The Lamprey River Smugglers' Trail: Seacoast Rum and Hill-Country Rye

As I set down these lines my black bear Barnaby has his snout at the still-house window again, sure that the jar filling under my worm holds honey. It holds hearts, and he has been told so. He sulks now like a deacon caught at a barn dance with his collar on backward, and so I may write in peace about the road that runs past my door: the Lamprey River Smugglers' Trail, where Seacoast rum went west, inland rye came east, and everything from salt cod to stolen copper changed hands in between.

First the usual word of sense. Making distilled spirit for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States. What follows is history, instruction and slander, offered for your education and nothing more.

From the Portsmouth Wharves to Great Bay

Put your finger on Portsmouth. The West India ships came in there low in the water, their holds full of molasses barrels sweating in the sun. A Portsmouth tide-waiter, which is our name for the customs man who boards on the tide, can smell a cask of rum through two inches of oak and a bale of hay. He cannot smell his own breath, and his breath is the stronger evidence.

They finished the new granite Custom House on Pleasant Street around 1860. It is handsome, and it is built heavy enough to hold the federal government's opinion of itself. While the government sits there counting molasses, the trade slips up the Piscataqua into Great Bay on the gundalows. Picture a barn floor that has taken up sailing: flat-bottomed, broad as a widow's lap, with a short stubby mast and a long lateen yard the crew can drop flat to pass under a bridge. She drops that yard the way a Newmarket mill agent drops his voice to pass under a raise in wages. She carries bricks, cordwood, hay, and kegs of whatever does not appear on the manifest.

Up the Lamprey and Over the Northwood Ridge

At the head of the bay stands Newmarket, where the Lamprey falls into the tide. The Newmarket Manufacturing Company built its cotton mills on those falls back in the twenties, and with thousands of spindles turning and girls at the looms, you would be amazed how much spirit a mill town drinks when the quitting bell rings. Newmarket was the first great swap-house of the trail.

From there the river runs upstream with more twists than a Dover lawyer's will, and it is twice as slippery. You pass Packers Falls in Durham, then Wadley Falls in Lee, where there is a sawmill, a gristmill, and a miller who never once asked what lay under the meal sacks. Then come Epping, Raymond, Deerfield and the Northwood hills, where the river is only a trickle off the high ground.

Where the river gives out, the road takes over. The First New Hampshire Turnpike, chartered in 1796, runs from the Piscataqua Bridge at Durham through Lee and Nottingham, over the Northwood ridge, and down into Epsom. From Epsom you turn up the Suncook valley, past the Short Falls, and come home to Pittsfield and my log fort. Altogether it is eighty-odd miles of mud, ledge, tavern and perjury.

Rum West, Rye East, and the Barter Between

The molasses was made into New England rum in Portsmouth and Newburyport, rough as a cob and twice as useful, and it went up the river to the hill towns, since a farmer cannot grow sugar on granite however hard he prays. Rye came the other way. It grows in thin, stony, cold dirt where wheat lies down and quits, which is why it does so well in Northwood and in my family tree. Every hill farm from Deerfield to Gilmanton has its rye patch, and the farmers distill the surplus, because a jug walks to market a great deal easier than forty bushels of grain.

Barter is the true heart of the trail, because barter leaves no ledger. Dried cod came up from the coast, stacked like shingles. Tinware came on the backs of the Connecticut peddlers, who would trade you a dipper and a lantern for a sack of rags, a pound of feathers and your daughter's opinion of them. Potash, shingles, butter and wool went down to the coast. And copper came up, the most precious freight of all to a man in my line.

I will say one solemn thing. The poorest grade of that cod, called refuse fish, went south on the same ships to feed the people held in slavery on the sugar islands, the very people who boiled the molasses we turned into rum. Every barrel of Portsmouth rum has that trade in its blood, and a man who loves this craft ought to know it. The war we just finished was fought over less than that and more than that.

In the old days a Lamprey runner had one enemy, the tide-waiter at Portsmouth. Then came Mr. Lincoln's revenue law of '62, with assessors and collectors appointed by district and every distiller made to register and pay for a license, and there were federal eyes in the hill towns too. Now a runner has a customs man on the coast, a gauger in the hills, and the lamprey eels in between, and of the three I would trust the eels.

Eels, Fish Barrels and a Widow's Churn

Last October a man came up the turnpike from Epsom with a peddler's pack of tin cups, pie plates and a nutmeg grater. His boots were too clean and his hands too soft. He was a revenue deputy out of the Portsmouth district, sent to buy a jug off me. But Barnaby cannot abide the rattle of tinware. He rose on his hind legs, all four hundred pounds of him, and took that pack in one paw. Tin went into the woodpile, a dipper went down the well, and the grater stayed on my roof until March. Then the bear took the coat tails, the seat of the trousers, and a fair soup-plate-sized portion of the gentleman beneath. The deputy ran north as far as Barnstead, where a farmer found him in a hog shed and lent him a feed sack for a skirt. His report called it an assault by an unregistered animal, which is the first honest report a revenue man ever filed about this county.

