The Suncook Stove Foundry Fire and the Moonshiner's Alibi

Orange Clouds Over the Suncook

It was January of this year, eighteen and sixty-five. The war was still grinding men up down South, coal was dear, and the cold on the turnpike was so hard that a man's spit clinked when it landed. I was in my still-house at Fort Wilkins, with the copper ticking as it warmed, doing honest chemistry for dishonest purposes, when Barnaby stood up on his chain and began moaning at the southern sky. I looked out the log window. The whole underside of the clouds was lit orange, like the inside of a blacksmith's mouth. Something large was burning down the valley toward Suncook.

The younger reader may not know what a stove foundry meant to a New England kitchen. When I was a boy my mother cooked at an open hearth. She knelt at the fire like a woman at prayer, her skirts six inches from catching, and every winter some poor farm wife in this county went up like a candle. Then the cast-iron cookstove came up the river roads: an iron box, an iron oven, and iron lids you lift with a hook. It burned half the wood, baked the bread evenly, and kept the women of the house on their feet and out of the coals. By the time Mr. Lincoln was elected, every decent kitchen from Concord to Barnstead had one. Every Saturday some poor child had to black it with black lead, which gets into the knuckles so deep that you go to your grave with gray fingernails.

What the Iron Founders Knew

The Suncook foundry made those stoves. It was run by old Ebenezer Hadley, a man with a beard like a burnt broom and a temper to match. He would explain the trade to anyone who held still long enough. You begin with pig iron. When the melt is run out on the casting floor, it flows down one long channel with little side molds branching off it, and the whole arrangement looks like a litter of piglets crowded at a sow. So the founders named it. Revenue men got their name from the same animal by a shorter road.

Hadley melted his pigs in a cupola, a tall iron chimney lined with fire brick. He charged it in layers: fuel, iron, a shovel of limestone, then more fuel and more iron, up and up like a wedding cake built by the Devil. The limestone is the clever part. It is a flux, and it gathers the dirt, ash and rust into a scum called slag that floats on the melt and is tapped off like fat from a stew. The clean iron then runs out the bottom, white-hot and flowing like syrup.

It runs into green sand, which is damp sand, though it is brown as a ditch. The pattern-maker carves the stove plate in good pine, down to every acanthus leaf and tiny eagle. The pattern is rammed into sand inside a two-part box called a flask, whose top half is the cope and bottom half the drag. I have known married couples arranged on exactly that principle. They draw the pattern out, close the flask, and pour.

The founders knew two things a coppersmith never had to learn. The first is that iron shrinks as it cools, about an eighth of an inch to the foot. So the pattern-maker uses a shrink rule, marked a hair longer than an honest foot, and the casting comes out true once it settles. The second is water, and this part is grisly. Molten iron that touches wet sand, a damp ladle or a puddle turns the water to steam in less than a heartbeat, and the steam carries the iron out with it. Thaddeus Brock, a molder from Allenstown, poured into a mold that had stood too near a leaking roof. The mold blew, and a gout of iron the size of a turnip landed in his boot. At first he only said 'oh,' very quietly. Then came the smell, and then the screaming, and it did not stop until the doctor had cut off the boot and a good part of what was in it. He walked on a peg afterward and stirred his coffee with it to prove he was not bitter.

Cast iron carries two to four parts in a hundred of carbon. That is why it pours so fluidly, and it is also why it is brittle. You cannot hammer it cold as you would copper. Strike a stove lid with a sledge and it does not bend. It breaks, and then it looks at you as if the fault were yours.

Forty Buckets Beside the Law

Nothing else in Suncook had enough fuel stacked around it to throw that much light, so I knew it was Hadley's foundry. His coal pile and his pattern loft went up together. The loft held years of pine patterns, dry as tinder, and once it caught it roared. A decent man goes to a fire. A clever man goes to the fire where the sheriff will be. I banked my still fire down to nothing, and mark this: I never in my life left a lit still behind me. Then I drove down the turnpike so fast that the sleigh runners whistled.

The Suncook hand-tub company was already pumping when I arrived. A hand tub is a long wooden box on wheels with pump handles down both sides and ten men to a side heaving like sailors at a capstan, and its hose squirts about as hard as a cow with a grudge. Behind it ran the bucket brigade, two lines of townsfolk from the river to the fire, one passing full leather buckets up and the other passing the empties back. The man beside me in line was the Sheriff of Merrimack County, red-faced and sweating at ten below in his brass-buttoned coat. He looked at me, I looked at him, and he handed me a bucket. For five hours all of Suncook watched G. G. Wilkins pass water alongside the law, forty buckets in all.

