Portsmouth Rum Runners on the First New Hampshire Turnpike

The Salt Road

Most men who think of New Hampshire spirits think of corn and rye in the hills, cider in every barn, and fellows like myself sweating over copper in the woods. But this state has a mouth on it, and the mouth is Portsmouth, on the Piscataqua River, our only true seaport. For better than a hundred years the West Indies trade came up that river: molasses by the hogshead out of the sugar islands, and rum out of the Portsmouth distilleries that boiled the molasses down. When I was a boy you could smell a rum house in Portsmouth from the far side of the river, a smell like burnt sugar and a sailor's armpit.

The Piscataqua is no gentle river. She runs cold and quick, with a tide that will pull a man's boots off and come back for his breeches. Above the town she opens into Great Bay, and off Great Bay run the tidal rivers to Dover, Durham, Newmarket, and Exeter. On those waters works the gundalow, a flat-bottomed freight barge, ugly as a mule's grandmother, with one great lateen sail on a long yard. Her mast and yard are counterweighted, so at a bridge the crew drops the whole rig flat, slides under, and hauls it back up beyond. She drops her mast the way a deputy drops his principles to get under a jar: quick, practiced, and with no shame at all.

In 1794 the Piscataqua Bridge opened from Newington over to Durham, and two years later the Legislature chartered the First New Hampshire Turnpike to run from that bridge inland toward Concord, through Lee, Barrington, Nottingham, Northwood, Epsom, and Chichester. Northwood and Epsom are Pittsfield's own doorstep. A man coming up from salt water with a wagon of molasses could turn north at Epsom, follow the Suncook, and be pounding on my door before his horse had finished complaining.

The Pedlar's Pass and Its Tricks

That road is what we call the Piscataqua Pedlar's Pass. It was never a gap in the rocks. It was a way of getting through: through the tollgates, through Northwood's nosy taverns, through the county's deputies, and through the Concord boys who reckoned every jug in New Hampshire ought to pass through their hands first.

Seacoast runners are a breed apart. They smell of salt cod and low tide and talk as though paying by the word. In these war years they have had plenty of cover. The Portsmouth Navy Yard has roared since '61; there they built the Kearsarge, named for our own mountain, which sank the rebel raider Alabama off France last summer. A town of ship carpenters, caulkers, and sailors on liberty has a thirst like a dry well, and wagons of oakum, tar, salt fish, and molasses rolled in and out day and night.

Jotham Brackett of Greenland hauled whole wagon beds of salt mackerel in brine, and in every third barrel, under eight inches of fish, sat a stone jug of Portsmouth rum. A mackerel barrel is the finest guard dog in New England. One Rockingham constable put his arm in to the elbow, came up with a fish head hung on his cuff link, and resigned his commission by Thursday. Other runners bored out a wagon tongue with a long auger, filled it with spirits, and plugged it with a peg greased in tallow. It sloshed over a frost heave, but so does a teamster.

Then the signals. One lantern in the gable window of a Northwood tavern meant come ahead. Two meant the deputy was drinking inside, so go round by the back road past the ponds. A lantern with a red flannel petticoat tied over it meant a Concord man was in the taproom asking questions, and you kept your wagon in the woods and your mouth in your hat.

Clam-Diggers, Lint-Lickers, and the Double-Struck Cent

On the other road, the Merrimack road from Concord down through the Amoskeag mill country at Manchester, ran another crowd entirely. Concord builds the best stagecoach under heaven, and a Concord man will sell you a coach, a Bible, and a lie in one afternoon, and charge extra for the Bible. The seacoast boys called the Merrimack runners lint-lickers; the Merrimack crowd called the seacoast boys clam-diggers. Both were right, which made the fighting honest.

Why does a Pittsfield stillman need friends on both roads? Arithmetic. My corn and apples come from the hills; my molasses and copper sheet come up from the coast; my buyers are mill hands, ship carpenters, and every thirsty selectman between. A stillman with one road is like a man with one tooth: he can still eat, but he chews careful and smiles at nobody.

