The Tin Peddler's Cart and the Copper Trade in Rural New Hampshire

The Red Cart on the Mud Road

Picture April on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, the mud up to the hub. Around the bend near Catamount comes a box wagon painted the red of a freshly pulled tooth socket. Dippers, colanders, milk pans and tin lanterns hang off every side, and they clank like a Methodist choir falling down a stairwell. There is a great bale of rags on the back and a hide or two going ripe underneath. On the seat sits a fellow with one eye on the road and the other on your wife's egg money. That is the tin peddler. In my youth he was the only store most hill farms ever saw, and I owe half my stills to his kind. I owe half my gray hairs to one of them in particular, of whom more presently.

The trade came up out of Connecticut. The story goes that two tinsmith brothers named Pattison settled in Berlin, Connecticut, along about the 1740s and began knocking out tin pans. Their neighbours bought every pan they had, so the brothers walked their wares to the next town, and the next. Before long half the young men of Connecticut were tramping the country with tinware on their backs. Then came the carts, and the Connecticut man became a legend for sharp trading. I will not swear that any peddler ever whittled a wooden nutmeg. I will swear that every peddler I have met could have, and would have charged you extra for the grating.

Most of what he called tin was not tin at all. Tinplate is thin sheet iron dipped in tin so it will not rust, and the best of it came over the ocean in crates from the mills of South Wales. Copper is a nobler beast. Paul Revere, the very same midnight rider, opened a mill at Canton, Massachusetts, in 1801, and he is generally credited as the first man in this country to roll sheet copper successfully. Most of our copper now comes from the Keweenaw mines of the Lake Superior country, which have been pouring it out since the forties. It travels east by lake boat and rail, the merchants of Boston and Portsmouth sell it by the pound, and some of it ends up rolled and bundled under a peddler's seat, bound for Pittsfield.

Rags for Copper, and a Tax on the Mare

In these war years hard money hides under every mattress, so mostly we barter. The peddler takes rags, because paper is made of cotton and linen rag and the mills will buy every scrap he hauls. He also takes goose feathers, beeswax, hides and potash. I have traded him rags so stained from tooth-pulling that he crossed himself. The paper mill bleached my patients' sorrows white as a bride, and somewhere in Massachusetts a young lady is now pouring out her heart on the ghost of a deputy's abscess. My bear Barnaby's old bedding went for half a pound of solder. It smelled bad enough to have been worth more.

The still-maker has three reasons to prize the peddler. The first is metal. Ask a Concord clerk for forty pounds of sheet copper and a coil of tubing and he will look at you the way a hen looks at a fox. The peddler asks no questions, or rather he asks all of them and answers none. The second is gossip. The peddler knows which deputy bought his wife a new teapot, which Chichester farmer has a new copper boiler and no cows, and which revenue man stopped in Barnstead for pie. The third reason is a warning: he can sink you. My first arrest came by peddler. A red-whiskered talker with a laugh like a hinge went down to Epsom and bragged in the tavern that Doc Wilkins had paid him in coin and a jar. The deputy only had to follow his wheel ruts up my hill. The peddler then sold the sheriff a tin cup to drink my evidence out of. I hate that kind of enterprise, and I admire it.

Still, the peddler gives as well as takes. I strike G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. on copper cents at my anvil and pay peddlers in them. They make change with those cents at every farmhouse door, so my name has slept in more farmhouses in Merrimack County than any bachelor's, and with a far cleaner reputation. Washington knows the peddler's value too. Under the Revenue Act of 1862 he must buy a federal license, and the fee rises with how he travels: so much on foot, more with one horse, more with two. Mr. Lincoln taxes my whiskey and the peddler's mare alike.

A Revenue Man's Ledger

Captain Donald Vance, a retired federal revenue officer out of Manchester, sat in my parlour lately and told me three tales worth setting down. The first was about a peddler on the Vermont side of the Connecticut River whose cart did not rattle. A tin cart that goes by as quiet as a hearse is hiding something. The Captain coaxed him onto a town hay scale at a toll bridge, and the beam read near fourteen hundred pounds. The man had lashed every piece of tinware with wool yarn to kill the clank, and under a false floor lay bundles of sheet copper and a coil of worm tubing bound for stills above Bradford.

The second tale was darker. A Grafton County man off the Baker River peeled the thin lead foil out of empty tea chests, melted it into the seams of an old kettle, and ran his hot, sour wash through it. When the Captain came to smash the thing, the man's gums showed a blue-black line along the teeth, as if drawn with a pencil. I have seen that lead line twice with forceps in my hand. It is the most honest thing about a lead-patched still, because it signs its name on the drinker's teeth. If you ever see it in your own mirror, stop drinking from that kettle and see a doctor.

