The General Store Gossip Chair: History of the Seat Beside the Box Stove

Of all the offices in a New England village, the mightiest is neither the selectmen's nor the minister's. It is stronger than the one, more feared than the other, and better paid than both. I mean the chair beside the box stove in the general store. I write this at Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike in Pittsfield. Barnaby, my black bear, lies sulking under the window, all four hundred pounds of him, because I came home from the store smelling of salt cod and cheese rind and gave him not one crumb. Bring your own crackers to this tale. The storekeeper counts his.

The Throne Beside the Box Stove

Picture any country store in Merrimack County in this year of 1865. A box stove stands in the middle of the floor, glowing like a drunkard's nose, and round it sits a sawdust spit box that nobody has emptied since Fort Sumter. There is a cracker barrel with the lid half off, a pickle crock, a cheese under a wire bell, and a molasses hogshead whose spigot drips slow as an old man at the necessary. The shelves hold calico, cut nails, saleratus, castor oil, Lucifer matches, powder and shot. In the back corner stands a cabinet of pigeonholes, for half the storekeepers in New Hampshire are postmasters too. Every love letter and every dunning bill in town passes within spitting distance of the man nearest the stove.

Nearest the stove sits the Chair. It is usually an old Windsor or a hickory splint-bottom, with the rungs worn bright by boot heels. I am a metal man, so I will put it in foundry terms. A wooden pattern pressed into damp sand leaves its exact shape behind, and in the same way that splint seat took the exact shape of Captain Asa Pickering's hindquarters over twenty-two winters. Pour molten brass into it and you would draw out a perfect likeness of the Captain, dimples and all.

The seat mattered because of credit. Nobody in this valley pays cash, since nobody here has any. You buy on the book and settle after harvest in butter, eggs, shingles, maple sugar or a quarter of beef, or when your potash goes down to market. Potash is made by soaking hardwood ash in water, drawing off the lye, and boiling the lye down in a big kettle until you have black salts that sell for soap and glass. Every stump-clearing Yankee since the Revolution has paid his debts in burnt forest. The man in the chair can read the ledger over the storekeeper's shoulder. He knows who owes, who pays in rancid butter, and who bought three yards of red calico the very week the hired man ran off west. Knowledge is power, and power sits down.

Then there is the liquor. On paper New Hampshire has been dry since 1855. The only lawful sale is through the town liquor agent, for medicinal, mechanical or chemical purposes, and it is wonderful how many mechanical purposes a Pittsfield man finds of a Saturday night. Then in 1862 Washington passed its Revenue Act. A retail liquor dealer now pays twenty dollars a year for his license, and stamp duties fall on patent medicines, playing cards and friction matches. Mr. Lincoln has found a way to tax a man for lighting his pipe. So the store became the revenue man's dream and the smuggler's exchange at once, with a license framed on the wall and something else entirely beneath the floorboards. The man in the chair knows about both.

The Price of a Seat

I have kept my own ledger of what it costs to move the great sitters of this valley. Captain Pickering calls himself a veteran of the Mexican War, though by every honest account he attended one militia muster in Epsom and fell off a borrowed horse. One plug of Virginia twist will move him, and it need not be good twist. The Widow Thankful Drowne cannot be bought with goods. She is moved only by assay. Your gossip goes in one pan of the scale and hers in the other, and the heavier scandal takes the chair. A Chichester drover once brought her word that the parson's wife had bought real French rouge in Concord. The widow was out the door before the bell stopped jingling. Deacon Ebenezer Crumb would rise only for the Lord's business, or for a hot dram for his rheumatism, which he swore was the same thing. I pulled two of his molars last spring, and both came out black as a stovepipe.

Old Jethro Bunce could not be moved at any price. He held the chair from Thanksgiving to sugaring, until one February afternoon he stopped halfway through a sentence about the price of wool. Nobody noticed for an hour, until the storekeeper observed that Jethro had not spat. By then the old man had set up stiff, bent exactly to the chair. When they tried to straighten him his knees cracked like dry kindling, and the storekeeper's boy fainted into the pickle crock. In the end they carried him out chair and all, with the door off its hinges. His widow would not pay for the chair, so it went into the burying ground with him. Before the door was back on, four men were wrestling on the floor for the new one.

The Backwoods Telegraph and the Lightning-Rod Man

The gossip chair works like the electric telegraph, only faster and more spiteful. The stage driver tells the chair, the chair tells the boy sweeping the floor, and the boy lights out up the Catamount road. By suppertime every still-house fire from Barnstead to Gilmanton has gone cold. I confess I kept that telegraph oiled. I struck G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. into copper cents on my anvil and filled Captain Pickering's pocket with them. Any man who showed a Wilkins cent got the chair for one full hour. The storekeeper honored them because I pulled his teeth for nothing, which made mine the only currency in New Hampshire backed by molars.

