The Suncook River Ice-Out Flood and the Eleven Lost Whiskey Barrels

When the Suncook Lets Go

A man who has never lived beside a New England river does not know what ice-out means, so allow me to explain it. All winter the Suncook lies under ice thick enough to carry an ox team. Then March comes. The sun climbs, the rain turns warm, and the snow up in Barnstead and Gilmanton runs downhill all at once. The water rises beneath the ice and lifts it. The ice goes rotten and gray, honeycombed through like a bad molar, and at night you hear it groan and boom like cannon in the woods.

The old folks call it the freshet. River ice does not melt politely. It breaks into cakes the size of a barn floor, and the cakes pile up at every bend, bridge pier and mill dam until the water backs up behind them like a congregation waiting on a late preacher. Then the jam lets go and the whole river comes down at once. It takes bridges, mill gates, fences, outhouses with the occupant still inside, and anything a careless man left on the bank.

The Suncook runs out of the Suncook Lakes in Barnstead, down through Pittsfield past our mills, on through Epsom and Allenstown, and into the great Merrimack at Suncook village. Whatever it steals from Pittsfield it hands to the towns below. A runner in these parts was fond of the river all the same. He could sink a barrel off a ledge under the winter ice with a line on it, where no revenue man would think to cut, or he could dig a cellar into the bank, shore it with timber, cover it with sod, and keep his stock cool all summer. That is a fine arrangement until the river wants a drink.

There is a cruel bit of natural philosophy in it, too. A tight barrel of spirit floats, for wood floats and spirit is lighter than water. A barrel washed from its cellar does not sink and keep its secret. It rides high and bobs along like a fat Methodist at a baptism until it fetches up in an eddy, where any farmer with a hay hook can pull it in. Then there is the law. Under Mr. Lincoln's war excise, spirit with the tax unpaid may be seized and forfeited, and under the old common law, goods carried off by a flood still belong to their owner, not to whoever fishes them out. So the owner cannot claim his barrel without confessing to the deputy, and the finder cannot rightly claim it either, though it sits in his barn. Nobody can own it and everybody wants it.

Eleven Barrels Bound for the Sea

It was the spring of 'sixty-four, after a hard winter of deep snow. I had laid down eleven barrels in a cellar dug into the bank below the mill dam: nine of good double-run rye, one of tails I meant to run again, and one painted with a great red X on both heads. That last held the heads and foreshots from a whole winter of running. I kept it for lamp fuel and for cleaning my dental instruments, and it was not fit for any human throat.

In the last week of February we had three days of warm rain out of the south. On the fourth night, about two in the morning, the ice went out with a roar like the whole Merrimack County bar association clearing its throat at once. I ran to the bank by lantern light in my nightshirt and found my cellar gone. Not broken. Gone, scoured down to wet ledge, with eleven barrels on their way to the Atlantic.

By morning they were strewn down the Suncook like peas spilled down a church aisle. In Epsom, Deacon Hezekiah Tuttle waded in to his watch chain, hooked one out, and announced before witnesses that the Lord had sent communion wine to his congregation. Below him the Widow Prudence Hatch, a temperance woman with a jaw like an anvil horn, took an axe to the heads of another, crying that rum is ruin, while her hired man stood ten feet downhill catching the ruin in a milk pail. Deputy Orrin Pease drove the river road and took up three barrels as evidence. He carried them home to his own barn, for safekeeping.

Every barrel bore a brand burned into the head in the shape of a molar tooth. Orrin came up my turnpike with that brand drawn on a shingle, waving it like Moses with the tablets: "A molar, Wilkins! A tooth! And you are the tooth-puller!" I told him that accusing a man by a molar brand was like arresting a cow for wearing a hide, and that he might as well arrest the dentist in Rochester, or the Lord God, who put thirty-two of the things in every head in the county. He went off grumbling, for I had said nothing false, and nothing true either.

A Bounty for the Red X

Here the joke stopped being a joke. Somewhere between Pittsfield and the Merrimack, a barrel of the poison that blinds a man and stops his heart was floating toward some farmer's barn, and every fool who had tapped the others would tap that one too. So I did what no sensible outlaw does. I rode the river road from Pittsfield to Suncook village and cried a bounty at every store, tavern and mill gate: two dollars in hard coin, no questions asked, for the red X barrel with its bung untouched. I said plainly that it was lamp oil and solvent and would kill whoever drank it.

Four days later old Asa Bickford, an eel fisherman below Short Falls, came up the turnpike with the barrel lashed in his wagon. It had caught in his weir. He had pulled the bung, taken one sniff, and found it smelled like a cobbler's glue pot and a dead man's breath, so he hammered the bung back with his boot heel and sat on it. I paid him in full, in coppers stamped on my own anvil, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., so he carries my name in his pocket, which is closer than the sheriff ever got. I burned the contents in a ditch across my field, where they gave a blue lick of flame and a stink that set Barnaby, my bear, covering his nose with both paws.

