Merrimack River Ferries: Tolls, Scows and Night Crossings in New Hampshire

The River and Her Licensed Ferries

The Merrimack is the great vein of this State. She comes down out of the lakes at Franklin and pours past Concord. She takes a bad tumble at Hooksett and a worse one at Amoskeag Falls by the Manchester mills, then runs on to Massachusetts and the sea. Our own Suncook, which runs past the log walls of Fort Wilkins, slides down through Epsom and Allenstown and empties into her at Suncook village, between Pembroke and Allenstown. Whatever a Pittsfield man makes, be it shingles, cider, or certain clear medicinal articles, must sooner or later cross the Merrimack to find a buyer.

Before the bridges, and at a hundred quiet places since, a man crossed that river on a ferry. A ferry was no fellow with a rowboat and an opinion. It was licensed. The town or the old General Court granted the privilege and fixed the tolls by law. The ferryman had to post those tolls on a board and carry all comers at the posted rates, rain or shine, sheriff or sinner.

Ninepence and Fourpence Ha'penny

I have seen those boards myself, painted on pine and weathered gray. As near as memory serves, a fair card from my youth ran thus: a foot passenger, two cents; man and horse, a fourpence ha'penny; horse and chaise, a ninepence; ox team and loaded cart, a quarter dollar; sheep and swine, half a cent a head. That swine rate is still more than I would pay to ferry most of the Pembroke selectmen.

The younger reader may scratch his head at a fourpence ha'penny. For the better part of a century the silver in a Yankee's pocket was Spanish, pieces of eight both cut and whole. The Spanish real was twelve and a half cents, and every New Englander called it a ninepence. The half-real was six and a quarter cents, and that was your fourpence ha'penny. We went on counting in shillings and pence fifty years after we had whipped King George for the privilege of counting in dollars. In February of 1857 Congress took away the legal tender of those Spanish coins, and they drained out of circulation like dishwater out of a cracked basin. The old ferrymen went on calling their rates in ninepences until they died, out of pure Yankee spite.

Scows, Rope Ferries and the Second Rate Card

The boat was a scow: flat-bottomed, square at both ends, broad as a barn door and about as graceful, planked in pine or oak and caulked with oakum and pitch. The flat bottom let her sit on a sandbar without tipping, and it let a team drive straight aboard over a plank ramp called the apron. The ferryman pushed her with a setting pole, which is a long ash pole with an iron shoe, or rowed her with sweeps as long as a church pew. At the cleverer crossings they rigged a rope ferry, also called a reaction ferry. A stout rope, or later an iron cable, was stretched bank to bank, and the scow ran along it on a pulley block. Set her at the proper angle and the current itself pushes against the hull and walks her across. The river does the work and the ferryman takes the money. Any natural philosopher must admire the arrangement.

Nor were the ferries alone on the water. In my boyhood, flat-bottomed freight boats were poled, sailed and hauled from Concord clear down to Boston by way of the Middlesex Canal. They carried lumber and granite down and brought rum, molasses and dry goods up. The boatmen were a hard, loud, beautiful breed. Then the Concord Railroad opened in 1842, and the canal was dead within a few short years, by about '51 or '53. The boatmen went to the mills, to the bottle, or to the West. Some of the cleverest kept a ferry and a short memory.

A ferryman knew everything. He knew whose wife crossed to Bow on Tuesdays while her husband sat at Concord court, and which deacon carried two jugs over and came back with none. He knew the revenue men by their boots, by their horses, and by the way they pretended to admire the scenery. So there were two rate cards. One hung on the post by daylight. The other lived in the ferryman's head and came out after dark: a dollar for a keg crossed at night with no lantern and no questions, a dollar and a half under a full moon, and in high water you named your price and said your prayers.

High water meant the spring freshet. Every April the snow comes off the White Mountains all at once, and the Merrimack rises brown and ugly. She carries drift ice, uprooted elms, drowned sheep, and the loose logs of the spring drive bound for the mills, with the river drivers hopping across them in spiked boots like devils on a griddle. A ferryman had to slack his rope or take it down entirely, or the first big pine would part it like a fiddle string. Honest traffic stopped in a freshet, and the other sort paid triple.

The Night Ephraim Gorse Sold Me Down the River

Below Concord I used two crossings. The lower one belonged to Ephraim Gorse, who had a face like a boiled ham somebody had sat on, and the personality of the chair. His scow leaked and he kept no license I ever saw. He charged me a dollar a keg and a ninepence more for the wear upon a conscience he did not possess. I paid him as I paid everybody in the war years, in good copper cents, each one punched on my anvil with my mark: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H.

In the spring of the year after Gettysburg the freshet ran high, and I had eleven kegs of double-distilled spirits of rye that had to be on the Manchester side by dawn. The upper ferryman had his rope down for the flood, so I went to Gorse. I did not know that Gorse had gone to the Merrimack County deputies the day before and offered to deliver me, my kegs and my wagon to the far landing. His price was a reward of five dollars. The going rate for a Judas has fallen considerably since the original.

Gorse did not know I had a passenger. Barnaby, my black bear, had been off his feed and melancholy, so I chained him to the kegs under a tarpaulin and fed him half a bucket of sour mash leavings to keep him docile. We rolled aboard at midnight with no moon. On the far bank I heard the faint jingle of bridle chains where no horses ought to be. Then a log the size of a church steeple struck us square on the bow. The tarpaulin slid, and four hundred pounds of bear sat up and looked Gorse dead in the face. Gorse dropped his pole. Barnaby lunged and the chain tore the tailboard off my wagon. The load went to the low side, the scow tipped up like a dinner plate on a drunk man's knee, and in we all went, together with six of my eleven kegs, which floated off toward Massachusetts.

