How 1860s New England Storekeepers Caught Clipped and Counterfeit Coins

The Curiosity Box Upon My Counter

I keep two boxes at Fort Wilkins. One is my cash drawer, and the revenue men read that. The other is my curiosity box, and tonight I empty it on the counter for you. Out tumbles forty years of New England pocket trash. On top lies a copper cent so worn it has passed through more hands than the banister of a Concord parlor house and come out smoother for it. You cannot read the date, and you cannot make out the lady's face. Hezekiah down at the store took it for a full cent anyhow, for what else was he to do? My subject is small change and the large lies that ride upon it. I mean to show how a Yankee storekeeper judged whether a coin was honest, and why a little steel punch struck on my own anvil came to mean more in this valley than the eagle on the reverse.

First comes a Spanish real, worn so thin you could read a newspaper through it. For most of my life it was lawful money in these United States, for Spanish and Mexican silver was legal tender here until February of 1857. Up here we never called it a real. We still counted the old way, six shillings to the dollar. So the real, at twelve and a half cents, was a 'ninepence,' and the half-real, at six and a quarter, was a 'fourpence.' In Philadelphia the same coins are a 'levy' and a 'fip,' and the shopkeepers look at you as if you had two heads when you ask for ninepence worth of molasses. I went there once and will not go again. They have no bears and they water their rum.

In 1857 Congress cleaned house. It declared the foreign silver no longer lawful tender and told folks to bring it to the Mint and exchange it for the new cents. The Mint did not take it at face. A Spanish quarter that had passed for twenty-five cents all your life went in at twenty, the ninepence at ten and the fourpence at five. Whoever held the coins on the last day took the loss, and that was mostly farm widows and storekeepers. The bankers saw it coming and passed theirs off the year before. Washington does not rob you with a pistol. It sends a circular.

Next is a pistareen, a Spanish two-real piece of poorer silver that went about at some twenty cents. I have had men swear to me it was worth a quarter, and I have pulled teeth from those same men and found more silver in their fillings. Beside it lies the most disreputable object in this fort, my bear Barnaby included: a bungtown copper. It is made to pass for an English halfpenny, with King George on the front and Britannia on the back. Under its brown skin it is light, cheap and crooked. Birmingham turned them out by the barrel, and so did enterprising rascals on this side of the water. Hereabouts 'bungtown' meant any copper not worth bending over for. It is like a Gilmanton suitor: it looks fine by lamplight and weighs nothing in the morning.

Our own old large cent weighed one hundred sixty-eight grains, nearly eleven grams if you talk like a Frenchman, and it held copper enough to patch a kettle. In 1857 the Mint quit making it and gave us the little copper-nickel Flying Eagle. Two years later came the Indian Head. In '64, with the war eating every scrap of metal, the cent was made lighter still, of bronze, and a two-cent piece came out beside it. That two-cent piece was the first coin in American history to say 'In God We Trust,' and I suppose two cents was about all the trust anybody had left. Before then, when the government could not make change, grocers, saloon keepers and undertakers struck their own cent-sized tokens bearing their names and trades, and these passed by the millions. Congress outlawed private one- and two-cent pieces in 1864.

Sound, Weight, and Edge

Suppose you keep a store in Pittsfield. A mill girl from the Suncook cotton mills lays a coin down for thread, and you have about one second to judge it. A storekeeper had three tests, and he ran them the way a natural philosopher runs an experiment. They were sound, weight and edge.

For sound, every decent store on the turnpike kept a flat stone, a marble slab, or a spot on the counter worn bare by years of use. Drop good silver on it and it rings like a church bell. Lead with a silver wash goes down like a drunk falling off a porch, with no music in it at all. Every scoundrel in the Suncook Valley owns a coin that will not ring, and most of them married one.

For weight, an old storekeeper could heft ten coppers in his palm and tell you whether two of them were light. A careful man also kept a little brass balance under the counter. That mattered more after 1853, when Congress made our silver coins lighter so the speculators would quit melting them down and shipping the metal overseas. The new coins carried little arrows beside the date. Half the town could not see an arrow without spectacles, so a storekeeper learned the new weight in his hand the way a farmer learns his wife's step in the dark.

For the edge, run your thumb around it. If it is smooth where it ought to be reeded, or flat on one side like a half-moon, somebody has been at it with shears or a file. That is clipping. The shavings go into a little pile, the pile gets melted, and the town grows poorer one ninepence at a time. Its cousin is sweating, in which a man shakes a sack of good coins hard enough to knock the dust off them and then sells the dust. The English were so plagued by clippers that they put milled edges on their money. Sir Isaac Newton himself, as warden of their Mint, spent his old age hunting clippers and seeing them hanged. He worked out how the moon goes round the earth and then hunted coin shavers for sport, a sensible man after my own heart.

We had a clipper of our own, whom I shall call Ezra Tibbetts. He was a Concord money-shaver who came up the turnpike in the fall of '61 and passed a sack of clipped Spanish silver in Pittsfield, Barnstead and Epsom before anybody caught on. He made the mistake of trying a shaved ninepence on me. It rang dull on my stone, and its edge was sharp enough to shave with. Ezra laughed and went out the side door, which is where Barnaby's chain reaches. Barnaby has his principles and did not kill him. He clipped Ezra the way Ezra clipped coins and took a sliver off the edge, only the sliver was Ezra's left ear. I charged nothing for the bandage, since the bear had already collected. Ezra wore his hat tipped to the left for the rest of his life, and Concord called him 'Short Weight.'

