Pine-Tree Shillings and John Hull's 1652 Boston Mint

Silver in the Wilderness

I keep a tin box beside my tooth forceps at Fort Wilkins. In it lies a coin no bigger than a thumbnail, as thin as a sermon on charity and as crooked as a Concord lawyer's smile. It is a pine-tree shilling of Boston, struck by hand, and it is older than any grandfather in the Suncook Valley. Every man who tends his own copper and fire ought to study such a coin. The colony was running an experiment in metal and honesty, and the results are still there to read in the silver.

In 1652 the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony grew weary of trading in wampum, beaver pelts, Indian corn and whatever battered Spanish silver drifted in off the Caribbean ships. So they did a bold thing. It was also an illegal thing, for in old England only the king might make money. They opened their own mint at Boston and put a silversmith named John Hull in charge of it, with his partner Robert Sanderson. The first pieces were bare silver discs with NE punched on one side and the value in pence on the other, as plain as a boiled potato. A plain coin is a thief's own dinner plate: a man shears a sliver from the edge, passes the coin on, and nobody is the wiser. So the Boston men changed the design, first to the Willow Tree, then the Oak Tree, and at last the Pine Tree, each with a ring of beads struck round it. Clip one of those and the beads go missing like the buttons on a drunk man's waistcoat, and every shopkeeper from Salem to Portsmouth knows you for a crook.

Nearly every one of those coins says 1652, even the ones struck thirty years later. In that year England had cut off its king's head, so there was no Crown to offend. When Charles the Second came back to the throne, the Massachusetts men simply went on dating everything 1652, much as a certain Concord widow has been forty-two years old since the Mexican War. The message to London was plain: these are old coins, Your Majesty, and we found them under the stairs. I admire it the way one rascal admires another. Hull kept fifteen pence out of every twenty shillings he coined, which makes him the first man in New England to grow rich by charging folks for their own money. There is an old tale, and I give it only as a tale, that when his daughter Hannah married Judge Samuel Sewall, Hull sat her in one pan of a great merchant's scale and poured pine-tree shillings into the other until the silver lifted the bride. Mr. Hawthorne put the story in a book, so it must be at least half true. Those are better odds than you will get at Town Meeting.

Here is what a counterstamper notices. The Boston shilling was struck about a fifth lighter than the English one, at roughly seventy-two grains of sterling, and that was done on purpose. A light coin will not sail back to London, because no English merchant will take it at face value. Massachusetts made a coin too poor to run away, like a hired man who owes at the company store. The mint closed in the early 1680s, and in 1684 the Crown revoked the colony's charter. Even so, the pine trees passed from hand to hand through two hundred years of New England, and in my boyhood I saw them in old women's purses, worn as smooth as creek stones.

Beside them in my box lies a Spanish dollar, a piece of eight struck in Mexico City. It holds about four hundred and seventeen grains of good silver, the big brother that bullied the whole continent. Congress declared in 1857 that foreign coin was no longer lawful money, but nobody told the farmers, and I still take Spanish silver worn so far that the old king looks as if he had been dragged behind a hay wagon. A real was a bit, and two bits made a quarter of the dollar, which is why we still call a quarter two bits. The oldest Spanish cobs, out of Potosi and Mexico City, were chopped off a bar of silver and hammered by hand until they sat as lopsided as a pumpkin after a frost. They suffered the same disease as Hull's shillings, and they got the same cure.

Then there are my own coppers. The United States large cent was struck from 1793 until 1857. It is nearly pure copper, a hundred and sixty-eight grains, wide and soft and generous. Lay one on the anvil, drive the punch reading G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and the coin takes the letters the way fresh snow takes a boot. The shilling taught me that a coin's value lies in its metal but its honor lies in its edge. The Spanish dollar taught me that a coin honest in weight is trusted long after its king is forgotten. A coin ought to carry three things: honest metal, a mark you can read, and a name that will answer for it.

Shavers, Sweaters and a Bear with a Silver Belly

Clipping you know already. Sweating is sneakier. A man puts a hundred silver coins in a stout leather bag and shakes it, hour after hour, like a Shaker at a revival. The coins grind against each other and leave a fine silver dust in the seams. He burns the bag, sells the dust, and spends every coin at full value, each one a little lighter than before. England grew so sick of it that in 1696 the old hand-hammered money was called in for the Great Recoinage, with Sir Isaac Newton himself at the Royal Mint. The genius of gravity hanged coiners, which I suppose was gravity applied.

Last autumn a coin-shaver came up the turnpike from Concord in a velvet waistcoat, calling himself Lemuel Grout, though I doubt his mother did. His pocket was full of half-dollars sweated so thin you could read a newspaper through them. When I rang one on the anvil it went thunk, like a dead toad. I asked him politely to pay in honest metal, and he told me impolitely where I might store my anvil. Then he ran out the back door, which is where Barnaby, my bear, lay asleep in the sun. A sleeping bear is not a stile. Barnaby caught him by the seat of his velvet britches and kept the cloth along with a fair helping of what lay behind it. Grout went up the road in a waistcoat and shirt-tail, spilling sweated half-dollars in the dust like a hen dropping eggs.

In the scuffle one real Spanish dollar flew loose, and Barnaby snapped it out of the air like a trout taking a mayfly. I am a frugal man. For three mornings I went through the bear's leavings with a manure fork and a bucket of creek water, the way a forty-niner works a sluice, and on the third morning the dollar was there, gleaming. That is faster than the Treasury has ever paid me anything. I washed the coin, boiled it and counterstamped it, and it is now the cleanest dirty dollar in New Hampshire.