A bear swims better than a ferryman. Barnaby came ashore before the three waiting deputies with Gorse on his back like a horse blanket, and promptly returned a gallon and a half of warm sour mash down Gorse's shirt front, a live perch included. Then he took Gorse's sleeve in his teeth and peeled back coat, shirt and a long strip of forearm. Next morning I stitched that arm with nineteen stitches of waxed silk and charged nothing for it. One deputy's horse bolted and dragged him by one boot through forty yards of blackberry canes. The second fired at the sky. The third, a sensible young man named Pillsbury, sat on a rock until the bear had finished his business.

Afterward Pillsbury looked into Gorse's tin toll box and found a hundred and twelve copper cents, every one stamped with my name. That was eleven years of night fares, and Gorse had never once read his own pennies. The sheriff fined him for keeping an unlicensed ferry and taking illegal tolls. They could not touch me. My kegs had gone to Massachusetts, my wagon lay at the bottom of the river, and nobody was going to swear in the bear.

Three Copper Tales from Silas McAllister

Silas Hacksaw McAllister, master coppersmith of the Fort Wilkins foundry, helped me haul that wagon out the next August when the water dropped. The iron tires had rusted through, but as he put it, "the copper fittings on the dash rail were bright as the day I made them." Copper does not drown. A ferry, says Silas, is a working machine just as a still is, with its chain, pulley blocks, pole shoes, lanterns, toll boxes and signals.

His first ferry work was a signal horn for old Asa, who kept a crossing near the Hooksett falls. Tin goes flat and mournful in wet weather, so Silas raised a long seamed cone of sixteen-ounce copper and spun the flared bell out on a wooden form. He spent a full week on the taper. Too quick a flare and she brays like a mule; too slow and she whispers. You could hear her in Pembroke. One long blast meant an honest traveler, and two short meant a wet cargo. When a Concord deputy blew two short to lay a trap, Asa knew the man by his breath. He grounded the scow on the gravel island at midriver, set the deputy ashore to lighten her, and was home in bed within a quarter hour. The deputy spent the July night there with the Merrimack mosquitoes.

Silas's father once riveted copper sheet over a cracked scow bow, inside and out, using copper rivets clinched over roves. A rove is a small copper washer the rivet is peened down upon so that it cannot draw through the wood. The next week the freshet parted the rope, and the scow went down through the ice toward Amoskeag carrying the ferryman, a farmer and two cows. The copper bow took every blow, and you could read the trip on it dent by dent, like a ledger. All aboard fetched up alive in a willow thicket above the falls. Every spring after that, until the dam at Lawrence, finished in '48, ended the shad run, a bushel of fresh shad appeared on the elder McAllister's step.

Last came the tattletale toll box: heavy copper with a brass slot, and two tongues of spring brass inside, tuned at different heights. Silver rang high on the upper tongue, a copper cent fell to the lower one with a dull bong, and a lead slug thudded as a lie does. The ferryman's wife learned the notes from her kitchen and kept a tally on a slate by the stove. The husband wanted the tongues removed. She paid better to keep them.

A River Crossing in the Still-House

A still run, friends, is a crossing of its own, and you conduct it as an experiment. First comes the wash. You do not distill grain; you distill what the yeast has made of it. Cook cracked rye to porridge, cool it until you can hold your hand in it, and stir in malted barley to turn the starch to sugar. Cool further, pitch good yeast, and let it work for several days in a warm, airy room until it settles sour and still. You now have a beer of a few parts in a hundred alcohol.

Next is the stripping run. Charge the pot with strained wash, never more than about three-quarters full, and run briskly for cloudy, coarse low wines. Scrub the pot between runs, every time. Then comes the spirit run, which you take slow as a funeral in mud season. At sea level ethanol boils at about a hundred and seventy-three degrees Fahrenheit and water at two hundred and twelve, so the vapour grows hotter and the distillate weaker as the run goes on. The thermometer tells you the whole story.

Make your cuts into a numbered row of small jars, like teeth in a jaw. Foreshots and heads smell of varnish and glue, and they go out. Keep the sweet, clean hearts. Set the oily, wet-dog tails aside for the next run. Grain makes little methanol, but the pectin in apples, pears and peaches breaks down to it, so the apple brandy man must cut his heads wide and generous. As for proof, the word comes from the British test: if gunpowder soaked in the spirit still burned, the spirit was proved. A hydrometer reads more honestly, and in our country a hundred proof is half alcohol by volume.

Keep the fire low and steady, and never leave a running still alone. Spirit vapour is fierce flammable. Never seal a still or let her clog with foam or a kinked line, or the pressure will burst her. A still must always breathe out the end of the worm, just as a ferry rope must have slack in a freshet. For that reason Silas hammers the cap seat and lyne arm wide and smooth, and he keeps the copper bright inside so she does her work upon the vapour. The old adepts called copper Venus, the metal of the morning star.

Ashes, Oak and the Blue Flame

Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, wrote to ask: "my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads." The ashes are a mistake. Water poured through wood ash yields lye, the potash your grandmother boiled with grease for soap. It is caustic, and in a hot thumper it will likely give you a foam-up, a puke-over and perhaps a scorched pot. Heads are not dirt. They are part of the spirit, and the only cure is to catch them in their jars. The oak shavings will lend some tannin, colour and woody flavour, and old-timers did charge thump kegs with peaches or apples to perfume the spirit. But that is seasoning, not medicine.

Last, the blue-flame test, which I strike dead on my anvil. Methanol burns with a pale blue flame, and so does good ethanol. The saucer cannot tell hearts from blinding foreshots. No saucer, spoon, ash or prayer can do the work of proper cuts. Keep your copper clean and your fire low.