Moonshiner Signal Lanterns: How the Suncook Valley Lookout Relay Worked

A Light in the Steeple, a Torch on the Hill

Every Yankee child knows the story. On the eighteenth of April, seventeen seventy-five, two lanterns hung in the steeple of the Old North Church in Boston: one if by land, two if by sea. The regulars went by water, Paul Revere got on a borrowed horse, and King George ran out of patience. Revere hung two lanterns and became immortal. I have hung forty and become a defendant.

The schoolmarms leave out the real lesson. Those lanterns were not for show. They were a code agreed on beforehand between men who trusted one another and did not trust the government. That is the whole art of the ridge lantern: a little fire, a high place, and a secret.

The Army caught up to the moonshiner in the end, as the Army always does, about eighty years late and holding the wrong end of the stick. A surgeon named Albert Myer worked out a scheme he called wig-wag. He used one flag by day and one torch by night, swung left and swung right, and every combination of swings stood for a letter. In eighteen sixty they made Myer the Army's first signal officer, and the Signal Corps became official in sixty-three. At the first battle of Bull Run, in July of sixty-one, a Confederate signal officer named Edward Porter Alexander stood on a hill and saw Union bayonets glinting as they marched around his side's flank. He wig-wagged across the valley: Look out for your left, your position is turned. That saved the rebels' bacon, God help us. The Union Army had to learn what any cornfield lookout in Wilkes County already knew: one man on a hill who can see the road is worth ten men with rifles standing in it.

How the Suncook Ridge Was Worked

First, the lantern itself. Your grandmother's pierced-tin lantern, the kind folks call a Paul Revere lantern, is useless for signalling. It throws light the way a Whig politician gives a speech, in little holes of brightness with everything else dark as a coal bin, and from a mile off it is only a smudge. A signal lantern wants glass panes, and better still it wants a shutter. The dark lantern, or bull's-eye, has a thick lens in front and a sliding shutter that hides the flame entirely. The night watch in Boston carries one, and so does every second-story thief in Boston. Apart from a lawyer, it is the only thing in the Commonwealth that serves the law and the burglar equally well.

Second, the fuel. Ever since a Pennsylvania man named Drake struck oil at Titusville in August of fifty-nine, we have burned kerosene, or coal oil, which is cheap and bright, and the whalers can go hang. But kerosene cut with naphtha, which every crooked merchant in Concord sells, behaves like a deputy cut with whiskey: perfectly calm until somebody brings a match near it. I saw one lamp go up in a farmhouse on Berry Pond Road like a Chinese firecracker. It took the curtains, the cat's eyebrows and the farmer's whole Sunday disposition. Buy honest oil or don't light a lamp at all.

Now the war is over and the statute of limitations has gone to bed drunk, so I can tell you how the ridge was worked. We posted boys on Catamount Hill and on the high pasture over the turnpike, each with a glass lantern, a shutter and a square of red bottle-glass. One steady white light meant the road was clear. Two lights side by side meant riders on the turnpike, most likely a doctor or a drummer selling corsets. A red light meant a revenue man. A light that blinked out and stayed out meant douse your fire, sink your copper in the millpond, and go home and kiss your wife as though you had been there all evening. The word passed down the valley from hill to barn loft to still-house window faster than a horse could gallop, and the sheriff would come up the turnpike to find nothing but warm ashes and a bear licking his own behind. I paid my lantern boys in jars, wool socks and dirty jokes, and only the socks ever came back.

The Deputy Who Borrowed My Light

One October night a certain deputy climbed Catamount with a lantern of his own. I won't name him, because his mother is still living and she makes a fine mince pie. He meant to send a false all-clear down the valley so the boys would light their fires and he could catch them red-handed. He had worked out our code, and I'll grant him that much, since it made him smarter than a bucket. But he had worked it out wrong, and he was showing his steady white light from the wrong ledge. That ledge happens to sit right above my cabin.

Barnaby, my black bear, believes every light on Catamount is a ham being carried home. He pulled his stake, which I had driven eighteen inches into frozen clay, as easily as a rotten molar and went up the hill. A bear at night sounds like a hogshead rolling through a cornfield, with a low wet huff like a bellows full of mud. The deputy turned and swung his lantern at the noise, and that was his mistake, because kerosene smells like supper to a bear that has been fed off a greasy plate. Barnaby opened the man's britches with no more ceremony than I use on a stubborn jaw. In fairness to the bear, he did not eat him. But the lantern had spilled oil down the deputy's coat, and Barnaby licked it off with a tongue like a wet wood rasp for most of an hour. The deputy came down at dawn with no seat in his trousers, his hair standing straight up and the smell of a Nantucket whale-boat about him, and the county surgeon said the stripe up his back was the worst rash he ever saw on a Christian. I still have the lantern. I keep tooth-oil in it.

