Lead, Zinc and Brass in Stills: The Metals That Poisoned New England Drinkers

The Sweet Poison

Lead is the most polite poison God ever made. It tastes sweet, it says thank you, and it takes thirty years to kill you, so a man dies convinced he had a good time. The old Romans knew it. Vitruvius, the Roman builder, wrote in his books on architecture that water from clay pipes is more wholesome than water from lead pipes. His proof was the lead workers themselves, pale as boiled tripe and shaking like a wet dog. He wrote that before Christ, and men in Merrimack County are still soldering stills with plumber's lead because it melts easy.

Closer to home, in 1723 the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay colony passed a law against distilling rum through leaden heads or leaden worms. The reason was the dry gripes. A Boston man would drink a few cups of rum run through a lead worm, and within a week his belly knotted up like a wet hawser on a whaling ship. He lay on the floor with his knees under his chin, howling at the rafters, so bound up he could not pass a pea for a fortnight. Doctor Franklin, the old kite-flier, remembered that law in a letter he wrote late in life. He knew the same colic from the hot lead type of his printing days.

In England they had the Devonshire colic, with whole parishes of cider drinkers doubled up and cursing. A physician named George Baker proved in 1767 that it came from lead in the cider presses and vats. Lead dissolves in sour drink, and any reader who keeps a still knows what follows from that. Cider is sour. Mash is sour. Wash is sour.

Worse, the poison flatters. The old chemists sold sugar of lead, which is lead dissolved in vinegar, and crooked wine-sellers stirred it into sour wine to sweeten it. A lead-run jar goes down smoother than a fat parson's sermon on gluttony. In 1840 a doctor named Henry Burton described a blue-black line along the gums of men poisoned by lead. Once you have seen Burton's line you see it everywhere: on house painters, type-setters, and every stillman who ever got cheap.

The Organ-Pipe Worm

Some years back old Zebulon Haines came over the hill from Epsom with a molar gone to black rot. He had drunk his own make for a quarter century. When I pried his jaw open, his gums were bluer than a Concord Whig's language after a lost election, with a slate-gray line along every tooth as if drawn in pencil. He could not lift his hands from the wrist; they hung off his arms like two dead trout on a string. The doctors call it wrist drop, or painter's palsy. The tooth came out with a crack like a pine knot in a stove, and Zebulon's scream sent Barnaby, my bear, up the hemlock.

I asked what his still was made of. He told me, “The cap is copper, Doctor, but I made the worm from the pipes of an old meetinghouse organ over Gilmanton way.” Organ pipes are lead and tin, poured and rolled. He had run his liquor through the church music for twenty-five years. I traded him an honest copper worm, and he lived another eight years, shaking the whole time. I melted the organ pipe into fishing sinkers and gave them to men I don't care for.

Why did it go so bad in our time? Mr. Lincoln taxed whiskey two dollars a gallon, copper got dear in the war, and lead was lying everywhere: old water pipe, roof flashing, tea-chest lining, and the lead coffins the rich are buried in. Deacon Hosea Plumley of Barnstead lined his still with lead off a rich man's coffin. The rich man was the only one who came out of that deal healthy, and Hosea's customers spent a summer in the outhouse praying in two directions at once.

The Zinc-Roof Man

Last spring Mr. Ebenezer Pratt of Lowell, agent for galvanized iron roofing, came up the turnpike to sell me a galvanized boiler. Galvanized means iron dipped in hot zinc; the Frenchmen patented the process in '37. He swore it would never rust. So I tried an experiment. I put a square of his sample in a pan with a quart of my sour mash and set it on the forge. In ten minutes the shining zinc had gone dull and grown a white bloom like mold on a cheese, and a sharp fume rose that tasted like licking a doorknob. The brass-founders of Lowell know that smell. Breathe hot zinc and you get brass-founder's ague: chills, sweats, aching bones, and a mouth like you've been sucking pennies.

Mr. Pratt called me a superstitious backwoods tooth-yanker and drank a tin cup of that warm mash to prove me wrong. Round about midnight he was on my porch heaving over the rail, right beside Barnaby's wallow. Barnaby came out of the dark to look over the offering, and Mr. Pratt lit out down the turnpike in his nightshirt. The bear took the seat of his checked trousers and a fair portion of the Lowell hide under it. That patch of wool hangs over my door, the only diploma I ever earned honest. Mr. Pratt sells his roofs in Chichester now, and they tell me he stands through the whole sermon.

Lessons from the Brushy Mountains

Mr. Junior Vance, a runner from North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, brought three stories of bad metal to the Fort. The first concerned a maker called Galvanized Gaither, who turned a zinc-coated washtub upside down for a cap and cooked in a galvanized pot to match. He sold his first run to a corn-shucking in the next hollow. By midnight, in July, every guest was piled under quilts, sweating and freezing at once, and one old boy threw up on the fiddler, who kept right on playing. Junior's father called it the galvanize ague and beat the rig flat with a sledgehammer. It was the same ague as Mr. Pratt's: hot acid mash eats the zinc off, and you either drink it or breathe it.

