How Mill Whistles Hid Whiskey Runners in New Hampshire's Suncook Valley

The River, the Wheel and the Miller's Thumb

Any man who would understand a whiskey runner must first understand a river. The Suncook comes out of the Suncook Lakes up in Barnstead and Gilmanton, and at Pittsfield village it drops. It goes over the ledge and through the narrows like a drunk going down cellar stairs, and every foot of that fall is money. When this town was cut loose from Chichester and set up for itself in 1782, a man of sense did not first buy a cow or a Bible. He bought a mill privilege.

For the soft-handed gentlemen of Concord, I will explain that a mill privilege is the deeded right to dam a stream and use the fall of its water. It is property and it is recorded at the county. It has caused more fistfights, lawsuits and drowned dogs in New England than whiskey and adultery put together. The man upstream holds back his pond to saw his logs, the man downstream watches his wheel go dead, and by suppertime the pair of them are waist-deep in the river trying to drown each other in the very water they quarrel over. I have pulled the teeth those fights loosened, and I keep them in a jar on the shelf, labelled by family.

Our stream carries two kinds of mill. The sawmill mostly runs the old up-and-down saw, a straight blade stretched in a wooden sash that chunks through a pine log like a hired man paid by the day and not by the board. On a still evening you may hear it a mile off. The gristmill has its bedstone lying still and its runner stone turning above it. The best stones are French burr, so half of Merrimack County eats bread ground on French rock and has never once said thank you in French. The miller takes his pay from the farmer's own sack. That is the toll, a sixteenth part or thereabouts, scooped out with a toll dish that every farmer swears is bigger inside than out. Mr. Chaucer's old saying holds that an honest miller has a thumb of gold. I have drawn teeth from four millers, and every one of them tried to pay me by the scoop.

A Smuggler's Almanac Written in Water and Steam

Water and daylight set a mill's hours. Before sunup the miller opens the head gate, the water roars down the flume, and the wheel groans as it takes up its load. For a quarter of an hour a man could fire a cannon in the Pittsfield millyard and nobody would hear it. Old Gilman put in a little steam engine to carry him through the low water of August, when the Suncook runs so thin a heron can stand in it without wetting his knees. A man with a boiler has a whistle, and a man with a whistle blows it every chance God gives him. Gilman blew his at noon, again at six o'clock, and on Saturday a long one that sounds like a heifer giving birth to a fence post.

No revenue man in Concord ever worked out the genius of the thing. Every one of those noises put people on the road. The six o'clock whistle emptied the mill, and for one hour at dusk Route 28 through Pittsfield was as busy as Market Street in Portsmouth. Out came mill hands, teamsters with boards, farmers fetching meal, ox carts, a boy on a mule and a widow with a handbarrow. A loaded wagon leaving a mill at dusk is so ordinary a sight that nobody sees it.

So the runner learned the mill's day the way a deacon learns the Psalms. The roar of the gate covered his wheels. When the noon whistle blew, the deputy was at the tavern with pie and gravy on his chin. At six the road filled, and the runner filled it right along with everyone else. When the mill shut down for low water or a broken wheel, the runners shut down too, because a lone wagon on a quiet road is like a bell rung in an empty church. In winter, ice froze the wheel up like a widow's affections, and the mill sat dead for weeks. Then came the spring freshet. The sawmill ran night and day by lantern light to catch the high water, and wagons went out at two in the morning hauling lumber. Some of that lumber was stacked around a hollow the size of a coffin, packed tight with jugs. Folk call that time of year mud season. The runners called it Christmas.

Hosea Brackett's Ledger and the Gentleman in the Meal Sack

The most dangerous man in the valley was neither an outlaw nor a runner. I shall call him Hosea Brackett. He kept a gristmill below Gilman's, and he kept a ledger in which he wrote down every sack, every bushel and every scoop of toll, farm by farm. Hosea knew how much meal a family of six eats in a month, down to the johnnycake. When a hill farm with four children and one consumptive mule bought enough coarse-cracked corn to feed a regiment of Zouaves, Hosea knew what the corn was for. He told no one. He only drew a little crescent moon in the margin.

In the spring of '65 the assessor came to tally the town for the excise. He saw the moons in the ledger, and Hosea told him they were for planting by the moon, as any fool knows. Then Hosea glanced over the assessor's own figures and told him he was three hundred and twelve bushels short and had added the Barnstead line wrong. The assessor copied Hosea's figures into the official report, so for years Washington's count of Pittsfield corn came straight from the one man who knew where every kernel went. Hosea also took his toll, as millers do: he borrowed the assessor's pencil and kept it. When he died, his widow fed the pages with moons on them into the cookstove one at a time, and folk swear the smoke smelled of corn liquor for a week.

