The Barn Dance Brawl of 1864 in the Widow Sanborn's Barn, Suncook Valley NH

Any man who has stood by his own copper on an autumn evening and watched the first drops come down the worm knows that this valley keeps time by mash and apples. Of all the autumns men still argue over at the cracker barrels from Barnstead to Epsom, none gets more argument than 1864. That was the year a husking dance in the widow Sanborn's barn became the Barn Dance Brawl. I was there, and I brought the punch. I also brought my forceps, which was the smarter of the two decisions.

The Husking Season of '64

Autumn in the Suncook Valley goes like this. The hay is in and the corn stands in shocks, and the apples fall faster than any man can press them. A good deal of the season's work wants more hands than one family has, so the neighbors are called to a husking bee, a raising or an apple bee. When the work is done the threshing floor is swept, lanterns go up on the beams, and somebody fetches a fiddler.

The dances were contra dances: two long lines of ladies and gents facing one another, and a caller hollering the figures over the music. The tunes were the old ones: 'Money Musk,' 'Chorus Jig,' 'Portland Fancy,' and 'Hull's Victory.' That last is named for Captain Isaac Hull, who sent the British frigate Guerriere to the bottom with the Constitution in 1812. Play it in a New Hampshire barn and every man over sixty stands up straighter and tells you he was nearly there. At a husking there was courting under the corn as well. Any young buck who found a red ear could claim a kiss from the girl of his choosing. I have seen boys smuggle a red ear in down a trouser leg, and I have seen girls spot it coming and move to the far end of the pile.

The war had gone on three years and more, and it had gutted the valley of young men. Under the Enrollment Act of '63 a drafted man could pay three hundred dollars to stay home, until Congress shut that door for most men in July of '64. So that fall the dance floor held men too old to march, boys too young to shave, and gentlemen who had paid their three hundred dollars, and the ladies let none of them forget which was which. There was a second war on as well, against the jug. The whiskey tax was twenty cents a gallon in '62, sixty cents in March of '64 and a dollar and a half by July, and two dollars was promised for New Year's Day of '65. Every man in the valley drank like a man paying in advance.

A Churn of Husking Punch

Cider was the farm drink, and every cellar had barrels of it. The stronger article was apple brandy, which some call applejack. On the last Saturday of that September I carried a quantity of it to the barn of the widow Mehitable Sanborn, out the Barnstead road. She owned a four-gallon cedar dasher churn with a white-pine dasher, hooped in iron I had forged myself. Half the bachelors in Merrimack County had offered to help her bring the butter. She turned every one of them down and churned alone, which tells you all you need to know about the bachelors of Merrimack County.

The old belief held that when the butter would not come, a witch had got into the cream. The cure was a red-hot horseshoe dropped into the churn, and hiss, out went the witch. I never saw it fetch butter any quicker. I did once see it fetch a witch out of a grandmother, who went at the hired man with the fire tongs.

That night the widow scalded the churn clean, and I filled it with Husking Punch: cider, a fair measure of apple brandy, maple sugar, a grating of nutmeg and a bruised stick of cinnamon. No revenue man ever opens a butter churn, because he is afraid of being asked to work the dasher. I kept one rule in that barn. Six lanterns hung from the beams, with forty ton of dry hay in the loft above them, and I allowed no unstopped jug within a rod of any lantern. Every man at his own apparatus should know that spirit vapour and open flame are bad company.

The Brawl on the Threshing Floor

The fiddler was Lemuel Hoyt of Chichester, a long rail of a man. The Pittsfield crowd held one end of the barn: mill hands from the cotton mill, farm boys, and Asa Kimball, a wool carder with forearms like smoked hams. Eleven Barnstead men came in by wagon, led by Obadiah Fogg. He had a face like a pie dropped on the meetinghouse steps and a disposition to match the filling.

Fogg produced a red ear, which in my opinion he had brought in his boot, and so thought everyone who saw him walk in limping. He marched over to claim his kiss from Miss Lydia Kimball, Asa's sister. She kissed the corn, square, handed it back to him and walked off, and the barn roared. Fogg went the color of a boiled beet and called for 'Hull's Victory.' When the caller sang out 'Down the center!', Fogg went straight down the center of the line and put his forehead into Asa's face. Most noses go 'crick.' Asa's went 'crunch,' like a boot through March snow. Asa wiped the blood, looked at his hand and smiled, and you never want a wool carder to smile at you.

After that all hell came up through the floorboards. A Barnstead boy leapt off the haymow onto two of our mill hands. A grandmother from Upper City cracked a man across the shins with her knitting basket. The caller kept calling 'Balance and swing!', and by God they did. Hoyt went from 'Hull's Victory' straight into 'Soldier's Joy,' because a Chichester fiddler is paid by the tune and not by the casualty. Somebody's elbow caught him in the nose and he bled into his f-holes and kept on playing.

