How Civil War Widows Ran the Stills on Pittsfield, New Hampshire Hill Farms

Picture Pittsfield in the summer of 1863. Catamount Mountain stands green to its crown, the Suncook runs low and brown past the mills, and every hill farm above the turnpike has lost its men to the Granite regiments, more than thirty thousand of them from this state. The farm year waits for no war, so the hill farms ran all the same. I set the season down here as the women lived it, for the reader who keeps a copper pot and a curious mind, because that whole summer was one long experiment in heat, ferment and endurance.

The Hill Farm Year When the Men Went South

In May you plow and plant. The old rule says corn goes in when the oak leaf is the size of a squirrel's ear, and that is all the almanac a hill farmer needs. Just as the corn shows, the black flies rise out of every brook in the county, late May through June, in clouds so thick a man could stake a tent on them. A black fly does not bite the way a gentleman mosquito does. He saws. He crawls under the hat band and up the trouser cuff to the very borders of decency, cuts a little trench, and drinks from it like a drover at a horse trough. He is the only creature in Merrimack County that takes more blood than the tax collector, though he at least leaves a receipt in the form of a welt.

The women fought back with fly dope, which was pine tar stirred into lard or mutton grease and smeared on until the wearer smelled like a ship's bottom. They also kept smudge fires of punky wood and green leaves burning at the edge of the field. A family hoeing corn in June looked like a line of tarred sinners standing in the smoke of their own damnation, and the flies came anyway.

Haying begins near the Fourth of July. You cut at dawn while the dew holds the grass upright, then spread it, turn it, rake it into windrows and cocks, and pray it does not rain before it is in the barn, because wet hay molds, and packed wet hay can heat up and burn a barn from the inside. With the men gone, the scythes fell to boys of twelve, girls in their brothers' trousers, rheumatic grandfathers and the wives. I watched the Widow Pease's boy, eleven years old and no bigger than a churn dasher, mow a pitched field off the Barnstead road with a scythe longer than he was tall. He put the point into a stone exactly once, and the word he said would have peeled the bark off a beech. The war did haying one good turn. It brought into Pittsfield dooryards the horse-drawn mowing machines that farmers had laughed at in the fifties, and I sharpened half the cutter bars in this valley at my own forge. Then came August, with blackberries ripening along every stone wall and old sheep pasture going back to brush. The children picked and the women boiled.

Bounty Money and the Bounty Brides

Now the money, which is the real story. Mr. Lincoln's Enrollment Act of March '63 was the draft. A drafted man could hire a substitute or pay three hundred dollars commutation. Every town had a quota, and no town wished its own sons drafted, so the towns paid bounties to any man who would enlist on their rolls. By '64 the town, state and federal bounties together could put several hundred dollars in a recruit's pocket, in some places close to a thousand, at a time when a hill farm might clear a hundred dollars cash in a good year. A private drew thirteen dollars a month and could allot a share of it home. Under the pension act of July '62, a fallen man's widow drew a pension. The soldier went south and the money stayed in the sugar bowl. For the first time since the Pilgrims, the hill farm women held the purse.

This gave rise to the bounty brides, young women who took a sudden romantic interest in any fellow fresh from signing his enlistment papers. I name no living soul, so take my composite, the Widow Thankful Spragg, who was married three times in two years and widowed by none of them. Each allotment came home to the same sugar bowl. When the war ended, all three husbands came home alive, and all on the same train. The two wisest shook hands and went west to Iowa together. The third stayed, and I pulled four of his teeth that spring, every one of them loosened at the Concord depot.

The quieter truth is that many a hill farm woman with cash in hand went into the still-house. Whiskey was the one crop that carried its value in a jug, kept all winter, and could be hauled to market over a bad road. A woman with a copper pot in the springhouse and a reliable boy to carry jugs to the cotton mill hands on payday out-earned the town minister. The only man who noticed was the sheriff, and he only noticed because his wife had begun paying cash.

