The Suncook Valley Railroad Comes to Pittsfield and Ends the Back-Road Runner

The Iron Horse Comes Up the Suncook

My bear Barnaby is chained outside the still-house window at Fort Wilkins, and every afternoon he lets out a long bawl when the whistle of the four-forty out of Suncook comes down the valley. He has answered that whistle every day for a month. I believe the poor fool thinks he is courting her. She is made of iron and burns cordwood, and he has neither the boiler nor the bank account to win her. Still, Barnaby has caught the feeling of the season sooner than most. The Suncook Valley Railroad has come to Pittsfield, and the man who made his living on a dark back road at two in the morning, with rags wrapped round his horse's hooves, is in serious trouble.

For the whole of my life, freight came up this valley one way: on a wagon behind a horse or a yoke of oxen. It sank to the hubs in Suncook mud from March to May and choked in dust from June to September. A load of cotton bales for the Pittsfield mill came up from Suncook village through Epsom and Chichester at about the speed of a Baptist sermon, and stopped about as often to water the animals. That slowness was a curse to every honest merchant and a blessing to every dishonest one. If shingles take two days to reach Concord, nobody can say for certain what rode under them or where it got off. A road like that is full of barns, woodlots, cellar holes and cousins, and a man with a jug could vanish into the alders like a tooth into a drunk man's gums.

Then, in this year of 1869, the rails came up the river from Suncook village through Epsom and Chichester into Pittsfield. The new line runs in harness with the Concord Railroad, which owns everything in this state that is not nailed down and holds a lien on the nails. Half the town turned out at the depot in Sunday clothes on the first day. The mill band played something that may have been a march and may have been a fistfight. Children screamed, horses bolted, and one widow fainted into a barrel of salt cod and came up smelling of the Grand Banks. The locomotive came round the bend like a fire-breathing iron hog that drinks water, eats wood, and screams like a widow at the reading of a will. It was still more sober than the Concord Railroad board of directors.

I will give the devil his due. Cotton cloth from the mill now goes down the line in hours rather than days. Flour comes up cheaper. Coal, kerosene, nails and the Boston papers arrive while the papers are still warm. Sheet copper from the Boston rolling mills comes up cheaper and faster than it ever did by wagon, which helps every honest coppersmith and apothecary in the valley, and me as well.

Waybills, Wire and Fifty-Cent Whiskey

Here is the burr in the saddle blanket. A railroad runs on paper. Every crate gets a bill of lading and every car carries a waybill. The station agent writes everything in a ledger as fat as a parson's wife: what the freight is, who sent it, who it goes to, and what it weighs. The waybills are the Gospel of the railroad, and the agent plays Saint Peter with a pencil behind his ear. Our agent at Pittsfield weighs every crate as though it owes him money. A crate of 'dry goods' that sloshes on the hand truck gets opened. A barrel marked 'vinegar' that a man's nose says is not vinegar gets a visit.

Beside the rails runs the telegraph. In the old days a deputy rode out of Concord with a warrant, and some boy on a fast pony gave you half a day's warning. Now the warrant arrives before the deputy has had his breakfast. Congress made things worse as well. Last July, in the summer of 1868, Washington cut the whiskey tax from two dollars a gallon to fifty cents. That is the first time Washington ever took less from a New Hampshire man without his having to hit somebody. At the same time it tightened the screws, with tax stamps on every package, every distiller registered, and revenue men poking through the paperwork.

So the back-road runner was not caught all at once. He was squeezed. The railroad took the honest freight off the road, so a lone wagon at night stands out like a sore thumb. The waybill took away his excuses, the telegraph took away his head start, and Congress took away his profit. A runner used to need a fast horse and a slow sheriff. Now he also needs a blind station agent and a telegraph man with no fingers, and I can never find more than two of those at once.

A Surveyor in the Bear's Parlour

Before the rails came, the company sent its surveyors. One was a young fellow from Concord with clean boots, a brass compass, a Gunter's chain sixty-six feet long, and whiskers like a muskrat that died of grief. He ran his line along the back of my lot and drove a stake about four feet inside the circle Barnaby can reach on his chain. I warned him that he had staked a claim in the bear's parlour. He answered that the animal was asleep. So is a powder keg, I told him, right up until it is not.

He bent right over to tie off his chain. A bear goes from asleep to on top of you the way a stove lid goes from cold to blistering. Barnaby reached the end of his chain at the same instant his teeth reached the seat of that boy's trousers. The wool came away, then the drawers, then a strip of hide about the size of a hymnbook. The surveyor went down the turnpike toward Chichester with his bare backside shining like a fresh-polished cent. Barnaby kept the chain and the compass, and I believe he ate the needle, for he walked in circles for two days afterward. I stitched the boy up in my dentist's chair with silk thread, and he held still better than most men with a molar out. When the final line was laid, the railroad had moved forty rods east. Nobody at the Concord office will tell you why there is a curve there.