Fips, Levies and Silver in the Bung

My guest this season was Miss Clara Higgins, an herbalist and a scholar of mountain talk who came up from the Blue Ridge of Virginia. On arrival she reported that Barnaby "looked at me through that window like I was a ham with a bonnet on." In her country the Spanish bits never left the hollers. Her great-great-uncle Zebulon kept a still up a branch so steep the mules said their prayers going up, and he priced everything in the old Spanish talk. A real was a levy, from elevenpence, and a half-real was a fip, from fippenny bit. Once a horse-swapper from Botetourt County paid for his fip sip with a fip filed so thin you could see daylight through it. Zeb poured exactly one drop onto the man's tongue and declared it "a filed sip for a filed fip." The fellow was called Drop Tongue until the day he died.

When small change ran short, Clara's people cut a Spanish dollar into eight wedges like a pie. A peddler named Asa Cudd made change with a cold chisel on a flat creek rock, and somehow the eighth wedge, the one he kept, was always the fattest. A widow named Mrs. Purdy hung his seven skinny wedges on her sorghum steelyard against a pint jar, and they came nowhere near lifting it. Then she hung his fat wedge alone, and it nearly balanced the jar. She told the congregation that Asa sold calico by the yard and cheated by the ounce, and he ended his days teaching singing school.

During the war, Clara's great-great-grandmother Dorcas hollowed the corncob bung of an applejack jug, pressed three Spanish dollars into it, and sealed them under beeswax. A foraging sergeant pulled that bung with his own teeth, spat it into the hearth ashes, and drank the jug dry with his men, never knowing he had spat out ten times the price of the liquor. A thirsty man will search everything but the thing in his hand. Clara's grandmother kept a bent silver sixpence nailed to the sill of the still-house door to keep the mash from souring. The summer a cousin pried it loose, every barrel she had turned to vinegar. Mash sours from wild yeast, heat and a dirty barrel, not from a want of witchcraft, but I would not care to be the cousin who explained that to her.

Copper at the Forge and in the Head

Every coin I punch is a lesson in copper, and every still is the same lesson in a bigger hat. Hammer copper and it hardens, turning stiff and springy until it cracks. Bring it to a dull red in the forge and plunge it into the water bucket, and it comes out soft as butter, the very opposite of steel, which turns hard and brittle under the same treatment. In this way a coppersmith hammers, anneals and hammers again until a flat sheet becomes the round belly of a pot. Copper earns its keep in a still because it grabs the stinking sulfur that comes from the yeast, especially yeast that has been starved or overheated. It does that work best where the hot vapour touches it, in the head, the arm and the worm. A copper bottom with a tin head is a church with a good basement and no roof.

I set down the old Yankee way with apple brandy as history only, for making spirits to drink without a Federal license is against the law. The farmer ground his apples and pressed the pomace, then let the cider work in clean oak barrels with a cloth over the bung, started by wild yeast or a cup of working cider. In two or three weeks it went hard and dry. He made a quick stripping run with the pot no more than three-quarters full, and after it a slow spirit run of the low wine in a cleaned pot. Apples carry pectin, which breaks down into wood spirit, so the apple man must cut more generously at the front of the run than the corn man does. The foreshots go on the ground. The heads, sharp as a cobbler's glue pot, go too, or into the lamp. He collected the run in a long row of small jars and judged each one by smell until the hearts came sweet and clean, and he set aside the tails when the jars turned to wet cardboard, oily and cloudy. Jacking cider by freezing removes only water and leaves every drop of wood spirit and fusel oil in the jug.

Never seal a still tight, or the pot becomes a cannon. Never run it dry, and keep open flame well away from the worm's end, for spirit vapour creeps along the floor and catches like gunpowder. I once saw a still-house in Barnstead go up in eight minutes flat. Brighten the copper afterward with vinegar and salt, then rinse it, rinse it, and rinse it again.

Ashes, Shavings and the Blue Flame

Cletus Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, whom everyone calls Rabbit, wrote to ask whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg will clean out bad heads, as his uncle swears. They will not. Hickory ash is potash. Drip rainwater through it in a hopper and you have lye. In a hot keg it brews a bad soap whose foam can pitch over into the worm. Red oak is too open in the pore for a cooper to trust with whiskey, which is why barrels are made of white oak. A handful of red oak shavings boiled for an hour gives only bitter tannin and a brown color that makes young liquor look old. You do not clean heads. You pour them off, by smell and by the jar, every time.

The same goes for the tavern test of setting a spoonful afire. Wood spirit burns with a pale blue flame, just as good whiskey does. All the flame can tell you is that the stuff will burn.

Reading a Hand-Struck Coin

For the collector, first weigh the coin. A pine-tree shilling ought to come in near seventy-two grains, and a missing stretch of beads means shears have been at it. Second, examine the back of any counterstamped piece. The anvil flattens that face, so a counterstamp with a crisp, untouched back is either a miracle or a liar. Third, remember that one punch makes one mark. Mine shows the same letter spacing and the same little nick in the second G every time. Lay a doubtful piece beside an honest one and compare. John Hull taught us all that a coin is only as honest as the man holding the shears. Keep your copper clean, your cuts true and your fire low.