What the Revenue Man Saw from the Road

Captain Donald Vance, a retired revenue officer from Manchester, tracked copper across the White and Green Mountains for years. They say he is the only revenue man in New England who ever got a thank-you note from a moonshiner. He told me that not every signal in these hills was a lantern. In one Green Mountain meetinghouse, Hymn One Hundred Twelve on the hymn board meant the revenue men were in the county, and that afternoon the smoke stopped rising out of every hollow. The Captain stood up and sang all four verses loud and on key with the rest of the congregation, and then he rode home.

Near Woodstock a farm girl set a lamp behind a red preserve jar in her gable window every Saturday night for her beau across the ridge. Three outfits below that ridge had agreed among themselves that a red light high on that side meant a raid, so for a month all three stills went dark every Saturday. As the Captain put it: "Love shut down more whiskey in that valley than I did in a year." She married the boy, and the distillers toasted her at the wedding with the jars they never made.

The Captain owns he was made a fool of once. Under Monadnock he and two county men chased a bobbing light for four miles, crawling on their bellies through juniper, and found it tied with baling twine to the horns of a big old Cotswold ram. The ram butted the youngest deputy off the ledge into an iced-over cow pond, while the real work went on two valleys over. The best lookout he ever met was a widow on a hill farm above Plymouth. For thirty years she kept a bound ledger of every revenue horse that came up her road. She recorded the colour, the gait, the shoes and which hoof dragged. She told him: "Your bay mare threw her left hind shoe at the Baker River ford, Captain. You'll want to see a smith." She was right, and the only thing he wrote in his report was "Farrier needed."

A Still by Lamplight

My lantern boys watched the road, but somebody had to watch the pot. I set this down for history's sake, and remember that distilling spirits for drinking without a federal license is against the law.

Start with the mash. Crack your corn coarse and cook it in hot water until it is as thick as a Baptist's porridge. Raw corn starch will not ferment, because yeast can no more eat starch than Barnaby can eat a church pew. Malt is sprouted barley or sprouted corn, dried and ground, and it carries a ferment the chemists call diastase, which turns starch into sugar. Cool the mash until you can hold your hand in it, stir in the malt and let it sweeten. Then cool it to about blood-warm, pitch the yeast, cover it loosely, and leave it three days to a week in a warm, airy room until the bubbling stops and it tastes sour and dry. That is your wash.

My pot is hammered and riveted copper, with a helmet and a long neck down to the worm. I use copper because it drags the stink out of the vapour, and for you fruit men it also helps break down certain mischief that comes off the stones of cherries and plums. Join it with silver solder or proper fittings and never with lead. Spirit boils at about one hundred seventy-three degrees by Mr. Fahrenheit's scale and water at two hundred twelve. If you roar the fire, everything comes over at once in a muddle. Keep it low and steady and the run divides itself like a congregation at a church fight.

Collect the run in small jars. Mr. Mason's screw-top jar, patented in fifty-eight, is the best thing that ever happened to an honest distiller, and you should number every one. The foreshots come first. They smell sharp, like a solvent, and they go on the ground. The heads come next, smelling like a cobbler's glue pot and bringing a headache like a mule kick, and they are thrown out too. When the smell turns sweet, clean and grainy you are into the hearts, which you keep. Last come the tails, oily and smelling of wet dog, and you set them aside. Be generous with what you throw away, because a man who keeps a jar too early to save a nickel may be buying a coffin later.

Alcohol vapour is heavier than air. It rolls along the floor like fog in a cellar hole until it finds a flame. Hang your lantern high, with glass all round and the shutter closed toward the still, and keep it well away from the worm. Fire the pot in a firebox with no gaps and keep a bucket of sand by the door. I knew a man in Barnstead who held a candle down to check his drip. They found his boots in the brook and his eyebrows in Gilmanton. When the run is done, scrub the copper bright while it is still warm, and feed the spent mash to the hogs only after it has cooled.

Ashes, Oak Shavings and the Blue Flame

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asks whether his uncle was right that the old-timers threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Wood ash is potash. We used to boil it down in asheries and sell it by the barrel to soap boilers and glassmakers. It is strong alkaline stuff, a cousin to lye, and in a wash it kills some of the vinegar sourness and takes hold of some acids. That is why the old men noticed a difference. Red oak gives off tannin, colour and a woody taste, which makes a spirit look ten years older, the way a powdered wig makes a scoundrel look like a judge. But bad heads are not a stain you can scrub out. They are simply what comes off the still first, and the only cure is to cut them away. In Tennessee, men have filtered new spirit slowly through packed sugar-maple charcoal since the eighteen-twenties. That does smooth out harshness, but they do it after the still, on spirit that has already been properly cut. Charcoal can polish good whiskey, but it cannot save poison.

Then there is the blue flame test. Wood alcohol, the poison kind, burns with the same pale blue flame as good spirit, so the flame cannot tell hearts from heads. All the test proves is that the man holding the match has never read a chemistry book. Trust your cuts, your nose and your numbered jars. And up here, a lookout who falls asleep at his post is said to have trimmed his wick. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.