Meanwhile Deputy Asa Pruett had decided that with the whole county at the fire, my still-house would stand empty. He is a man so thin you could floss a horse with him, with a mustache like a dead caterpillar. He crept up the turnpike with a lantern and a fresh warrant, and he forgot Barnaby. The bear rose out of the snow like a hairy hill with teeth. Pruett threw the lantern, which hissed out in a drift, and in the dark he heard the chain run out link by link. Barnaby is a gentleman and does not maul for spite, but he is interested in pockets. Pruett had a fried doughnut in his coat. The coat came off him like the skin off a boiled onion, and the trousers followed, because he had wiped his greasy fingers on the seat. Barnaby ate the warrant, the wax seal and the left mitten.

Pruett ran half-naked toward the only light in the county, six miles down the road. About three in the morning he walked into the firelight in long-handled underwear and one boot, frosted like a wedding cake, and pointed at me. The Sheriff, God bless his slow mind, answered him: 'Asa, Wilkins has been at my elbow since ten o'clock. Whatever happened at his place, he was not there to do it.' A barrel of gold eagles could not have bought me a better alibi.

Stories from the Brushy Mountains

My visitor Junior Vance of Wilkes County, North Carolina, had fire stories of his own. His great-uncle Hob kept his jars all summer in a cold parlor stove, until a shivering revenue man asked to light it at the first October cold snap. The jars blew one after another, and burning liquor rolled across the floor while the revenue man went out through the window, glass and all. Hob's eyebrows never grew back right, and he drew them on with stove blacking for church. Junior's father once had a deputy, Lonzo Pegram, beside him in the bucket line at a tobacco-barn fire on the very night he was supposed to be at his copper pot. Lonzo had to swear to it before the judge. He did not speak to the man for eleven years, and then he came to his wedding anniversary with a ham.

Old man Treadway, up toward the Alexander line, cast hollow pigs around sand cores, filled them with liquor, plugged them tight and sold them as wagon ballast. That worked until a deputy idly knocked on one and it rang like a church bell. Treadway hollered, "That one's defective!" Bear in mind that liquor kept in raw iron takes on an inky taste, and if it has touched oak the iron turns it black. That is the same chemistry as iron-gall ink. Junior also once threw cold water into his granny's red-hot wash kettle, and it split in two like a melon. The founders call that thermal shock.

Copper at the Apparatus

Iron is the finest thing God put in the ground for a stove and a poor partner for a still. Copper carries heat roughly five to seven times faster than cast iron, so the pot heats without scorching and the worm sheds its heat quickly into the cooling water. Raw iron rusts and taints the spirit. Copper, and here is the alchemy, takes up the sulfur in the vapor and holds it on its own surface. I set down the method here as history, for the student and the lawfully permitted. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against United States law.

For a five-gallon barrel, take eight or nine pounds of cracked corn and cook it slowly in about five gallons of water until it is thick as porridge. Cool it until it is warm as a milking cow. Then stir in a pound and a half or so of ground malted barley, whose virtue turns the starch to sugar. Put the malt in too hot and you have made very expensive porridge. Once the mash is cooler still, pitch the yeast and cover the barrel loosely, never sealed, until the bubbling quits and the cap falls. Strain the wash and fill the pot no more than three parts full. A still must always stand open to the condenser, because a blocked one bursts like a stopped teakettle. Keep the fire low. Alcohol vapor is heavier than air and creeps along the floor toward any flame. As Junior put it, "Vapor runs downhill, just like water and deputies."

Then come the cuts, which are your true experiment. Throw out the foreshots, which carry the wood spirit that blinds and kills. Set the harsh heads aside. Keep the sweet hearts, and save the oily tails to run again. Make your cuts by nose, with a row of small jars and patience. Afterward, scrub the copper bright. That dark film is the sulfur she caught for you, and a dull pot is a dead pot.

Ashes, Oak and the Blue Flame

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro asked whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg clean out bad heads. The true half of that notion lives in the kitchen. Water run through hardwood ash makes lye, which goes into soft soap and hominy. But lye is caustic, and it pulls no wood spirit from a run. The heads come off early because they boil at a lower heat, and the only cure is the cut. Oak shavings do lend color, tannin and sweetness, so the spirit is not cleaner, only wearing a new hat. If iron hoops or nails touch that oak, you may draw off ink. As for the barroom blue flame, methanol burns pale blue too. A blue flame tells you there is something in the spoon that burns, and it tells you nothing about whether it will kill you.

Hadley's foundry was rebuilt by spring. His first new stove plate bore a little eagle holding a bucket, and he swore that had nothing to do with me. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.