The second was an old-timer called Uncle Pink, whose gums were black-blue and whose hands hung useless. It was Burton's line and wrist drop again. He had patched every seam with soft gray plumber's solder for thirty years. Ever after, Junior scratched a maker's solder seam with his pocketknife and rubbed the scrapings on paper. In his words: “If it wrote on the paper like a pencil, I turned around and walked off.” It is a fair rough test, because lead is soft enough to mark paper and good tin marks much fainter. But it is a hint and not a proof, since a crafty man can lay tin over lead like a whitewashed tomb. The only sure course is to build honest from the start.

The third was a still head cast from a cracked church bell after a steeple fire. Bell metal is bronze, copper and tin, honest metals, though brittle and loud. Every thump rang the cap down the hollow, and the congregation walked out mid-sermon to find the miracle. The preacher went up himself, sampled it, and blessed it twice. The revenue men simply walked toward the music and chopped the rig to pieces.

Building an Honest Apparatus

Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, so take what follows as history and natural philosophy. In a Wilkins still the pot, cap, arm and worm are heavy copper, beaten and riveted. Seams are sweated with pure tin or silver solder, never plumber's lead. The cap joint is sealed with a stiff paste of rye flour and water, which bakes hard and can poison nobody; the worst it does is draw mice. Fermenting tubs are white oak, never galvanized, never a zinc pail, never a painted keg, because old paint is lead too. No sheet brass of unknown birth goes in the boiler. Brass is copper and zinc, and cheap scrap brass often carries lead besides. A sound fitting of lead-free alloy, made by a careful shop for the purpose, is another matter.

Copper is not chosen for its shine. The hot vapour carries a rotten-egg sulphur reek, and copper grabs that sulphur and holds it. It does most of this work where the vapour touches it, in the cap, arm and worm. That is why even the poorest honest maker insisted on a copper head and worm. Put lead or zinc there instead and you don't clean the vapour. You season it with poison.

For my rye-and-corn, crack the corn and cook it to a thick porridge near a boil, stirring so it does not scorch. Cool it to about a hundred and fifty degrees, or hot enough to sting but not to scald, then stir in rye meal and malted barley. The malt carries the ferment the French chemists Payen and Persoz named diastase in 1833, and too much heat kills it. Rest it an hour, stirring, until it tastes sweet. Cool it to blood-warm, about eighty degrees, add yeast or brewer's barm, cover it, and keep the room aired. In four days to a week you have a wash, and that sour liquor is exactly what eats lead and zinc.

Charge the pot no more than three-quarters full, paste the cap, and bring her up slow on a low fire. An alcohol flame burns a pale blue you can scarcely see in daylight, so keep no lamp near the spout, and keep a bucket of water and a wet blanket at hand. Throw out the foreshots, which smell of a hatter's shop. Throw out the heads, sharp as glue, and discard more than you think you should. Keep the sweet, clean hearts. Set the oily, wet-dog tails aside for the next charge. Afterward, scrub the copper while it is warm with salt and vinegar, then rinse it again and again.

A Confession About Quicksilver

In '33 the Crawcour brothers came from France to New York selling Royal Mineral Succedaneum, which was silver-coin filings in mercury, and so began the Amalgam War. The American Society of Dental Surgeons made its members swear against quicksilver in '45 and then argued itself to death. One winter I foolishly warmed quicksilver on my forge in a closed shop. Within a week my hands shook too badly to hold a coin punch, my mouth ran spit, my gums went spongy, and two teeth wiggled like fence posts in a thaw. The hatters of Danbury call it the Danbury shakes. Surgeon General Hammond pulled calomel, which is mercury again, from the Army's supply table in '63, and the outcry helped get him court-martialed. Keep quicksilver a mile from any still fire.

The Mailbag: Ash, Oak, and Two Myths

Cletus “Rabbit” Miller of Wilkesboro asks whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in a thump keg clean out bad heads. Hardwood ash steeped in water makes lye, the stuff our grandfathers boiled into potash and pearlash for soap and glass. Ash in the keg gives a slick, bitter, alkaline taint and does nothing for the heads. Red oak is so open in the grain you can blow air through a stick of it, which is why coopers use white oak. Its shavings add tannin and colour but cannot remove heads. Nothing in that keg can. The only cure is a generous cut at the spout.

Two myths deserve the anvil as well. A blue flame on the bar proves only that there is alcohol in the spoon. It tells you nothing about lead or zinc, and wood spirit from the heads burns blue too. Zebulon's organ-pipe liquor burned as prettily as any. And a pewter worm is not safe merely because pewter is tin. Fine Britannia metal is tin with antimony and copper and little or no lead, but peddler's pewter can be a third lead or more. Use copper for the worm, always. I have stamped four cents, one for each question and myth, and they go in the jar for the next poor soul who needs a tooth pulled and cannot pay.