The Great Hay Barn Fire of Chichester, New Hampshire: Arson Rumors and Wet Hay

A Red Sky Over Chichester

Any man who keeps a copper pot dreads a barn fire on the horizon, for he knows what the neighbours will say before the coals are cold. So I will tell you of the night the sky over Chichester turned the colour of a fresh-pulled tooth socket, red and wet-looking and angry, and how a coppersmith of Pittsfield came within a sieve's breadth of being blamed for it.

It was the autumn after the war ended, and the summer had been a wet one. It rained through haying the way a widow cries at a rich man's funeral, steady and with purpose. Every farmer in the Suncook Valley got his hay in damp, for the choice was damp hay in the mow or no hay at all, and a cow cannot eat your good intentions in February.

Just over the line in Chichester lived Hezekiah Dow, a pinch-faced deacon of a man who could squeeze a copper cent till the Indian on it hollered for mercy. His barn was sixty feet long and freshly shingled. It held two horses, six cows and a yoke of oxen, with better than thirty tons of hay piled to the ridgepole. About two o'clock one October morning it went up like Judgment, and I saw the glow from my own window on the turnpike.

How the Mutual Men Reckon a Loss

Three kinds of vulture landed on Dow's ashes: the insurance man, the revenue man and the gossip. The gossip has the sharpest beak of the three. Most farmers in this county buy no coverage from city companies with marble steps. They join a mutual, which is a pack of farmers agreeing to be robbed by one another in a slow and orderly fashion. You sign a premium note promising to pay and put a little cash down. When any member's barn burns, the company assesses every member his share of the loss. Every farmer in the county becomes your partner the minute your barn burns, and your stranger the minute you ask for a loan.

The mutuals will not insure a building for its full value. They pay two-thirds, perhaps three-quarters, rarely more, so that no man can profit by burning his own barn. There is also the increase-of-hazard clause that every farmer signs and none reads. Bring a dangerous trade onto the property without the company's leave, and your coverage goes up the chimney with your barn. No trade is more dangerous to hide in a hay barn than a still. So when a barn burns in this valley, the first word in every mouth is 'still', because if it was a still, the company owes nothing.

Uncle Sam smells money in it as well. Since Mr. Lincoln's Revenue Act of '62, this state has been carved into collection districts, each with a Collector and an Assessor, and under them Assistant Assessors and deputies paid to count what a man has made. An untaxed still in a burned barn means back taxes, penalties and a seizure.

The gossip outran them both. By sunup every kitchen from Epsom to Barnstead said Dow had a still in his mow. By breakfast he had bought it from me, and by dinner I was running it for him on shares. By supper I had set the fire myself, and in some versions I had ridden my bear Barnaby there to do it.

An Alibi Nobody Believed

At two that morning I was at Fort Wilkins with my knee on the chest of Amos Tuttle, a cooper from up the road, pulling a lower molar the size and temper of a wolverine. He had come at midnight, driven out of his wits by the pain and already full of enough courage to float a gundalow. The root came out curved like a pig's tail. Amos screamed, fainted, woke and asked me who had won the war. So my alibi had two witnesses: a cooper too drunk to remember his own name, and a bear who will not testify without a ham.

When I saw the glow I hitched the mare, threw two leather buckets and an axe in the wagon, and drove so hard my forceps swung in my apron pocket. The barn was past saving. Thirty tons of hay do not burn, they roar, and burning shingles sailed over the dooryard like flaming crows. Neither Chichester nor Pittsfield has a fire engine. We had neighbours and buckets, so we formed a line from Dow's well, wet down the roofs, and saved the house, the woodshed and the corn crib.

A horse will run back into a burning barn, because its stall is home. Dow's gray mare broke loose and went for the door. I got my coat over her head and led her out blind, talking low and sweet and lying, as I talk to a patient before a wisdom tooth. She thanked me with a kick in the haunch whose shoe nails I could read in the mirror for a week.

The Sieve and the Iron Rod

Two days later the Assistant Assessor came with a long-nosed deputy and his ledger. The insurance agent from Concord stood beside him in a clean collar, which is how you know a man has never fought a fire, only priced one. Behind them stood Gideon Pettengill, the tavern mouth of Chichester, swearing he had smelled whiskey in the smoke.

I put the matter to them as a coppersmith. Copper does not melt till you bring it near two thousand degrees. A hay fire might soften a pot, warp it or puddle a seam, but copper does not vanish into Heaven like a Christian soul. There would be sheet, rivets, lumps, or a green and black stain on the foundation stones. So we sifted on our knees in the warm ash: the deputy, Dow's hired boy and I. We found horseshoes, a scythe blade with its temper burned out, strap hinges, a lantern frame, a hay knife, a brass harness buckle and forty-one nails. There was not one rivet or bead of copper, and no green stain on any stone.