One October afternoon a stranger came in wearing a green-and-yellow checked waistcoat. He said he sold lightning rods, sat down in the chair without asking, and began inquiring after Fort Wilkins, its men and its bear. The Captain slipped the boy a cent, and the boy ran the two miles to the fort without stopping. I met the gentleman at the gate all smiles and walked him along the cabin wall, right past my still-house window. Barnaby does not roar. He huffs once, like a bellows, and then he is on you. The stranger went up shrieking and came down running, and he left by Route 28 with a perfect crescent of bear teeth in his hinder. Out of the ruined trouser pocket fell a letter to the revenue assessor in Concord, which read: 'The so-called bear at Wilkins's is surely a fable or a docile animal, and presents no hazard to a determined officer.' I read it aloud to Barnaby. He belched, and I take that as his reply to the Bureau of Internal Revenue.

Settin' Chairs of the Blue Ridge

Miss Clara Higgins, herbalist, forager and keeper of mountain talk, came up from the Blue Ridge of Virginia to tell me how the South keeps its chairs. Down there it is the settin' chair, and the men lined up on the porch outside are the Liars' Bench. In Floyd County the man in the settin' chair was called Your Honor, and his rulings on mules, frosts and marriages held better than any courthouse judge's. In Patrick County an old chewer called Uncle Doss could hit a knothole across the room, and he spat signals on the hot stove top. One sizzle meant nothing, two meant watch him, and three meant the law was in the store. It worked well enough until a revenue man with a cold so excited Uncle Doss that he sizzled seven times. The boy ran off and told everybody the war had started again.

Miss Higgins's great-grandmother Viney wanted the chair held by one Pleasant Akers, who had sat in it since Monroe was president. She carried in her best broody hen and offered a trade, and Pleasant took it. In Miss Higgins's words, 'Great-Granny Viney traded a setting hen for a setting man.' Viney held the chair eleven years. The Liars' Bench had its own words for liquor, brought home by the soldiers: tanglefoot, bust-head, oh-be-joyful, and forty-rod, rotgut so mean it would drop a man at forty rods. As for the circuit preacher who held the chair six hours preaching hellfire, a red-headed boy named Lafe slid a live coal under his cushion, and after twenty years on the subject the preacher at last spoke from experience.

At the Apparatus: Mash, Copper and the Cuts

I set this down for history and learning only. Making spirits for drinking without the government's license is against the law of the land. Cook cracked corn in hot water to a porridge, then add malt, which is sprouted barley or corn, dried and ground, to turn the starch to sugar while the mash rests warm. Cool it to blood-warm before you pitch the yeast, or you will cook the yeast like a lobster. A fermenting mash breathes out a heavy, invisible gas that pools in cellars and pits. I have known a man to climb down after a dropped dipper and never climb back out. Keep air moving, and in three to five days you will have a wash only a few parts in a hundred strong.

Fill your copper pot no more than three parts in four, because grain wash foams and can plug the vapor line, and a plugged line on a hot pot is a bomb. Never seal a still and never leave it unattended. Keep the flame low, the worm cold, and every open lamp away from the spout. Copper scavenges sulfur from the vapor and holds it on the metal as a dark crust, so scrub the pot bright with salt and vinegar after each run. For the cuts, collect into a long row of small numbered jars. Throw out the foreshots, and more of them than you think you need to. Throw out the heads, which smell of varnish. Keep the hearts, sweet and clean of the grain, and set aside the tails, which smell of wet dog. Let the jars stand overnight under a cloth and judge them in the morning with a rested nose. With apples and pears, cut more generously at the front.

Ash, Oak and the Blue Flame

From Wilkesboro, North Carolina, Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller wrote: '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 makes lye. It leaves a soapy, flat taste and may stall a ferment, and it does not touch the poison. Red oak is so porous that coopers will not make a whiskey barrel of it. Its shavings give colour and a woody bite, but colour is not cleanliness. The uncle is not entirely wrong, though. Before the war some Tennessee makers dripped new spirit through maple charcoal, which does smooth the flavour. Still, neither charcoal, ash nor shavings removes the poison. Only the cuts do that.

Finally, the blue flame test is hogwash. The poison in the heads burns a pretty pale blue itself, and no man can read lead in a flame with any certainty. Keep lead solder and salvaged metal away from your still, and make your cuts honestly. Treat the man in the gossip chair kindly, for he may be the one who warns you when the law comes up the turnpike. Keep your copper clean and your fire low.