How New Hampshire Runners Dodged Turnpike Tolls and Toll Bridges in the 1860s

The Gate and the Pike

Every jug that ever left a still-house had to travel a road, and in this state the road had a gate across it and a toll keeper standing before the gate with his hand out, like a beggar wearing a constable's hat. A man who works copper and fire ought to know the history of that gate. Most of the trouble in our trade, and a good share of the comedy, happened on the road between the worm and the customer.

In 1796, when my grandfather still had all his teeth and most of his opinions, the General Court of New Hampshire chartered the First New Hampshire Turnpike, running inland from the Piscataqua toward Concord. After that the legislature handed out turnpike charters like a drunk deacon handing out tracts. There came the Second, the Third, the Fourth, the Cheshire, the Croydon, the Grafton, and a dozen more with names that sounded like a family of Baptists. Each was a company of gentlemen who put up money, cut a road, set a gate across it, and charged every soul who passed.

The word itself is simple. At the gate stood a pike, a long pole, sometimes studded with iron, sometimes a plain spruce bar on a pivot. You paid your coin and the keeper turned the pike aside. Turn the pike, turnpike. That is the whole etymology, and it cost the Republic a great deal more than it ought.

The Cheshire Turnpike ran through the southwest of the state toward the Connecticut River country. It had a charter from the legislature, a gate from a carpenter, and potholes from the Almighty, who never asked a penny. Beside every such gate hung a toll board: so much for each four-wheeled carriage drawn by two horses, so much for each cart or wagon, each horse and rider, each horse led or driven. Then the livestock: neat cattle, which is the old word for cows and oxen, so much a head; sheep and swine, so much a dozen. A drover moving three hundred hogs to Brighton market paid for every curly tail that squealed through. Remember that list. It comes back to bite somebody, and I mean bite.

The Shunpike and a Sudden Outbreak of Piety

The Yankee farmer, who would sooner give up his wife's company than a copper cent, answered the toll gate the way water answers a dam. He went around it. A quarter mile before the gate a set of ruts would peel off the turnpike, wander through some deacon's back pasture, ford a brook, cross a woodlot, and climb back onto the pike a quarter mile past the gate, where the keeper could watch it and grind his teeth to powder. I know, for I have filled the cavities. That lane was a shunpike, and the man who used it went shunpiking.

Some owners of those pastures did a tidy trade letting travelers through at half the turnpike rate, a toll, but a Christian one. Others set a dog on you. One fellow down Epsom way set his mother-in-law on you, and I would pay double the turnpike rate before facing that woman's tongue again.

The charters themselves handed the shunpiker a second weapon. Most let certain local folk pass free: a man going to public worship, to town meeting, to militia muster, or taking his grain to the grist mill. The piety that broke out on New Hampshire turnpikes was a wonder of the age. More men went to meeting on a Tuesday than sat in the pews on Sunday, each carrying his hymnal in a five-gallon keg. I once met a man going to meeting with a wagon of cider brandy at two in the morning. He named his congregation the Church of the Thirsty Brethren, Pittsfield chapter, and I confessed I had been a deacon there for years.

Fords, Freshets and False Bottoms

Many crossings on our rivers were private bridges or ferries, each with a keeper's shack, a lantern, and a cash box. But the Suncook, the Contoocook, and even the Merrimack in a dry August have places where a team can splash across if you know the bottom. A good runner knew every ledge and gravel bar from Pittsfield to Pembroke as I know the inside of a man's jaw. He crossed at night, at low water, hubs greased against squealing and the horse's bit wrapped in rag against jingling.

Fords will kill you. A teamster from Barnstead took the ford below the old dam in a March freshet, and the ice let go upstream and came down like a Concord lawyer on an unattended estate. They found the horse at Suncook village, the wagon in Allenstown, and the teamster in three towns, for they never did find his left boot, and his foot was still in it. His widow put a jug on the grave. The river collects a toll too, and it does not make change.

Then there was the false-bottomed wagon. A carpenter with a grudge against the government could build a farm wagon whose bed sat four inches higher than it ought, with a hollow beneath packed with straw and stone jugs. On top went manure, honest and steaming, flies and all. Not one toll keeper in the history of this state ever put his arm elbow-deep in fresh dung looking for whiskey. Turnips served too, and cordwood, and a dead hog under canvas if you wished the keeper to wave you through with a handkerchief over his nose.

The game grows easier now, for the turnpikes are dying. Few corporations ever paid their gentlemen a decent dividend, and with the railroad creeping up every valley they are giving their roads to the towns as free highways. There is talk of rails up the Suncook to Pittsfield before long.

Barnaby Is Tolled as Neat Cattle

Some summers back I carried Barnaby, my black bear, by wagon to a fellow in Loudon who owed me for a set of uppers and two jugs; a man pays faster with a bear in his dooryard. At a little toll gate on a bridge road, which I will not name because the corporation is still alive, barely, stood a pinch-faced keeper I shall call Hezekiah Pound, with the soul of a weasel that had studied bookkeeping.

I paid for the wagon and the horse. Then Hezekiah ran his finger down the board and demanded toll on one head of livestock, driven. I said find a bear on that board and I would pay double. He found neat cattle, sheep and swine, and no bear, and so decided Barnaby was neat cattle, though Barnaby had a squirrel tail hanging from his lip and a smell like a tannery that had died.

