How to Spot a Genuine Wilkins Counterstamp on an Old Large Cent

A Man's Name in the Public Pocket

Barnaby, my black bear, has lunged at three peddlers since supper. One of them carried nothing more dangerous than tin pans. Now he lies sulking in the mud with his chin on his paws, like a widow at a will reading. The yard is quiet at last and Catamount Mountain stands black against the stars over Fort Wilkins, so I have opened my coin box. Our subject is my own name, my own mark and my own reputation, hammered into the copper of the Republic. First let me say it plainly, so the revenue men cannot claim they were not told: making spirits to drink without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and what follows is history and instruction.

For those raised by Methodists and sheltered from coinage, a counterstamp is a simple thing. A tradesman with a steel punch and a strong arm sets a coin on his anvil, sets the punch on the coin, and strikes. Now his name is sunk into the metal, and the coin goes off on its travels. It buys a loaf in Concord, a nail keg in Epsom, a drink in a Barnstead tavern and a sermon in Gilmanton. A newspaper notice wraps fish by Friday. A stamped coin lasts a lifetime and ends up in the collection plate. My mark has been in more pockets than a Concord pickpocket's hand.

The old large cent was the best billboard a merchant could ask for: a broad slab of copper, soft enough to take a punch without cracking. But the Mint struck its last in '57 and gave us the little Flying Eagle, so small you could lose it in a deacon's beard, and after it the Indian Head. Both are hard, small and mean to stamp. So the big cents grow scarcer every year, which is one reason my mark already brings a premium in the Concord taverns. Foreign silver has gone under my punch as well. The Act of February 21, 1857 stripped it of its standing as legal tender, but the silver has never once read a newspaper, and it still passes hand to hand along the turnpike. Mark this difference too, for the Act of June 8, 1864 forbade private persons to issue one-cent or two-cent pieces meant to pass as money. A token is a whole new coin that a man strikes himself. A counterstamp is a punch on a coin the government already made. I never made money. I only signed it, with a pen that weighs four pounds and is swung overhand.

The Tinker from Epsom

Where a man's mark is worth something, somebody will try to forge it. Two springs ago a tinker came up the turnpike from Epsom. I will not give his name, because his mother is still living and has suffered enough. He had a cart of pans, one wall eye, and a leather purse of large cents, every one stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and he meant to sell me my own coins at a nickel apiece. I knew they were false before the last one stopped spinning on the bench. Down in the bottoms the letters were bright as a new bride's teeth, while the coins themselves were brown as old saddle leather. Every letter stood at the same depth, like a regiment of drunk soldiers all leaning one way. And the backs were smooth as a baby's cheek, with no flattening and no bulge.

He called me a liar, a quack and a horse-leech, in that order, and lit out the side door past Barnaby's window. Barnaby cannot tell a genuine punch from a forgery, but he knows the taste of a liar. At the full stretch of his chain, which reaches exactly to the rain barrel, he took the tinker's coat-tail, then the seat of his britches, then a good handful of what lay beneath. I put eleven stitches of silk thread in the man on my kitchen table while he bit down on a pine stick. I charged him for the stitches and kept his counterfeits as my fee for the insult.

What the Revenue Man Found

Captain Donald Vance of Manchester, lately of the federal revenue service, has turned up my cents in strange places. In Plymouth his men searched the barn of a deacon, the treasurer of the county temperance society, and found a false-bottomed cider press. Under the deacon's bedroom floor they found a wool stocking packed so tight with large cents that it stood up on its own, and a good third of them carried my mark. The deacon had been touring town to town lecturing against drink, passing the plate at every hall and selling jugs out the back of his wagon once the lamps were out. The coins from both trades went into the same stocking.