The third tale was of a peddler's widow in the Green Mountains who drove her late husband's cart for twenty years. She kept a calfskin ledger of every kettle, boiler and coil she sold in three counties. She would not open it for a gentleman who was not buying, and the Captain came away owning forty nutmeg graters. From that ledger he learned which outfits bought cheap copper-washed sheet and solder by the pound, and he let the honest buyers be. In his words, "You can tell a good deal about a man by what he will pay for his metal."

The Kettle of Lemuel Crouch

I read metal the way a parson reads Leviticus, carefully and with a little horror, and I was cheated all the same. A peddler on the Gilmanton road, whom I shall call Lemuel Crouch, sold me a ten-gallon kettle and swore on his mother's grave that it was solid copper. His mother, I later learned, was alive and living in Belmont. Low on the belly, where the fire hits, he had let in a lead patch the size of my palm. Then he rubbed the whole kettle over with copper bronze powder in varnish so that it glowed the same rosy colour throughout. At the first firing a dull, sweaty gray spot came through the soot like a bald scalp through a bad wig. My thumbnail gouged it like cheese. Copper does not gouge under a thumbnail. Lead does.

Crouch came back up the turnpike the next spring, bold as a tomcat, and parked by the still-house window as before. I may have let Barnaby's chain out a link or three that morning. I was oiling it, you understand. Barnaby tore away the tail of Crouch's frock coat, then took the seat of his trousers and what was inside them. The mule bolted for Barnstead with every dipper on the cart raining onto the road like Judgment Day in a hardware store. That evening Crouch crawled back holding his britches together. I washed the wound with spirit, closed it with eleven stitches of waxed linen, and charged him exactly what he had charged me for the kettle, to the penny. He has sat a little crooked on his wagon seat ever since.

Testing the Metal at the Tailboard

Lead is a poor partner for fire. Copper does not melt until close to two thousand degrees by Fahrenheit's scale, while lead lets go at about six hundred and twenty. Long before a lead patch sags and runs, your hot, sour wash is eating at it. Every one of the following experiments can be made on the peddler's tailboard before a single rag changes hands.

The file comes first. True copper is the pink-red of a healthy gum, while brass runs yellow. Ask to file a bright spot inside the rim. If the peddler refuses, you have your answer. Copper stays copper all the way through, but copper-washed iron shows gray under a skin as thin as a lie. Next, press your thumbnail hard into any patch or seam. Lead takes the mark and leaves a gray, pencil-like streak when rubbed on paper.

The third test is the alchemist's own, from Archimedes, who saw his bathwater rise and understood that every metal has its own weight against an equal bulk of water. Copper weighs about eight and nine-tenths times as much as water. Lead weighs over eleven times as much, iron near eight, and brass a touch less than copper. Weigh a scrap in air, then weigh it again hanging in a bucket of water, and divide the first weight by what it lost. Last comes the ring. Hang a sound kettle from a string and strike it with a knuckle, and it hums a long while. A patched kettle gives a dead clunk. That is a hint rather than a proof, but a hint is worth something.

Put no faith in the lodestone. A magnet will not cling to copper, but it will not cling to lead, tin, brass, zinc or a peddler's conscience either. All it tells you is that a thing is not iron, and Crouch's patch would have passed it with honours. Nor is a kettle gone green all over a sign of fine old copper. Green means neglect, and you scrub it bright before any wash goes in.

Clean Copper, Cuts, and the Thump Keg

Making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law, so take what follows as history and natural science. Build your pot of heavy copper wherever wash or vapour touches it, with no lead, tea-chest foil, pewter or soft solder. Rivet and braze the seams, and test them with water before you light a fire. Fire low and patiently. The bright copper catches the sulfur in the vapour, which is why you scrub it after every run. Throw out the foreshots, every drop. Set aside the heads, which smell of the glue pot, keep the sweet hearts, and set aside the oily, doggy tails. I catch the run in a row of small numbered jars and go down them with my nose in good light, for the peddler cannot sell you a false nose.

Cletus "Rabbit" Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, sent a question up by post on a wax cylinder: "My uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads." Hardwood ash is mostly potash. It was prized enough that the first patent the United States ever granted, in 1790, went to Samuel Hopkins for a better way of making it. In a thump keg, though, ash gives only a muddy lye broth and no cleaner spirit. Red oak gives tannin, colour and a woody sweetness, but that is a coat of paint, not a new house. Neither one takes out the heads. Only your own hand, moving the jar at the right time, does that. Know your metal, know your peddler, and remember that a smile on a wagon seat is no proof of copper.