A Broker, a Bear, and a Calfskin Book

Wherever there is bounty money there are buzzards. The bounty jumper enlisted, took his bounty, deserted, and enlisted again in the next county under a new name, some of them a dozen times or more. The bounty broker was worse. He supplied recruits and substitutes to the towns and kept the fattest slice of every bounty. One August a broker from down Manchester way came up the turnpike in a yellow buggy, carrying a calfskin book of enlistment papers and promissory notes and hunting for widows with pension money to lend against. He cut through my dooryard. Barnaby, my black bear, had rolled all afternoon in blackberry pomace and was purple, half drunk and swarming with yellowjackets, and the broker had wiped smoked herring off his fingers onto that book. Barnaby took him by the seat of his trousers and sent him down Route 28 with his bare hindquarters to the wind, and the yellowjackets followed him. The bear ate the book whole. Three widows on the hill owed that broker money, every note went down the bear, and the widows paid what they owed in pies.

Brier-Patch Copper of the Blue Ridge

Miss Clara Higgins, a mountain herbalist from the Blue Ridge of Virginia, brought kindred tales to Fort Wilkins. By '63, she says, half the copper in the Blue Ridge was in women's hands. Her great-great-grandmother Lettie ran her husband's still on a branch of the Dan River. Copper was dear in the war, and the conscription officers seized whatever was worth seizing, so every night Lettie carried the cap and arm deep into a blackberry brier patch behind the hog lot, dressed in her husband's leather britches with a feed sack over her head. No officer would wade in after them in August. In her family, anything hidden where no man is fool enough to look is still called brier-patch copper.

The berries earned their keep twice. The bloody flux tore through the armies worse than bullets did, and blackberry cordial, puckery with tannin, was the cure every woman knew for the summer complaint. The mountain women sent it to camp in crates packed with straw and marked 'preserves.' One crate of six jugs went out, and in spring a single empty jug came back with a pencilled note on the handle: 'Preserved the whole company. Send more.' In Miss Higgins's words, 'A cordial is what a lady calls whiskey when the minister is in the parlor.' A Floyd County widow named Patsy paid back a broker's usurious loan in cordial, watered half and half and coloured with pokeberry juice. Mark me plainly: pokeberry is poison to eat, and that jug was strictly for the broker.

Cordial and Bramble Brandy at the Pot

First my standing warning. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against United States law, and what follows is history and education. The cordial, happily, needs no still, since it is steeped and fortified rather than distilled. Pick the berries dead ripe in the cool of the morning, mash them in a crock, and let the juice drip through a hanging flannel bag overnight. To each quart of juice add about a pound of sugar, a little cinnamon stick, a few cloves and a grating of nutmeg. Boil it gently for a quarter hour, skim it and let it cool. Then add a pint or so of good brandy or sound whiskey from a proper merchant to each quart, and bottle and cork it.

Bramble brandy was a more dangerous road than corn whiskey. The wash works for a week or two in a covered barrel in a shaded, airy place, because fermentation breathes out a choking gas that will lie in a cellar. Strain out the skins and seeds, or they will scorch on the bottom of the pot. Fruit foams, so fill the pot no more than about two-thirds full. A pot filled to the neck pukes up the arm and can plug the vapour line, and a plugged still over a fire is a bomb with a copper hat. Keep the fire slow and low, keep vapour away from open flame, keep water and a wet sack handy, and never leave a running still alone.

With fruit, the cuts matter most. The pectin in berries gives off more wood spirit, methanol, than a corn mash does, and it comes over first. Every drop of the foreshots goes on the ground. Take a generous heads cut as well, and throw it out or keep it, well marked, for cleaning tools only. The soft, sweet spirit that smells of berries is the hearts. When it turns flat and smells like a wet dog in a hayloft, set those tails aside. Copper gives a sweeter fruit spirit, so keep it bright and join it with sound unions or silver solder, never lead.

Hickory Ashes, Red Oak, and the Shake-Test Bead

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asks about his uncle's claim that old-timers threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Hardwood ash is potash, the alkali this state once burned whole hillsides to make. An alkali eats acid, so the ash may soften a sour wash, but neither ash nor shavings nor prayer will scrub out methanol, and only cutting away the foreshots and heads will do that. Red oak is so full of open pores that you can blow bubbles through a stick of it, which is why coopers make whiskey barrels of white oak, whose pores are sealed by growths the coopers call tyloses. Shavings in the keg add tannin, colour and a woody bite. That is flavour, not cleaning, and it only makes a dangerous jar look respectable. I have stamped a large cent at my anvil for Rabbit's honest question.

As for the shake-test bead, big bubbles that last mean strong spirit and small ones that vanish quickly mean weak spirit, and that is all the bead tells you. Strong poison beads as handsomely as strong whiskey. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.