Then there was the Boston man I shall call Mr. Pike, who wore a waxed mustache and a waistcoat the colour of an infected gum. He had himself sewn into a meal sack and laid atop a farmer's corn load, meaning to ride into Fort Wilkins under the six o'clock whistle. He did not know that Barnaby, my bear, can smell cracked corn through a meal sack, a wagon bed and two feet of snow, and has been taught that the six o'clock whistle means supper. Barnaby hooked the sack with one paw. Cornmeal went up in a white cloud you could have seen from Catamount Hill, and out of it rolled Mr. Pike, floured like a ham for frying, with four red furrows raked across the seat of his trousers. The bear sat on his legs and licked him, and one lick took off the meal, the mustache and both eyebrows. I washed his hindquarters with spirit and stitched him with dental silk, and out of pure habit he bit me. His report to Boston read: No still located. District overrun by very large dogs.

Quiet Axles, Pine Sawdust and the Widow

My coppersmith, Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, can hear a bad seam the way I hear a bad molar. He brought stories of his own family. "A squeaking axle is a confession," his grandfather used to say. A wagon full of jugs squeals differently from one full of boards. So the old man fitted brass bushings into the hubs, filed true by hand, and packed them with tallow worked up with black lead, which the old men called plumbago. A wagon done his way rolled over the Pittsfield bridge so quietly that it ran clean over the hat of a deputy who lay with his ear to the planks.

Silas's great-uncle bedded his jugs in fresh white pine sawdust, like eggs in bran, with boards stacked over the top. A deputy drove a pitchfork through the load and broke a jug, but when he leaned in to sniff he got a noseful of pine pitch and sneezed nine times. He waved the wagon on just to be rid of the stink. Silas's father, for his part, mended a frost-split whistle bell with a copper sleeve sweated on with silver solder, never lead. It came out a half-tone flat with a wheeze on the end, and the town named it the Widow. To say "the Widow's blown" came to mean the road was full and a runner could go. Best of all, Silas bought a box of tools at a Barnstead auction and found among them a mill bill, the pick a miller uses to dress his stones. Its handle was hollow, and rolled up inside was a pencilled timetable. The gate at half past four meant take the lower road under the roar. Noon at Gilman's meant P. was at dinner. Six at Gilman's meant go with the boards. On the Saturday long blow, stay home, because church folk were about. The pick was dressed to the same furrow pattern as Hosea Brackett's stones. I say no more than that.

From the Stones to the Worm

What follows is for history and education only, since distilling spirits to drink without a federal permit is against the law of the United States. Tell your miller to set his stones wide and crack the corn coarse. Fine meal settles in a direct-fired pot and scorches, and the scorch carries through to the jar. The old recipe takes about eight pounds of coarse-cracked corn, a pound and a half or two of malted barley ground fine, and five gallons of water. Bring the water near a boil, about a hundred sixty-five degrees by Mr. Fahrenheit, then stir in the corn until it thickens and goes glossy. Let it cool to about a hundred fifty-two degrees before the malt goes in, because boiling heat scalds dead the ferments that turn starch into sugar. Hold it warm an hour and more, and it will turn sweet on the tongue. Cool it to blood-warm or a bit under, pitch the yeast, and let it work several days until the bubbling quits. You then have a wash of a few percent.

The angle of the swan neck is part of the experiment. Tilted up, it sends heavy vapour back to the pot for a lighter spirit. Tilted down, it brings everything over, heavy and oily. A dephlegmator does the same work on purpose. Bring the pot up slowly. Throw out the foreshots, which smell like a hatter's shop. Set the heads aside, and cut them generously, because the poison does not come off all at once but trails into the run. Nobody ever went blind from being wasteful. Then come the sweet hearts, and after them the tails, which smell like a wet dog under a porch and should be kept to run again. Collect in small jars and make the cut by nose. More valley sawmills burned than ever wore out, and a still-house is worse, so keep the jar away from flame, check every joint before you light, never leave a running still, and keep sand and a wet blanket by the door.

Two Old Notions Put to the Punch

The blue-flame test is hogwash. Wood alcohol burns a pale blue as well, and no farmer's eye can read lead in a flame on a stove lid. From Wilkesboro, North Carolina, Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller asked whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg would clean out bad heads. Ash and water make lye, the same stuff our great-grandfathers boiled down into potash. It gives a taste like licking a fireplace and does not touch a drop of the poison spirits. To show him about the red oak, I put one end of a foot-long stick in a jar of water and blew bubbles straight through it. Red oak is open-pored end to end, which is why coopers use white oak. Shavings give colour and tannin, but they clean nothing. The thump keg strengthens the run without washing away its sins. Keep the ash for the soap kettle and the oak for the woodbox.