Fogg was losing, and on his back. He tore the dasher out of the churn and laid five feet of pine, dripping hot buttered brandy, across Asa's jaw. Two lower incisors and a canine went skittering across the planks like dice. Asa fell on him like a church steeple, and the pair of them went over into the churn. Four gallons of punch spread across the floor in one brown wave, and thirty people went down at once with their legs in the air like overturned beetles. Then a lantern began to swing over that brandy-soaked floor. I went across on my backside like a boy on a sled, caught the bail and blew it out, and then I blew out every lantern but the one by the door. In the dark that followed, Fogg bit off a piece of Asa's left ear, the soft lobe and a good crescent of the rim, and spat it into the wreck of the churn.

Eleven Teeth and a Bear's Supper

The deputy arrived at midnight. He put one boot in the punch, went heels over head and landed on his tailbone, and wrote in his book: 'riot of unknown origin, and the floor was against me.' At sunup I swept the threshing floor like a man panning for gold and found eleven teeth. I spent the morning on the widow's kitchen bench pulling stumps and stitching lips, and I set Asa's nose with two goose quills up the nostrils. The churn was kindling. I hauled the wreck home, and my bear Barnaby licked every stave so hard he pulled the hoops off, and I believe he ate the rest of Asa's ear. I forged the widow new hoops and paid a Concord cooper for a new churn. Asa wears his hair long over the left side to this day. Fogg still gums his supper, because on principle I would not fit him for teeth. The widow married a Gilmanton man the next spring.

What the Revenue Man Saw

Captain Donald Vance of Manchester, lately retired from the federal revenue service, sat by my fire not long ago. He chased copper through the White Mountains and the Green, and he is known for leaving a good honest pot alone and taking his axe to a poisoner's rig. In one Vermont town he learned that the dance caller was the lookout. 'Balance and swing' meant all clear, 'Down the center' meant somebody on the road, and 'Cast off' meant revenue at the door. At the next dance he stood at the end of a line and sang out 'Cast off!' himself. Six jugs flew out the haymow door into the manure pile, and he judged that punishment enough. Up near the Lamoille he knocked on a bass viol whose player had found only one note all night. It answered with a slosh: near three gallons of spirit, poured in through the f-holes and corked with wax. One farm wife made him dance the whole of 'Portland Fancy' while her husband fiddled it at half speed. By the time he reached the cellar the still had gone out the hatch. His report said only, 'Outdanced.'

His darkest tale came from the Connecticut River. Half the dancers at a harvest dance came down with cramps, a blue line on the gums, and wrist drop in one old fellow. The doctor called it painter's colic. It was lead. The Captain found the still in a sugarhouse, its worm and condenser lining soldered up from the lead foil out of tea chests. He took an axe to it on the town common and told the people why. The maker built a copper worm, and two years later wrote that nobody had had a bellyache since. The Captain left me one more piece of advice: 'The one grandmother who never gets up to dance is sitting on the jug.'

The Apparatus: Mash, Copper and the Cuts

A plain word first: making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law, and what follows is for history and learning. For a mash of about ten gallons, boil eight gallons of water and stir in ten pounds of cracked corn. Cook it to porridge, stirring so it doesn't scorch. Cool it to about a hundred and fifty degrees by a Fahrenheit glass, because a finger is a liar, and stir in two pounds of crushed malted barley. Yeast cannot eat starch, and the diastase in the malt turns it to sugar. Hold the mash near that heat for an hour, then cool it to about eighty, pitch your yeast and cover it loosely with a cloth. In five days to a week the cap falls and you have a sour, beery wash.

Use copper wherever the vapour goes, the worm above all, since bright metal does its cleaning of the sulphur stink in hot vapour. Never use lead. Never seal a still tight with flour paste, keep the end of the worm open to the air, and keep cool water running through the condenser for the whole run. Keep the fire low and steady, never leave it unattended, and keep your jars well away from flame. Collect the run in two dozen small jars numbered in chalk, never in one big crock. On a ten-gallon wash, throw out at least the first pint of foreshots. That is where the methanol comes, and it blinds and kills. The heads smell of a cobbler's glue pot. The hearts are clean and sweet with grain. The tails are oily and show a slick when water is added. Judge your jars in morning daylight with a clear nose, rubbing a drop between your palms. An honest man always cuts a jar too late rather than a jar too early. Afterward, rinse the copper hot and scrub it bright, and let no green crust live in the worm.

Ashes, Red Oak and the Blue Flame

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, sent word that his uncle threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Wood ash is alkaline. It is what our grandmothers leached for lye. It may take the edge off a little sourness, but it does nothing to methanol, a light vapour that comes early and that no ash can hold back. Red oak is so open-pored you can blow bubbles through a stick of it, which is why coopers use white oak. Shavings add only colour and tannin, and that is face paint, not cleaning. Fruit mashes carry more methanol than corn, from the pectin, so a fruit man must be stricter with his cuts, never looser. Ashes are for soap, red oak is for firewood, and heads are for the ground.

Now I strike a coin on my anvil to drive the blue-flame myth into the ground. All spirit burns pale blue, methanol included, and a pinch of salt or dust will turn the flame yellow. A blue flame tells you the spirit will burn and nothing about whether it will kill you. The bead from a shaken jar tells you strength, and strength is not safety. Your only true guards are a still of the right metal and an honest cut. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.