The River's Revenge

Of Deputy Pease's three barrels, two were good rye and the third was my barrel of tails. Orrin was greedy and opened that one first because it was the biggest. Tails are the oily dregs at the end of a run, greasy as a wet hound and tasting of harness soaked in lamp oil. He drank three tin cups of it one Saturday night to prove a point to his brother-in-law. By Sunday the evidence had been entered into the record, the record being Mrs. Pease's front step. He was green until Wednesday and never drank found whiskey again, which I count the most successful temperance lecture ever delivered in this county.

One barrel never left home. It beached in the alders below the fort, forty feet from Barnaby's chain, and the bear, fresh out of his den and bound up tight, bit through two staves and drank half of it lying on his back. That very afternoon Orrin came to search my property, walked right up to those alders, and met a bear who had been considerably loosened by my rye and who chose that moment to pass his whole winter's plug onto the deputy's boots. Orrin walked backwards all the way to the turnpike. Of my eleven barrels I recovered the red X and Barnaby's leftovers, and five were never seen again.

A Coppersmith's Freshet

Silas "Hacksaw" McAllister, the finest metalsmith in Merrimack County, lost his share to that flood as well. That winter he had made hollow copper balls, two hammered halves joined with silver solder, to be tied by a line to a barrel sunk under the ice as a tell-tale float. At Hooksett he found one of his own bobbing in an eel weir, which he knew by his seam the way a man knows his own handwriting, with its line sheared clean through by an ice cake. A month after the flood, Deacon Tuttle brought him a copper vessel folded up like a crushed hat, which he insisted was a maple-sugar kettle. It had a domed top with a two-inch hole in the crown, ringed with old solder where a swan neck had broken off. Silas called it the first sugar kettle he ever saw that needed a chimney, and charged the deacon accordingly.

Silas also rode an ice cake near half a mile down the Suncook to save a new condensing worm, was pitched into the river at the next bend, and was hooked out by the seat of his britches on a river driver's pike pole. His verdict should be cut into every riverbank: "Spring ice will kill you. It's rotten, it turns over without warning, and that water will freeze your limbs in a minute."

A Spring Rye Run at the Bench

A plain word first: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and what follows is history and education. Spring was when the old runner started his rye. Rye's sweetness is locked up as starch, which yeast cannot eat, so he wanted barley malt, whose enzymes turn starch to sugar. The old rule ran a bushel of coarse-ground rye to about a peck of malt, with plenty of clean water. Cook the rye to break it open, then let it cool to near a hundred and fifty degrees before stirring in the malt. Hold it there and stir until the mash goes thin and sweet. Malt dropped into boiling water dies, and you have made a very expensive porridge. Cool it to blood-warm, pitch the yeast, and keep it warm but not hot for several days, because suffering yeast stinks of brimstone. Give it good air, since a working mash gives off gas that will drop a man in a closed pit. Strain off the wash and never fill the pot past three-quarters, or it will foam up into the neck.

The copper does its real work in the vapour, in the helmet, swan neck and arm, where hot vapour rubs the bright metal and the sulphur is caught. Snowmelt makes the best tub water in the world, but feel it partway through the run, and if it is warm, freshen it, for loose vapour near a fire burns still-houses down. Keep the fire low and steady, never leave it, keep the joints tight, and keep a bucket of water and a wet sack at your elbow. Join with silver solder or proper unions, never lead solder or scrap of unknown history.

For the cuts, catch the run in a long row of small numbered jars. The foreshots, sharp as a glue pot, are thrown away. The heads, which are solvent-sharp and carry the methanol, are set aside to be destroyed or burned as fuel, and marked better than I marked mine. Then the hearts, sweet and clean, and then the tails, oily and doggy, which go to be run again. Judge each jar by its smell, so you need not trust one great crock that has mixed the good with the bad.

Ashes, Red Oak and River-Aged Whiskey

Cletus "Rabbit" Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, writes that his uncle swears by hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Ash in water makes lye, the stuff of soap and hog-scraping. It makes the charge harsh and alkaline and does nothing to the methanol, which boils off early no matter what you add. The grain of truth is that old distillers sometimes put a little lime or ash into a soured mash to tame the acid, but that was done in the fermenter, days before the fire was lit. Red oak is so open in the grain that you can blow air through a stick of it, which is why coopers use white oak. Its shavings will add colour and bitterness and clean nothing. The thump keg strengthens the spirit, but it cannot forgive a bad cut.

As for Epsom's claim that my fished-out barrels tasted smoother for being rocked by the river: heat, cold and motion on a long flatboat voyage may push spirit in and out of the wood a little faster, but cold spirit in a cold barrel for a few March days ages not at all. A barrel banged against ice and dams springs its joints and takes in the river. What the deacon tasted was Suncook water, a little mud, and the warm feeling of drinking something for free. Watch your ice this spring and mark your heads as if a life depended on it, because somebody's does.