drops gather at the worm should know that the Yankee did not learn to hide his barrels from Mr. Lincoln. He learned it from King George, and from that king's grandfather before him. In 1733 Parliament passed the Molasses Act, which laid sixpence on every gallon of foreign molasses landed in these colonies. Molasses was the mother of rum, and rum was the mother's milk of every New England seaport from Portsmouth down to Newport.

Our honest forefathers answered by lying, smuggling and bribing, in that order, and often all three before breakfast. Molasses casks came ashore marked as fish, as salt, as ballast, and as the personal luggage of sea captains who had apparently packed eleven hundred gallons of underwear. One customs man in Portsmouth took so many bribes in molasses that by the end of his career his conscience was too sticky to turn over. For thirty years the Crown collected hardly a farthing on that duty. Such is the noble heritage of the sons of Merrimack County.

Now Mr. Lincoln has a war to pay for, and the whiskey tax sits on our shoulders like a wet cat. The assessors want every cask gauged, every gallon counted and every still registered. So the Yankee mind has gone back to its oldest trick. You do not hide a barrel in a cave, for a cave is the first place a deputy looks and the second place a bear lives. You hide it where nobody would think to look, because it is sitting in plain view being ordinary. I learned the principle pulling teeth. A man opens his mouth wide for the dentist and never once thinks about what is in his pockets. Give a revenue man nothing to look at but the dullest, sourest and most respectable things a Christian household owns: pickles, hay and grief. Nobody searches grief.

Pickles, Hay, and a Deputy's Seat

Every farmhouse from here to the Canada line keeps a row of gray salt-glazed stoneware crocks in the cellar, made in Bennington, Vermont, at the Norton works and its rivals, each with a blue cobalt bird or flower on the side. The cucumbers go down in brine, a wooden board called the follower is laid on top, a stone holds the board under, and a cloth is tied over all. Sink a stoppered stoneware jug in the bottom, pack the cucumbers round it, and finish the crock as usual. The deputy lifts the cloth, the brine hits him in the nose like a slap from a fishwife, and he goes back upstairs to trouble your wife.

Hear one warning, for I am in dead earnest about it. Use STONEWARE, properly salt-glazed and fired hard. The cheap red earthenware the country potters sell for pennies is often glazed with lead, and spirit or vinegar or anything sharp will draw that lead out into your drink. Lead poisoning is a slow and ugly death: cramps in the belly, palsied hands, a mind gone as soft as a boiled turnip, and a blue line along the gums that I have seen with my own eyes in a man's mouth.

Then there is the hay wagon. In haying season every road in the Suncook Valley is crowded with loads piled as high as a church steeple. Build a little cave in the middle of the load, lash the kegs in tight, and fork loose hay over them. Deputy Ezra Plumb, a sour, long-necked fellow, once took it into his head that my wagon in the dooryard at Fort Wilkins held more than timothy and clover. He was right, for there were four kegs in it. Up the back of the load he went, jabbing with a pitchfork. I had parked that wagon, a fair-minded man might say, exactly the length of Barnaby's chain from Barnaby's post, plus about a foot and a half, and the deputy's backside hung over the tailboard by that same foot and a half. A bear gives no warning growl. Barnaby took the seat of Plumb's trousers, his drawers, and a good mouthful of what lay under them. I sewed the man up myself, free of charge, with fourteen stitches laced like a boot, and he cussed me through every one. He stands through church service to this day. The kegs never moved an inch.

The Funeral of Uncle Absalom

Since this war began, coffins have been coming home on every train, some of pine and some the iron Fisk burial cases patented back in '48. Every Christian in New England knows that you do not stop a funeral and you do not open a coffin. So I built one of six feet of white pine, painted black, with a brass handle on each side and a tin plate I punched myself: ABSALOM WILKINS, AGED 71, GONE TO HIS REWARD. There never was such a man. Inside I packed two dozen stoneware jugs in sawdust.

We set out down the turnpike toward Pittsfield center with a hearse borrowed from a Barnstead man who asked no questions, four hired mourners in black crepe at a quarter dollar apiece, and myself behind with a handkerchief to my eye. Every farmer took off his hat. The sheriff's own man rode up on a gray mare and offered his sorrow. Then a hearse wheel dropped into a frost heave and the coffin LURCHED, and out of it came a long, sloshing, gurgling noise. I never paused. 'Poor Uncle Absalom,' I said. 'That's his final digestion, gentlemen. He went to his Maker with a full plate of beans.' The deputy remembered urgent business in Epsom and spurred so hard that his mare threw a shoe. That shoe is nailed over my door yet.

The Revenue Man's Side of the Ledger

Captain Donald Vance spent near thirty years in the revenue service out of Manchester, and he knows every one of these tricks from the other side. Hay is hay, he says, but a full barrel of thirty-one or thirty-two gallons weighs better than two hundred and fifty pounds, and no man can make it weigh like hay. One March in Vermont he watched a hay wagon roll into farm country, carrying hay to people who already had hay, with ruts three fingers deeper than any hay load he had seen and two Morgans lathered white on level ground. About four feet into the load his fork rang on oak. He found six kegs, and a hymnbook lying on top of them.

He told me of a widow in Rutland County with forty crocks in her cellar and one family of three cucumbers. She moved them along the row ahead of him while he searched, and he found thirty-eight jugs under the brine. He told me also of a funeral near the Canada line where the pallbearers whistled, the lid read J. B. CORN, ESQUIRE, and the grave was dug two feet deep. Under the lid lay eleven jugs in sawdust. His report read: 'Deceased found to be spirits only; spirits departed into custody.'

What the Hiding Place Does to the Spirit

Every hiding place costs your spirit something in flavor and in safety, so treat the matter as a natural philosopher would. Begin with the mash. Crack corn or rye coarse, cook it, cool it to about blood-warm, pitch your yeast, and let it work in a warm place with plenty of air moving to carry off the gas. When it goes still and sour you have a wash of a few percent, ready for the copper pot. Keep the fire LOW and steady and every joint tight, for spirit vapour is a ghost that wants to become a fire. I knew a man in Loudon who lit his pipe beside a leaking union and was buried in two places. Copper takes hold of the sulfur rising from the mash, so keep it bright and scrubbed after every run.

The cuts are the whole art. Run into small jars and number each one with a grease pencil. The foreshots, sharp as nail varnish, go on the ground. The heads, smelling of glue and green apples, are set aside. The hearts come on sweet and clean of the grain. The tails, oily and smelling of wet dog, are saved for another run. As for storage, keep brine out of the jug, keep kegs out of the sun and dust, and never store spirit in raw pine, which will make it taste like a Maine lumber camp's underwear. A vinegar cask will sour low-strength spirit and leave you smuggling salad dressing. All of this is set down for history and education, since the law forbids making spirits for drinking without a federal permit.

Ashes, Oak Shavings, and the Bead

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asks whether hickory ash or red oak shavings in the thump keg will clean out bad heads. Wood ash is lye, the makings of soap. In '59 a Chichester man put half a bucket of it in his doubler and painted his still-house with gray foam, and his spirit still tasted like fish glue. Oak shavings will lend color and a little flavor, as a coat of paint dresses a barn without mending a single rotten board. Only honest cuts will remove the heads. The bead is no better a test. A shaken jar gives a rough guess at strength and nothing more, and bad heads bead as prettily as good hearts. Judge by your cuts, by your nose, and by a hydrometer if you can get one. Keep your copper clean and your fire low.