New Hampshire's 1855 Prohibition Law: Hard Cider, Druggists and Back-Road Stills

The Maine Law Comes to the Granite State

Friends, neighbours, sinners and selectmen, I take up my pen at Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, with Barnaby, my black bear, grunting at his chain beneath the window and plainly resentful that he has been forbidden the cider barrel since the day he fell into it. My subject is a law that made the whole Granite State as dry as an old deacon's sermon, and about as well obeyed.

In the year 1851 the State of Maine, a cold, rocky, sensible place full of men who should have known better, forbade the sale of intoxicating liquor. A Portland mayor by the name of Neal Dow carried that law about as a preacher carries his hymnal, and it spread across New England as the grippe spreads through a schoolhouse. They called it the Maine Law. In 1855 my own beloved New Hampshire passed a prohibition statute of its own. The legislature in Concord bade the people put down the jug, and the farmers, the mill hands and the teamsters on the turnpike replied that they would consider it. They then considered it for several years, over a jug.

I offer here a dentist's observation. A law is like a tooth. You may pull it, fill it, or crown it with gold, but if the roots run deep enough into the jaw of the people, the whole thing comes up bloody and in pieces. The roots of drinking in New England run clear back to cider brandy and rum in the Pilgrim cellars. No statute yanks those out in a clean extraction.

A Law That Wanted a Complainant

The law, as I read it, made the sale of strong drink a punishable offence. It authorised the seizing of liquor kept for sale and the bringing of complaints before a magistrate: fines for the first offence, harsher for the second, and the usual threat of a stay in the county jail. But observe its beauty, and I say beauty as a man says it of a rattlesnake's pattern. The whole engine depended upon somebody complaining. In a little town where the would-be complainant is the very man who borrowed your oxen last spring, and whose wife you relieved of a molar on credit, the complaining grows awful thin.

Some towns enforced it with the zeal of a Baptist at a barn dance; others with the zeal of a man sent out to the barn in January to look in on a cow he already knows is fine. A selectman who votes for temperance at Town Meeting on Tuesday and sends his hired boy round to the back door of a still-house on Thursday is no hypocrite. He is a New Englander with a consistent schedule. In some counties the sheriff was a hard man with a long list of grievances; in others he knew every jug in his district by name and had in some cases helped fill it. I will not say which sort we kept in Merrimack County. I will only say that whenever he called at Fort Wilkins, he arrived at the very hour Barnaby had just been fed and wished to say hello.

The seizures raised a heavier matter. Whether a constable needed a warrant, and whether he might poke through a man's barn and cellar, set off fights in courtrooms across the country. A man's property, said the lawyers, is a man's property, and a constable with a crowbar is not a judge with a warrant. Those arguments climbed from the town hall to the higher courts. Some folks cheered, some wept, and a good many hid the jugs in the hay.

Three Holes in the Dam

The true story of any law is the story of the holes in it, and this one had three worth a man's study. First, the farmers. Every New Hampshire farmer with an orchard had cider, and every one of them knew what cider does when left alone in a cold cellar all winter: it gets hard, harder than a farmer's heart at tax time. No statute ever reached into a man's own cellar and proved that the barrel in the corner had meant to be vinegar. The law might forbid selling, but it said less about what a man served his guests, and nothing at all about what a hired man was owed as part of his board.

Second, the druggists. Statutes of this kind commonly allowed liquor to be sold by licensed agents for medicinal and mechanical purposes, and every town was straightway blessed with an astonishing epidemic: chills, rheumatism, weak lungs, the vapours, and bad backs eased only by a pint, with worse backs requiring two. Read the prescription ledgers of 1856 and you would conclude all New England was one great infirmary, and marvel that the patients were so cheerful. The druggists were not all rascals. Some were upright, some frightened, some kept honestly to the letter. But enough stretched the word medicine until it wept, and the people kept a list of which apothecary would write a man up for a bottle of bitters with no questions asked.

Third, and dearest to my heart, the back-road distillers in the hill farms behind the turnpike, where a plume of smoke passes for a cook fire and nobody asks why it burns all night. Pot stills, copper if the man was prudent and tin if he was poor, with a worm of coiled tube laid in a spring-fed trough. A little corn, a little rye, a little cider, whatever the land gave. They sold to neighbours, to teamsters, and to men down from the lumber camps toward the White Mountains with pay in their pockets. Mark the lesson: a law hard to enforce and easy to evade does not stop the trade. It raises the price, promotes cunning, makes the careful man rich and the careless man a guest of the county, and teaches a generation that the statute book is a mere suggestion.