The railroad has also played a small joke on me. I stamped a copper cent at my anvil, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and spent it at the depot on a newspaper. Three weeks later a conductor on the up train handed it back to me in my change. My cent rode to Concord and back faster than I could, and it came home in better shape than I did after my last visit to the county seat.

Hymnals, Jug Babies and Persimmon Brandy

Miss Clara Higgins, an herbalist and collector of mountain talk from the Blue Ridge of Virginia, visited the fort recently. Barnaby admired her at once. Virginia had the cars long before we did. When the Virginia and Tennessee came through in the fifties, every mountain man stood beside the tracks working out how to cheat it. Her great-uncle Abner shipped his jugs in crates stencilled 'HYMNALS. HANDLE WITH PRAYER.' The agent at Big Lick nearly ruptured himself lifting one and told him: "Mister, I been a Christian forty years, and no hymnal ever written weighs as much as a sin." The agent kept one jug as a 'choir fee' and passed the rest. Abner paid that fee every month for three years, and the agent was said to sing the finest bass in Roanoke County.

She also told me of Granny Pruitt of the Rockfish Gap country, who rode the cars to Charlottesville with a stoneware jug wrapped in a calico shawl like a newborn. One day the car lurched on a sharp curve and the 'baby' went glug-glug out loud. The conductor kindly carried the colicky infant to the baggage car, and she got it back two fingers lighter.

Along the Blue Ridge grade, the track gangs traded frost-ripened wild persimmons for persimmon brandy, and for a while the fruit was currency. One old woman on Afton Mountain set a basket of persimmons on the tax collector's desk to pay her federal tax. He told her the Treasury does not accept fruit. She replied: "Well, it accepts nuts, don't it? It hired you." The rails brought new words too. A brakeman's flask, carried where the cinders collected, was 'cinder tea,' and a man who had drunk too much of it was 'running on a soft rail.' The old names lived on along the grades: bust-head, tanglefoot, forty-rod, and who-hit-John.

Copper, Fire and the Cuts

First, a plain warning: making distilled spirit to drink without a federal permit is against United States law. What follows is history and education. Cheaper sheet copper is a blessing, because a pot built from scrap and salvaged junk sends its customers to the burying ground early. Use clean copper and nothing doubtful, and never lead solder in a seam. Lead is a slow poison.

Make the mash from cracked corn, rye, or apples crushed to pomace. Cook the grain with water to loosen the starch, let it cool until you can hold your hand in it, and add yeast. Let it work for some days into a weak sour beer, which is called the wash. Keep the place aired, because the froth gives off a gas that will lay a man down quietly in a closed cellar. Keep the fire under the pot low and steady. Alcohol vapour catches fire faster than gossip, so check every joint with your nose and eyes before you light, and keep a bucket of sand by the door.

Now the alchemy. The vapour carries sulphur, with its stink of rotten eggs. Bright copper takes the sulphur out of the vapour and holds it as a dark crust. That is why copper makes a sweeter spirit, but it works only while the copper is bright, so scrub the pot after every run.

Then come the cuts. The foreshots and heads smell sharp, like glue and varnish, and they carry most of the methanol, which blinds and kills. Throw them out. Methanol boils cooler than good spirit, but in a pot still the two run together, so throw out more than you think you need. Catch the run in a row of small jars and judge it jar by jar. Fruit carries pectin, which makes more of the bad alcohol, so apple and persimmon brandy need a more generous front cut, not a stingier one. The hearts follow, clean and sweet. The tails come last, oily and smelling of wet dog, and should be set aside to run again.

Ashes, Oak Shavings and the Blue Flame

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, wrote to ask whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg clean out bad heads. Wood ash is mostly potash, which our settlers leached and boiled down to sell for soap and glass. It is alkaline, so it may take some bite off a sour run. It does nothing at all to methanol, which rides straight through the doubler and into the jar. Oak shavings add colour and a little woody flavour, but the spirit underneath is unchanged. A fistful of ash in the keg is like a pinch of salt in your grave: it may improve the flavour, but you are still in the grave.

As for the porch rhyme, 'lead burns red and makes you dead': good spirit and methanol both burn a pale blue you can hardly see. A blue flame proves only that the liquor will burn. Lead will kill you in any colour of flame. The only protection is clean copper and an honest cut. Keep your copper bright, your fire low, and your heads in the waste bucket.