Then Hezekiah took hold of Barnaby's chain. You do not touch the chain. Barnaby turned his head slow as a church door swinging, and Hezekiah turned to run, which presented the broadest part of himself to the bear. Barnaby took a mouthful of hindquarters, trouser seat and upholstery together, and Hezekiah went over the rail into eighteen inches of brook with his bare moon shining at the heavens. Barnaby spat out a brass button, ate the rest of the wool, then ate Hezekiah's dinner pail of cold beans and pickled eggs, pail and all, or near enough.

Being a dentist, I laid him face down across a saw-buck, poured a half-pint of my best over the wound, and stitched him with silk and a curved needle, eleven stitches, at the tooth-pulling rate, there being tooth marks in it. Neither of us would pay, and the matter came before a justice of the peace in Pittsfield. Hezekiah stood throughout, for reasons the court understood. The justice read the charter's toll list aloud, slow as molasses in January, and ruled that a bear is not neat cattle; that a man who lays hands on another's chained animal does so at his own peril; and that a toll keeper's backside is not a public way under the laws of New Hampshire. He fined me fifty cents for doctoring without license upon anybody's lower half, Hezekiah paid me a dollar for the stitches, and I came out fifty cents ahead. Ever after, Hezekiah swung the gate open from forty yards off with a pole rigged for the purpose. They called it Barnaby's Free Passage.

A Carolina Runner's Roads

Junior Vance of Wilkes County, North Carolina, a runner from the Brushy Mountains, sat by my stove with tales of his own country, where creeks pretend to be roads and roads pretend to be creeks. When the law sat at the end of a bridge, his cousin Lonnie whitewashed the fence posts along a gravel ford half a mile downstream, only on the downstream side, so a runner crossing at night with no lights saw the posts 'glowing like teeth in a dark mouth' and steered between them. Once a cow pushed a post over, Junior went off the bar, and only a loud and unwilling mule got his machine out.

An old farmer strung a log chain across the best back lane off the mountain and charged a quart a pass. Junior paid faithfully in spring water from behind his granny's house, until the farmer served it to the mourners at his brother-in-law's funeral and came hunting him with a corn knife. Junior paid him back double, and the farmer raised the rate to two quarts, calling the first one interest.

Once Junior hauled crates of hymnals for a church down the mountain, hymnals on top and jars in sawdust beneath. At a roadblock the deacon riding with him opened a hymnal and sang two full verses of Amazing Grace to the officer, who took off his hat with wet eyes and waved them on. Ten miles later the deacon said, 'Junior, I believe I was saved a second time back there,' and passed him a jar. Another evening, with an officer parked at the head of a one-lane iron bridge and no other crossing for twelve miles, Junior eased in behind a drover's forty hogs and squealed across in the herd. It is the same trick as our Yankee drovers, who would send a man across bent over among the sheep to be counted as wool.

At the Apparatus: Mash, Heat and the Cuts

Let it be said plainly: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is illegal under United States law, and what follows is for history and education only.

A still is a teakettle with ambitions: the pot where the wash is heated, the cap or helmet where vapor gathers, the lyne arm carrying it sideways, and the worm, a copper coil in a barrel of cold water where vapor turns back to liquid. You do not distill corn; you distill what yeast has made of it. Cracked corn is cooked soft and starchy as a minister's handshake, a little malted grain stirred in so its enzymes turn starch to sugar, the whole cooled to blood-warm, yeast pitched, and the mash covered and left some days in a warm, airy place till it quits bubbling and tastes sour and dry. Strain it, and that weak sour beer of a few parts in a hundred alcohol goes into the pot.

Water boils at two hundred and twelve degrees by Mr. Fahrenheit's scale; ethanol near one hundred seventy-three. Gentle, steady heat sends off vapor richer in spirit than the wash. A roaring fire pushes everything over at once and endangers the barn. What drips from the worm burns hotter than lamp oil with a flame scarcely seen by daylight. Never leave a running still, keep the jar well away from the firebox, keep air moving so vapor never pools, and keep sand and a wet blanket by the door.

The first drips, the foreshots, smell of varnish. Throw them out, untasted; they carry methanol, which blinds and kills, and careful old hands discard a full gill or more for every five gallons of wash, for methanol does not march out in one tidy rank. Next come the heads, harsh with solvent and green apple; set them aside. Then the hearts, sweet and clean, judged by nose, by fingertip taste well past the heads, and by watching the strength. When oily, wet-dog, cereal tails creep in, stop; save them for the next charge. Cut early and honest. Copper does chemistry, grabbing the sulfurous stinks onto its bright skin, so scrub it after every run. It must be pure: no salvaged boiler, no lead solder, only silver solder or a proper mechanical union.

Ashes, Oak Shavings and the Blue Flame

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro asked whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg clean out bad heads, as his uncle swears. Wood ash is lye in its Sunday clothes, the stuff every farm wife leaches for soft soap. In a keg of hot liquor it makes a gritty, foaming brew that can puke froth into the vapor line and foul it. It removes no methanol and no heads; only your own hand making the cut does that. Oak gives color, tannin and a woody taste, and charred shavings in a finished jug left a season make a kind of aging, but that is flavoring, not purifying; it dresses poison in brown. Red oak is leaky and porous besides, which is why coopers want white oak. His uncle's heart is right and his chemistry wrong.

Last, the blue flame. The tavern sage who lights a spoonful and pronounces blue good and yellow poison is talking hogwash, for methanol burns pale blue too. If a blue flame proved good liquor, every will-o'-the-wisp would be a bartender. The only test of a jar is how it was made: clean copper, no lead, foreshots and heads thrown out. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.