In Manchester, by the Amoskeag mill yard, a die-sinker with steady hands heard that Wilkins cents fetched a premium among the curiosity men. He cut himself a punch with my name on it, struck a few hundred coins and sold them at the cattle market. He was undone when a drover from Barnstead asked whether Pittsfeild, E before I, was a new town. So, collector, look to your letters. A forger has to cut every letter fresh, and he will slip somewhere: in the spelling, the spacing or the shape of the S. In Lisbon, a still-man swallowed a Spanish two-real piece bearing my mark. The Captain sat three days in the snow outside the man's outhouse until he heard, in his words, “a little tink against the pail.” The letters came out readable. That is a true punch.

Turn the Coin Over

Here is the natural philosophy of it. Copper is soft, but it is not water. When my punch comes down, the letters have to push the metal somewhere. Some of it rolls up into a raised lip along the edges of each letter, like mud squeezed up around a boot heel. The rest is driven down through the coin and mashed against the face of the anvil. So on the opposite side, the coin's own design goes flat and weak in a patch the shape of the blow. Sometimes it bulges, and sometimes it picks up the grain of the anvil itself. A forger who strikes on a soft surface, or casts his coins in sand, cannot fake that honest bruise. If the back is perfect, the front is lying.

Then look into the letters. A coin I stamped ten years ago has toned dark brown down in the letters, the same as the fields. Bright salmon-pink copper at the bottom of the letters on a dark old coin means somebody stamped it last Thursday. Check the date on the host coin, because my mark on a coin dated after my working days is a fairy tale with a price tag on it. Weigh it too. A large cent from the last years of the last century up through '57 was struck to 168 grains. A cast copy is often light, grainy and pitted like a pocked cheek, with soft, rounded letter edges, because sand cannot hold an edge the way steel can. Do not bite it, either. I am a dentist, and I charge two dollars to mend the fellows who do.

The Same Copper at the Anvil and in the Pot

Copper hardens under the hammer. When I raise a still pot out of sheet, I heat the copper to a dull red and let it cool, or dunk it in the trough, and it goes soft again as pie dough. That is annealing, and it is the opposite of steel, which goes glass-hard in the quench. My punch is steel. After hardening it I watch the colours creep along it on a hot iron bar, from pale straw to deeper straw, bronze, purple and blue, and I plunge it at dark straw, just shy of bronze. A forger who skimps on the temper gets letters that mush and spread as his punch wears, so his late coins do not match his early ones.

As history only, here is the old Suncook Valley corn mash. Crack the corn coarse as gravel and cook it in water until it thickens like porridge. Cool it to about blood-warm and stir in a good portion of ground malted barley. The malt turns the corn's starch to sugar, and within the hour the mash goes from pasty to sweet. Cool it further, pitch the yeast, and cover it loosely in a warm, airy place. In several days you have a sour, beery wash. Fire the still slow and never walk away from it, for the vapour is flammable as lamp oil. Hot, clean copper grabs the sulphur stinks out of that vapour and keeps them as a dark sulphide, which is chemistry, not superstition.

Collect the run in a long line of small numbered jars. Throw out the foreshots. Throw out the heads too: they smell sharp, like a varnish pot, and carry methanol. Keep the hearts, which are clean and sweet and smell of the grain. Set aside the tails, which are oily and flat. Smell every jar and choose your cut with a clear head. The honest cut is the only thing that keeps the poison out.

Ashes, Oak Shavings and the Bead

Cletus “Rabbit” Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, sent word that his uncle throws hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. That is swamp medicine. Wood ash is potash, and it makes lye. In a doubler it foams and scums and leaves the whiskey tasting of a laundry tub. The methanol rides right through it. Red oak, meanwhile, has open pores that run down the grain like straws, which is why every whiskey barrel worth its hoops is made of white oak. A few shavings boiled in a thump keg give only a little colour and a sappy bitterness.

The bead test is no better. The bead tells you roughly how strong a spirit is, and nothing more. A jar of uncut heads beads as handsome as a jar of hearts and will send you blind besides. Captain Vance put it best: “In all my raids I never once found a man poisoned by an honest cut. I found plenty poisoned by a clever trick.” So turn the coin over, look in the letters, check the date, weigh it and trust the bruise. And keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.