The Ballad of Fort Wilkins: Pittsfield, Applejack and Barnaby the Bear

A Mill Town and a Cider Press

Every ballad worth a penny starts with a place, and this is mine. Pittsfield was set off from Chichester and made a town in 1782. It was named for William Pitt, the English lord who stood up in Parliament and told the King to quit kicking the colonies. Pitt never once set foot in Pittsfield, which shows the man had sense as well as principles.

The Suncook River runs through the middle of town and drops fast enough to turn a wheel, so the valley filled up with mills. Sawmills scream through the pine, gristmills grind the corn, and the cotton mill bell gets the poor girls out of bed before the Lord Himself is up. Catamount Mountain hunches over the whole business. It was named for the wild cats that once screamed up there at night, until the farmers shot every last one and had to make do with me.

Before there was ever a still in this valley, there was a cider press. Old New England ran on cider the way a mill runs on water. Every farm put up barrels of it in the fall, and the deacon and the hired boy drank it alike. Mr. John Adams himself wrote that he liked a tankard of it of a morning. He helped write the Declaration with apple on his breath, and nobody complained of the spelling.

The Dark Verse: Frost-Jacked Applejack

When a Yankee farmer wanted his cider stronger and had no copper, he jacked it. He rolled the barrel out into a January night, let the water freeze into a cake of ice, and poured off the strong brown liquor that would not freeze. That was applejack. It is clever, the way a man stealing his own horse is clever.

You, at your own apparatus, should understand the trouble. Freezing takes out only the water and nothing else. Every bad thing in that cider stays behind and gets crowded closer together, like Baptists in a leaky boat. Apples are worse than corn for this, because the pectin that makes apple jelly set breaks down into wood alcohol, methanol, during the ferment, and jack keeps all of it. That is why the old men who drank it all winter got what they called the apple palsy: shaking hands, headaches like a mule kicking at a barn door, and faces as red as a boiled beet. Old Ezra down in Barnstead jacked his cider every winter for forty years. By the end his hands shook so badly that he could thread a needle only by holding the needle still and shaking the thread at it.

A copper pot still changed all that. With a still, a man can do what the frost cannot: catch the first poisonous spirit off the top and throw it away. That is the whole reason I built a still-house instead of a frost-yard. I built it of hemlock logs a foot thick, so a revenue man who knocks bruises his knuckles before he can bruise my business.

Of Gaugers, Tinkers, and a Wandering Cent

A gauger came out of Concord one night to creep up on the fort. He had one leg of flesh and one of maple wood, strapped on at the knee with harness leather. He went thump-shuffle up the turnpike like a drunk drummer looking for his regiment. He had been sugaring all week, and that maple leg had soaked up so much sap and syrup that it smelled like a pancake breakfast. To Barnaby he was a walking flapjack. The bear took the leg at the knee strap and gave it one shake. The buckles popped, and the trousers tore like a wet bedsheet on a nail. Barnaby lay down and chewed that leg like a Thanksgiving drumstick. When the gauger tried to hop off, Barnaby took one more bite, out of the seat of the man, about the size and shape of a Boston cracker. I am a doctor and I keep my oath. I laid him face-down on my anvil bench, poured spirit on the wound, and stitched him with silk. I charged him fifty cents for the stitching and a dime for not laughing, and I am still owed the dime. He hopped home to Concord on a hoe handle. Barnaby kept the leg.

Then there was the tinker from Epsom, who coveted my worm: forty feet of coiled copper that has never once failed to deliver. I mean my condenser, mostly. He came one moonless night with tin snips and forgot the chain. Barnaby did not bite him. He sat on him, four hundred pounds of bear, from midnight until breakfast. At dawn the tinker lay in a bear-shaped print in the frost, flat as a pressed flower and twice as fragrant. He took the Temperance Pledge instead of my worm, and I am told he is miserable.

Last, the cent. Years ago I struck G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. on a fat copper large cent and bit it to test the metal, leaving the mark of my left eyetooth across Liberty's cheek. Three years later an oysterman in Portsmouth handed that same coin back to me as change, smelling of fish, tar, and sailors' pockets. It rides in my vest pocket now, and I will be buried with it.