What My Punch Promised

By the war years Pittsfield had quit trusting its own pocket change. Half the coppers were bungtown trash, half the silver was clipped, and the paper was not worth wiping with. So I began to stamp coins. I took a bar of tool steel, cut the letters backwards into its end, hardened it in the forge and tempered it to a good straw color so it would not shatter. Then I laid a coin on the anvil, set the punch and gave it one blow: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H.

That mark never claimed to be money. It was a signature. It meant Wilkins had held that coin, rung it, weighed it and thumbed its edge, and would take it back at his own counter at the face he had paid it out for. It was my word struck into another man's metal. A man in Chichester who had never laid eyes on me would take a stamped cent from a stranger. He knew a Pittsfield dentist with a bear stood behind it, and he knew the bear stood a good deal closer.

Copper takes the mark like butter. Silver is harder and fights you, so you must hit it harder. If your hand wobbles, you get a double strike that looks like a drunk man's signature. Strike once and strike hard. I stamped them by the hundreds. The sheriff once confiscated a stamped cent of mine as evidence, and so far as I know it still sits in the county strongbox, the only honest coin the county has ever held. One spring Barnaby broke into an earlier coin box and swallowed better than a dollar in stamped coppers. I followed him three days with a shovel and a sieve and panned his leavings in the Suncook. I recovered every cent but two, and each came out brighter than it went in, for a bear's gut is the finest pickle in New England.

A Carolina Road Man's Purse

My guest by the stove was Junior Vance, a road man from the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County, North Carolina. He was once paid for a load in forty pounds of nickels, hauled out in bank sacks by a Charlotte man whose machines stood in every beer joint from there to Gastonia. With his load gone his conveyance rode light, and the nickels slid from side to side all the way up the mountain. Another time a fellow in Statesville came up short and dropped a silver half dollar on a concrete step. "It didn't ring," said Junior. "It went thud. Like droppin' a biscuit." It felt greasy and marked like soap under his thumbnail. It was lead that some fellow had poured in a mold and painted, and a real half dollar turned up in the man's other pocket mighty quick.

His granny sorted coins by their edges every Saturday. Any coin showing a red stripe of copper went into the coffee can for spending. Solid silver went into the buttermilk can, and nobody touched that. The face can lie, but the edge confesses. Junior once scratched a 'J' with a horseshoe nail on a nickel he handed a deputy as toll, and six years later it came back to him as change in Wilkesboro. He also knew an old corn maker back in the Brushies who would take no paper at all. "Promises on a rag," the old man called it, and he bit every silver coin and rang it on his anvil before he nodded.

Copper at the Still

A word first: the law of the United States forbids making spirits to drink without a federal permit, and what follows is offered as history and education. Cook cracked corn in water until it is thick as porridge and smells like a johnnycake. Cool it to about a hundred and fifty degrees and stir in malted barley, whose ferments, which the chemists call enzymes, turn the starch to sugar. Cool it to about eighty degrees, pitch your yeast and cover it loosely. In a few days to a week you have wash, a sour beer of six to eight percent.

A still does not make alcohol. It sorts it. Acetaldehyde boils at about seventy degrees, acetone near a hundred thirty-three, methanol a hair under a hundred fifty, ethyl alcohol about a hundred seventy-three and water at two hundred twelve. Throw out the foreshots, a good teacupful on a small pot or more if you have any doubt, for nobody ever went blind from throwing too much away. Set apart the heads, which smell of varnish and the glue pot. Keep the sweet, clean hearts, and set aside the tails, which smell like a wet dog asleep in a damp cellar. Fruit mash makes more methanol than corn, because the pectin in the skins and pulp breaks down as it ferments, so cut your heads bigger and braver on apple brandy. Keep the fire low so the wash does not foam into the worm. Never walk away from a running still, keep a bucket of water within reach, and keep your pipe in your pocket.

Now the alchemy. Fermentation makes sulfur compounds, and when the vapour touches bright copper, the copper grabs the sulfur and holds it. Most of that work happens in the head, along the arm and down the worm, so a copper pot with a cheap condenser is money spent in the wrong place. Copper used this way wears thin over the years, just as a large cent wears smooth. So tap your still and listen to it the way you would ring a coin. A thin spot sounds tinny, and a sound wall sounds solid. Vinegar and a handful of salt will brighten tarnished copper. Rinse until the water tastes of nothing, then run a load of plain water through before any wash goes in.

Ashes, Oak Shavings, and the Blue Flame

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro asks whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg will clean out bad heads. Wood ash is mostly potash, the strong alkali farm wives leach for soap. It may tame a little sourness, but heads are a portion of the run, and the only cure for them is a clean jar and a willing hand. Oak gives color, tannin and a woody taste, but that is flavoring, not cleaning. Red oak's pores run open end to end with nothing to plug them, so it weeps where white oak holds. Raw shavings in a hot doubler give a sawdust bitterness and a brown tint, and folks who see the color think the spirit has been aged.

The blue flame test tells you one thing only: there is alcohol in the dish. Methanol burns pale blue as well, so a spoonful of poison burns as handsomely as a spoonful of hearts. I stamped a copper BLUE FLAME IS NO PROOF, and that is the lesson of my curiosity box. A mark is worth only as much as the man who struck it. A clear jar means something only if somebody threw out the foreshots and heads. Ring your coins, thumb your edges, keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.