When change grew scarce I took to stamping coins G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. One batch of large cents I struck twice, once on each face, and gave only to seacoast runners I trusted. Shown to the right man behind the right bar between Northwood and Epsom, it got a wagon waved on and a lantern lit. A Concord man who forged one struck his letters upside down, which proves he had never read anything but a bill of sale.

The Night Barnaby Dressed a Fire-Setter

A Merrimack man I shall call Ruel Dustin took my seacoast trade as a personal insult. I hold him responsible for whispering in the sheriff's ear before my first arrest. When the law did not finish me, Ruel tried fire. On a moonless January night he sent his hired man, Lafe Colby, a chinless article like a heron in a coat, with a lantern and a quart of lamp oil. Lafe came through the alders in his stocking feet, which was clever, and up the window side, which was not, for the window side belongs to Barnaby.

A bear that means business does not roar. He makes a sound like a cellar door opening slowly, clicks his teeth, and moves faster than any creature of four hundred pounds has a right to. He took Lafe by the seat of the breeches and the meat beneath, shook him as a terrier shakes a rat, and left a pie wedge of breeches and ham on the chain stake. I laid Lafe face down on my workbench, poured a gill of my roughest over the wound, and sewed him with fiddle string. Lafe sat sideways in church for a year, and the minister took it for humility. That breeches-wedge hangs over my door still.

Miss Higgins and the Coast Words

Miss Clara Higgins, a Blue Ridge herbalist and collector of old words, came north from Norfolk on a coasting schooner full of molasses. The mate, an Eastern Shore man named Purnell, set a keg of apple brandy in the middle of a molasses hogshead and packed it round, so that it floated like a pickle in a crock. The Portsmouth inspector tapped his hogsheads low, near the chime, drew pure black molasses every time, and signed them clean. Her uncle Absalom sank stoneware jugs in his Chesapeake oyster beds on cords, each marked by a gourd painted to resemble a dead gull, and no revenue boat ever rowed toward a dead gull.

She gave me the coast words: kill-devil, the raw rum of Barbados two hundred years ago; blackstrap, rum sweetened dark with molasses; flip, beer and rum sweetened and plunged with a red-hot loggerhead; stonewall, hard cider and rum, because after two mugs you walk into one. Her aunt Tabitha fed a wartime grain inspector four mugs of flip, after which he wrote in his book, "No corn on the premises, only weather." And from a Portsmouth ropewalk widow she learned that a runner who delivers light and lies about it is 'a gill short of a gundalow.'

A Molasses Run in the Copper

Making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law, and what follows is for history and learning. Thin your molasses about one part to four or five of warm water, stirred free of streaks. Pitch yeast when the wash is warm to the hand, not hot, cover loosely, never sealed, and keep it warm and airy a week or more. West Indies makers kept back dunder, the spent wash, to give the next batch body and bite.

Your still must breathe out at one end only, through the worm. Never stopper it, never let the worm clog with mash or ice, or the cap jumps like a champagne cork. Alcohol vapour is heavier than air; it crawls the floor and pools until it finds your firebox. Keep joints tight, the house aired, the fire low, sand and water at hand, and never leave a running still.

Methanol boils near one hundred forty-eight degrees by Fahrenheit's scale, ethanol near one hundred seventy-three, water at two hundred twelve, so the poison comes first. On five gallons of wash, throw out at least the first half-pint of foreshots, and more is better. Set aside the heads, sharp as a varnish pot; keep the sweet hearts; set aside the tails when the run goes flat and smells of wet dog. When in doubt, cut early. Better a short jar than a blind customer.

Ashes, Oak, and the Blue Flame

Cletus Miller, called Rabbit, of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asked: "My uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads." Water through ash makes lye; our grandfathers boiled it to potash for soap and glass. Lye in the keg cleans nothing but starts a soap factory, and will burn skin and blind an eye. Red oak lends tannin, colour, and a woody taste, but methanol still comes over at the front of the run. You cannot dress a corpse and call him a groom. The only cure is the cut.

As for the blue flame: methanol burns blue too, so faint in daylight you may not see it; a flame cannot find lead from a badly soldered worm; and lighting spirits in a still-house is how still-houses burn down. Honest cuts, a thermometer, and clean copper with no lead in it are the only tests worth a damn. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.