A Revenue Man at My Table

I lately entertained a visitor whose calling card set my knees knocking: Captain Donald Vance of Manchester, retired from the federal revenue service, who spent twenty-eight years hunting copper stills through the White Mountains and the Green. He is precisely the sort of man I have spent my life arranging to be out when he calls. Yet he declared he never quarrelled with the old fellow who hammered out a clean copper still and ran it honest. It was the men who cobbled rigs from scrap and lead solder and poisoned their own neighbours whom he shut down, and he slept fine after.

His finest find was an 1856 ledger out of Hillsborough County, kept in a tidy hand by a deacon who sat in the front pew. “Every week, regular as Sunday, an entry: cider for the sick,” the Captain told me. “By my count that deacon was tending enough invalids to fill a hospital the size of Boston, and not a one of them ever got a day better.” The deacon had long rested in the churchyard when the book turned up, and the Captain merely closed it and tipped his hat.

He recalled, too, a posse of the 1850s that hauled a dozen sealed barrels onto the green before a crowd and proudly stove in the first head. Pickled herring, every barrel. The town smelled of fish for a week and the posse never lived it down. And in Vermont he once climbed a creaking steeple on a tip and found a still in the bell tower, the bell long silent and the rope tied round a coil of copper. A smoking pine-knot fire, smelled three miles upwind on a November morning, had betrayed it. The minister allowed it was the first time that bell ever did honest work, and the Captain owned the coil was a fine piece of copper: clean joints, not a drop of lead. Barnaby, for his part, ate the Captain's hat, which being government issue was surrendered without complaint.

Copper, Vapour, and the Cuts

Now to the apparatus, for I know half of you have endured the history while waiting for the metallurgy. A still is a patient device: a pot, a head, and a condenser, the worm, coiled in cold water. Heat the fermented wash, and because alcohol boils at a lower temperature than water it rises first as vapour, passes through the head, down the cooled coil, and emerges as liquid. That is distillation. It is not witchcraft, though I enjoy telling the tax man it is alchemy.

Why copper? It conducts heat beautifully, so the pot warms evenly and does not scorch. It hammers and shapes readily, which is why old coppersmiths made the finest stills in the world. And here is the quiet miracle: copper reacts with the sulphur compounds formed in fermentation and cooking, those that smell of rotten eggs and taste like a wet match in a ditch, and binds them in the pot. The learned call it catalytic sulphur reduction. In time a green crust forms within; scrub it out between runs with vinegar and salt or a good hard rinse, for it will foul the next batch.

The cuts separate the careful from the dead. First come the foreshots, the first few spoonfuls, carrying methanol and harsh volatile compounds. They are poison, fit only for the fire. Next the heads, tasting of solvent, set aside. Then the hearts, the clean middle of the run. Last the tails, oily, weak, tasting of wet cardboard, set aside likewise. Foreshots, heads, hearts and tails: learn them as you know your children's names.

Vapour that finds a flame makes a very short and very final speech. Never run a still in a closed room, never leave it untended, never let vapour leak near open fire; a man in Gilmanton lost his barn, his hired man's eyebrows and much of his dignity to a careless run. Use no lead solder, no salvaged radiators, no scrap of unknown origin. If you cannot afford to do it clean, you cannot afford to do it. And as the lawyers bid me say: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is unlawful, and these pages are for history and instruction only.

On Hickory Ashes and the Thump Keg

A correspondent from Wilkesboro, North Carolina, Mr. Cletus “Rabbit” Miller, writes: “My uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?”

There is a grain of truth wrapped in much chaff. Hardwood burned to charcoal adsorbs certain harsh compounds, a sponge on the smallest scale, and old distillers knew that running spirits through a column of charcoal made them smoother. But ashes or raw shavings tossed into the thump keg or a boiling charge do not remove methanol. It boils lower, comes early in the run, and the only honest remedy is to cut it away with the foreshots and heads. Ash in the keg is perfume on a corpse. Worse, ash is lye, or near enough, and lye in a hot still fouls the charge, makes it foam, and sends boiling mash surging up the neck. Keep your ashes in the stove and your shavings for the smokehouse. For his trouble I stamped Mr. Miller a coin on my anvil, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., as I did through the hard-money years of the war when coins were hoarded and promises bought no bread.

The Toll Booth of 1862

So New Hampshire in 1855 tried to dry a thirst older than the state, and failed, for a law that depends on the cooperation of those it forbids is written on the surface of a pond. Then came the war, and in 1862 Mr. Lincoln signed the Revenue Act creating the Bureau of Internal Revenue and laying the first federal excise on distilled spirits. First the state said do not make it; then Washington said make it, but pay us. Of that toll booth, and the cold fury it raised in the Granite State, I shall write another time. Until then, keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.