A Virginia Lady at the Fireside

Miss Clara Higgins, a mountain herbalist from the Blue Ridge, rode six hundred miles to see the bear. She had heard of this place long before. The spring after the surrender, a Yankee tin peddler came up her holler in Floyd County singing a penny ballad called 'The Tooth-Man and His Bear.' In his version I pulled a tooth with blacksmith tongs, the bear ate the tooth and then the man, and I sold what the bear left behind for tobacco. Three of those four are lies. Her mama traded two eggs for the sheet and pasted it inside the flour-bin lid. Clara tells me the woodcut flattered me.

She also told of the burying of her great-uncle Amos, who left a still running on Pine Creek in the same week a revenue man was nosing about the county. Their church lines out its hymns, and Brother Tolley, leading 'Wondrous Love,' lined out: 'Go move the kettle to the laurel hollow, O my soul.' The whole congregation sang it back, the revenue man loudest of all, with tears on his face. By sundown the still was three ridges over in the laurel.

From her I also learned of Dock Roop, the fiddler who charged a dram a tune. He played 'Sally Goodin' perhaps forty times one night and fell backwards off the porch into the hog lot, still bowing. Her granny said 'forty-rod' was whiskey mean enough to drop a man before he had walked forty rods from the jug, about two hundred and twenty yards. 'Tanglefoot' is liquor that ties a man's feet in knots while his mouth keeps walking.

The Last Lesson: An Apple Run

First, the lawful part, and I mean it: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the laws of the United States. What follows is history and instruction for curiosity's sake.

Press sound apples and let the juice work in a clean barrel with the bung loosely stopped. It will foam for a week or two and then go quiet and dry. That is your wash, only a few parts in a hundred spirit. Never fill the pot more than three parts in four, because cider foams. Seal the joints with flour paste, but keep the vapour path open from pot to worm to jar at all times. A still is never sealed shut. Plug it and she splits like a hog's bladder and scalds you to the soul. Keep the fire low, because a slow drip is one you can read.

Number your jars in chalk. Throw out the foreshots, which off apples carry wood alcohol. Nothing has grown on my woodpile stump since Buchanan was President. Next come the heads, which smell like a cobbler's glue pot quarrelling with a shellac can. Smell them, never taste them, and throw them out too. Then comes the hearts, sweet as a September orchard. Last come the tails, which smell soft and greasy like a wet sheep in a damp cellar. Set them aside to run again with the next charge.

Why copper? A ferment throws off sulphur stink, and bright copper seizes it as a dark crust so that the spirit runs on clean. The base metal takes the curse so the spirit goes free. Scrub the pot after every run.

As for proof, the English, so the story goes, soaked gunpowder in spirit and put a match to it. In 1818 their government made the brass Sikes hydrometer the law, which is a good deal safer. Mind the vapour as well: alcohol vapour is heavier than air and creeps along the floor toward any flame. I saw a man come out of a burning still-house in Loudon with his boots still alight. Keep water and a wet blanket at hand, and never leave a running still.

Ash, Oak, and the Lying Blue Flame

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, sent word up from the Carolinas with a question: 'My uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads.' Hickory ash is potash, alkaline, and it may take a little vinegar sharpness out of a run. But the heads boil off early regardless, and the only cure is to catch them and throw them away. Ash in a thump keg is whitewash on a privy, and too much of it makes the spirit taste of soap. Red oak gives tannin, colour, and a woody pucker. It makes raw spirit look older and does nothing to the heads. Red oak is leaky besides, which is why coopers favour white oak.

The blue-flame test is rubbish. Wood alcohol burns pale blue just as good spirit does. I once lit a spoonful to prove the point to a Gilmanton deacon, and he set his whiskers afire. Honest cuts at the still are the only test that keeps you alive.

The Bear Has the Last Word

I struck one last coin on the final night. Whoever finds it, buy a round and lie about me kindly. Barnaby came to the window with his chain taut and gave one long rumbling grunt that rattled the glass. I could not have put it better. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.