I asked the boy whether the mow had steamed in the mornings. He went white and said it had steamed like a kettle every morning since August and smelled sweet, like pipe tobacco and burnt molasses. That was our arsonist. Hay put up green and damp cooks. The little living things in it work like yeast in a mash, and it heats until the middle chars and one dark night catches. I drove an iron rod into the unburned end of the mow, left it a quarter hour, and handed it to the insurance agent. He dropped it and invented three new words, none of them Episcopalian. When we raked the rest open, the heart of the mow was a black cave, charred from the inside out like a charcoal kiln.

The Assessor wrote 'no evidence of distillation' and the agent wrote 'spontaneous combustion of hay'. Dow got his two-thirds. The mutual then assessed every member, me included, eighty-seven cents. It was the first time I was ever billed for my own slander, and I paid in coppers freshly counterstamped at my anvil. Pettengill, for his part, crept round my woodshed a week later looking for proof. Barnaby relieved him of half his britches and a slab of rump the size of a pork chop, then dropped it in disgust, for Pettengill was mostly gristle and lies. I stitched him on the anvil block, eleven stitches, for a dollar.

What the Ashes Told Captain Vance

My friend Captain Donald Vance, retired from the Federal Revenue service out of Manchester, has knelt in more ashes than any undertaker in New England. As he puts it: 'A fire is a confession. It talks if you'll kneel down in the ashes and listen.' In Haverhill a sugar house burned in March, and the valley swore it was whiskey. His sieve found no copper, only an iron evaporator pan warped like a saddle. The sugarmaker had dozed off by the arch and let his sap boil dry. In Vermont a man with an over-insured woodshed blamed a stranger's still. The Captain found no copper in the ashes, but he found a fine cool copper pot under two bushels of seed potatoes in the man's root cellar. He had carried it out before he struck the match.

In Bethlehem the Captain watched a still fire at noon. Hot spirit had boiled onto the firebox, and in daylight the flame was nearly invisible, only a pale blue shimmer. The fellow slapped at it with his hat until his long beard caught, and the Captain plunged his head into the horse trough. In Rumney a woman swore she smelled whiskey in a barn's smoke. It came from a crock of the deacon's wife's fruitcakes, soaked in rum since September.

Fire in the Still House

Some barns have burned from stills, so take this lesson to your own apparatus. For a plain corn mash, cook eight pounds of cracked corn in five gallons of water for an hour or better. Cool it to about one hundred fifty degrees and stir in two pounds of crushed malted barley, whose enzymes turn starch to sugar. Then cool it to about eighty degrees before pitching the yeast. Starved or overheated yeast sulks and gives off the rotten-egg stink. Let it work a week to a wash of eight or ten parts in a hundred.

Mind this above all: alcohol vapour is heavier than air. It slides along the floor from a leaky joint and lights at your firebox. Test every joint with water and a low fire, and use mechanical unions or silver solder, never lead. Never leave a running still. Keep the condenser outlet and receiving jars away from the fire. Keep sand and a tight lid by the pot, because careless water can scatter burning spirit. If you feel heat where there should be none, believe your face before your eyes. Keep no hay, straw or oily rags near the still.

Copper does its best work in the vapour path: the head, the lyne arm and the first turns of the worm, where it grabs the sulphur stinks. Run your coldest water in at the bottom of the worm tub. Ethanol boils near one hundred seventy-three degrees and methanol near one hundred forty-eight. Throw away the foreshots generously, a gill and better for every five gallons of wash. Set aside the heads, which smell of glue, and keep the sweet hearts. Save the oily tails to run again. Catch the run in numbered jars and judge them by morning with a clear head. Distilling spirits for drinking without a federal permit breaks the law of the United States, and these lessons are for history and instruction.

Hickory Ash, Red Oak and Blue Flames

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina asks whether hickory ash or red oak in the thump keg cleans out bad heads. Hardwood ash leaches lye, called potash, which this state once sold abroad to soap makers and glassmakers. Lye knocks back some sourness, but it does nothing whatever to methanol, and it will burn your hands and blind your eyes. Red oak is full of open pores, which is why no cooper makes a whiskey barrel of it. Its shavings lend tannin and a tawny colour but hold nothing. A blue flame proves nothing either, since methanol burns blue too. Only the cuts make spirit safe.

And hay can set itself afire. Drive an iron rod into your mow, and if you cannot grip it when you pull it out, get help, get water and get the stock out. Do not tear the mow open, because a gulp of air can burst it into flame. Remember Dow's barn: a rumour travels faster than a fire. When a neighbour's barn lights the sky, ride toward it with a bucket. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.