The trail is real enough that my own money knows it. I once traded a man a fistful of the cents I punch at the anvil, marked G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. This spring a ship chandler on the Portsmouth wharf counted one of them back into my palm, worn half smooth. It had come home in better shape than any man who has walked that turnpike.

Miss Clara Higgins, the herbalist and historian of drinking talk from the Blue Ridge of Virginia, spent two weeks reading letters in Lamprey farmhouse attics, and she found that our people hide their history the way they hide their liquor. Around Epping and Raymond the runners trusted no lantern, since a revenue man can light one as easily as anybody. Instead they nailed a lamprey eel to a pine by the cart track. Head upstream meant the road was clear; head downstream meant officers were about. One June a raccoon ate the signal off its nail, and two wagonloads of rum sat three days in the woods outside Epping while the drivers waited for an eel that was already inside a raccoon. Not one of them took a drink, and it was the most sober Epping has ever been.

Her great-uncle Amos Higgins, a cook on the coastwise schooners, wrote of a wharf inspector called Old Gauge-Stick, who rammed his rod into every hogshead and licked it clean. Amos's crew built a hogshead with a tight partition a foot and a half down, brined salt cod above it and a hundred gallons of rum below. The rod came up dripping pickle, and the inspector wrote down salt fish. Amos admitted the rum tasted a touch fishy, though a Newmarket loom-fixer said it put him in mind of the sea.

Best of all was Patience Ladd, a widow of Raymond whose fine yellow butter was famous. The dasher handle of her churn was bored out like a gun barrel and held a quart of hill rye. The new revenue deputy bought his butter from her every Saturday, with a little something poured into the crock, and complained to the whole Raymond store that it made him dizzy. He blamed the clover. Miss Higgins also brought me the Lamprey's own words for rum: the rankest molasses rum off the barges was "Great Bay grog, or Gundalow Tea," and a customs man who took a jar to look the other way was a wet tide-waiter.

Copper, Mash and the Cuts

Much of the copper on the trail was torn off ships' bottoms, but a great deal of that sheathing is Muntz metal, or yellow metal, a brass of about sixty parts copper and forty parts zinc. Zinc does not belong in your spirit, and salvaged brass often carries lead besides. Pure copper is red. If it is yellow, sell it to a bell-founder. Copper takes the sulfur stink out of a spirit, and it does most of that work in the vapour rather than the wash, where the hot steam meets bare metal in the helmet, lyne arm and worm, so that is where your best copper belongs.

For hill rye, grind the grain coarse and take near seven or eight parts rye to two of malted barley, since rye's own converting power is not to be trusted. Cook the rye, stirring the whole time, for it goes gummy as taffy. Let it fall to a hundred and fifty degrees, about where you can just hold a finger in it for a count of two, stir in the malt, and hold it warm in quilts an hour or more until the porridge turns to a sweet thin gruel. Cool it to about eighty degrees before pitching yeast, leave a third of the barrel empty for the foam, and ferment four days to a week in a warm, airy room, never in a shut-up cellar. Strain before distilling, because scorched rye tastes like a burnt church. For rum, thin molasses with four or five parts water; the islanders add dunder from the last run for backbone.

At the worm, the foreshots and heads, sharp and smelling of solvent and glue, go out. The sweet hearts you keep, and the oily tails you run again. Wood spirit, methanol, comes mostly from the pectin in fruit, so the apple, pear and plum man must cut deepest of all. Alcohol vapour is heavier than air and creeps along the floor like a cat, so keep your joints tight and open flame away from the floor, never leave a running still, and keep a bucket of sand by the door.

The Blue Flame and the Thump Keg

Every porch-sitter swears good whiskey burns blue. The blue flame only proves the spirit is strong enough to burn. Methanol burns with a pale, nearly invisible flame, and lead shows no color at all. The only test that counts is the one you make at the worm.

A correspondent from Wilkesboro, North Carolina, Mr. Cletus "Rabbit" Miller, asked whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg will clean out bad heads. Red oak is so open in the grain that I once won two dollars at the Pittsfield fair blowing bubbles through a foot-long stick of it, which is why no cooper makes a whiskey barrel of anything but white oak, and even white oak works over months and years, not an afternoon. Hickory ash is lye, caustic enough to foam over hot onto your face, and it removes no methanol whatever. Properly made hardwood charcoal will take some rasp off a finished spirit, but ash is no cousin of charcoal. Your heads are bad because somebody kept them, and no ash, shaving or prayer will save a man from his own greed at the worm. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.