Paul Revere's Copper Mill and Where New England Still Copper Came From

Paul Revere's Heirs and the Mill at Canton

Every stillman between the Merrimack and the Connecticut ought to tip his hat to old Paul Revere, and curse him under his breath in the same motion. The schoolmasters teach that Revere was the silversmith who galloped out of Boston in '75 crying alarm about the regulars. What they leave out is that he spent the latter part of his life growing rich on copper.

Revere kept a foundry in Boston where he cast church bells and bronze cannon, bells for the Lord and cannon for the Lord's enemies, which I call a balanced ledger. But nobody in the young Republic could roll sheet copper. Every flat sheet came from England, and the English charged for it the way a Portsmouth dentist charges a drunk sailor. So around 1801 Revere set up a rolling mill on the river at Canton, Massachusetts, on ten thousand dollars the government lent him, and there he made the first successful rolled copper sheet in this country. The first of it went over the dome of the State House in Boston, and more went onto the bottom of the frigate Constitution. The copper that kept the shipworm off Old Ironsides is grandfather to the copper sweating in my still-house tonight, so I hold that my liquor is a naval veteran.

The old man died in 1818, and in 1828 his heirs made the works into the Revere Copper Company. Had Revere known what his copper would cost me in '64, I believe he would have ridden the other way.

Pig Copper, Native Copper and the Vermont Heaps

A man who works metal should know where his metal was born. A cast lump of smelted copper is called a pig, a cake or an ingot, depending on who is selling it and how drunk he is. In my boyhood that metal came across the ocean from Cornwall and from the Welsh smelting works at Swansea, with Chile ore in the holds. Then in the forties the Keweenaw country on Lake Superior opened, and that is the strangest copper God ever buried. It lies in the rock as pure native metal, and some masses run to hundreds of tons. The miners cannot blast a lump that size without wrecking the drift, so they stand with cold chisels and cut it apart by hand, chip by chip, for weeks. Picture pulling a molar the size of a Concord meetinghouse with a nail file.

Closer to home, the Vermont mines at Vershire and Strafford are sending ore down the valleys now, and from a ridge over there you can smell the roasting heaps three miles off. It smells as though the Devil burned his breakfast.

Why Rolled Sheet Cost So Dear

You might think copper would come cheap once a Yankee mill was rolling it. It did not, for three reasons. First, the rolling itself. Copper hardens as you work it. Roll it, hammer it or bend it and it goes stiff and cranky until it cracks at the edges like a spinster's patience. So the mill rolls it a little, heats it to a dull red to anneal it soft, rolls it again, and so on over and over. That wants water power, iron rolls as heavy as an ox, coal, and men who know when to stop. Every blacksmith raised on iron learns this the hard way: steel heated red and plunged in water comes out hard as a sheriff's heart, while copper treated the same way comes out soft as butter. Copper is the one metal in New England more stubborn than a Pittsfield selectman, and the only one that softens when you throw cold water on it.

Second, the war. Every Napoleon cannon the Union cast is bronze, and bronze is mostly copper. Every percussion cap fired at Gettysburg held a pinch of it. By '64 ingot had climbed near half a dollar a pound, and sheet cost more. A good forty-gallon pot wants thirty or forty pounds of heavy plate. Do the sum and you have a year of honest farm cash, which is why nobody hereabouts buys a still with honest farm cash.

Third, the road. Sheet goes from Canton into Boston, to the metal dealers and ironmongers along Long Wharf and Broad Street. A Boston copper merchant smiles at you the way I smile at a molar: friendly, patient, and fixing to take something from you that you will never get back. From Boston it rides the cars north to the Concord depot and stops there, because Pittsfield has no railroad. The gentlemen keep promising a Suncook Valley line and keep not building it, so the last fifteen miles come up the turnpike by wagon, through the mud, behind a teamster who drinks a toll at every tavern.

Peddlers, Old Kettles and Ship Sheathing

Then there is the Yankee tin peddler, who started out of Berlin, Connecticut, last century and now covers every road in New England with a cart that clanks like a drunk knight. He sells tin pans, sad irons and pins, and if you lean close and pay cash he will sell you a roll of copper without asking what it is for. He also buys old copper, and that brings us to the dirty secret of the New England still: most of them were never new.

The country stillman builds from whatever wears out: a cracked brewing kettle from a dead aunt's kitchen, a wash-boiler, a dented apple-butter pot, a broken dyer's vat from the woolen mill. Best of all is ship sheathing. Every few years a ship's copper bottom is stripped and replaced, and the old sheets go off by the cartload to the junk yards of Portsmouth, Salem and New Bedford. They are thin, bent and full of nail holes, but they are copper and cheaper than new. In the winter of '63 a Boston dealer sold me old sheathing off a New Bedford whaler, and every square foot was still studded with copper tacks. I sat three nights by my stove with my dental forceps and pulled two thousand of them, each one fighting harder than a deacon's bicuspid. The crock of tacks weighed eleven pounds, and I sold it back to the same dealer for more than he had charged me for the sheets. Boston paid me to do dentistry on a whale ship.

Copper draws thieves as well. Two winters back a fellow from over Barnstead way came by night with a pry bar and a feed sack for the sheet under my woodshed eave. He never reckoned on the length of my bear Barnaby's chain. By lantern light I found the sack, one boot with a good deal of sock still in it, and three teeth in the frost. I knew him by the teeth, since I had filled one of them in '59. He came back in the spring to have the rest looked at, and I charged him for the three he left in my dooryard.

What the Revenue Captain Learned from the Copper

Captain Donald Vance, a retired revenue officer, sat in my good chair drinking my coffee and told how copper betrays its owner. Above the Piscataqua the Captain's men hunted a still for a fortnight before following a thin, many-voiced whistling to a hemlock hollow. The still was built of stripped ship sheathing, with every tack hole plugged by a whittled pine peg. As the pot heated the pegs shrank, and the vapour came singing out like a dozen teakettles. Barnacle scars and the shear pattern on the edges led the Captain to a Portsmouth shipbreaker, whose ledger read: "old copper, to a gentleman, paid in cheese."

There was also a cheerful peddler who sold seven farms in one township a curious copper milk pan, flanged and holed for rivets, when the assessor's rolls showed only eleven cows in the whole township. At a husking bee the seven panels were riveted into a still. The Captain bought the eighth panel, the lid, gathered the rest by warrant, and laid them out on the courthouse table like a jigsaw map. Then there was the widow whose copper wash-boiler, the right size and shape for a still's cap, turned up upside down on a pot in a sugarhouse with her husband's initials in the handle. The magistrate sentenced the thief to do her laundry every Monday for a month, in her apron, under her eye. No crueler punishment appears in any statute book.

The Ring of a Sound Plate, and the Poison Pot

Why copper at all? Iron rusts and stinks. Copper carries heat evenly and quickly, so the charge does not scorch in one corner and sulk in another, and it takes hold of the sulfur in the vapour, the rotten-egg and boiled-cabbage foulness, and keeps it on the metal. The copper gives itself up a little, going black and dull to keep your jar clean, and that is why you scrub it bright after every run.

When I buy a plate I do not trust my eyes, because paint, grease and soot will hide anything. Hang the sheet by one corner from a string and rap it with a knuckle or a small hammer. A sound plate rings clear and even and dies away slowly, like a church bell across a valley. A crack too small to see, a blister, or a sheet split into layers by bad rolling will buzz like a hornet in a jar or thud dead. Railroad wheel-tappers use the same test, and so did Revere's bell-casters. Hard-rolled copper rings bright and high and annealed copper rings softer, so a dull note alone does not condemn a plate. A buzz does, and so does a rattle.

The Captain once rapped a "pure copper pot" that buzzed like a saw. Under the bronzing powder it was sheet iron, and the seams were patched with lead foil cut from a tea chest. The family that used it took sick all winter with what their doctor called colic, and it was lead colic. I will make no joke of that. Lead is poison, plain and certain. Tea-chest lining, old pewter, soft solder and lead patches must never go near the vapour. Rivet your copper and braze it hard with brass spelter or silver. Scour an old kettle down to bare red metal, because old tinning may carry lead. And do not treat brass or Muntz metal as copper, for they hold zinc and sometimes lead.

The Run, the Thump Keg and the Blue Flame

I give this as history, since making spirits without a federal permit is against the law. Cook the mash, cool it to blood-warm, and add yeast. Let it work in a warm room with the air moving, because its gas will kill a man in a closed cellar. Fill the pot no more than three-quarters full, never seal it tight, and keep the fire low, with flour paste or rye-meal paste on the joints and buckets of water and sand by the door. Throw out the foreshots generously, since that is where most of the methanol runs. Discard the heads until the smell of glue goes away, keep the sweet hearts, and run the oily tails again with the next charge.

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, wrote to ask whether old-timers truly put "hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads." Ash is lye. It may cut some sour acid, but it makes the charge foam and puke, gives a soapy taste, and does nothing to the methanol. Oak shavings give the spirit tannin and colour, and city rectifiers use that trick to pass new white liquor off as old whiskey, but they do not take the heads out. A thump keg is a second boiling and nothing more.

Last, the blue-flame test is hogwash. Good spirit burns pale blue, and so does methanol, which burns so pale you can hardly see it by daylight. A man in Loudon once set his spoon alight two steps from a leaking cap, and the roof went up in a sheet of light. He lived, but he had no eyebrows left. Do your cuts honestly and keep fire away from the vapour.