Trade Tokens, Store Cards and Local Money in New Hampshire's Suncook Valley

When the Mint Ran Dry

Every man who works copper over a fire ought to know something of copper in the purse. It is the same red metal, and a man who knows coin knows copper. So let us go back to when New England had hardly any money at all. The old Puritans paid their debts in corn, beaver, shell beads, nails, and whatever a man could carry without his back giving out. A cow was a fortune and a goose was small change, and making change for a goose took a hatchet.

In 1652 the Massachusetts Bay Colony opened its own mint without so much as a by-your-leave from the King, and put a silversmith named John Hull in charge of it. He struck the Pine Tree shilling, a thin silver coin with a scraggly little tree upon it, and kept one shilling out of every twenty for his trouble. That makes him the first honest tax collector in America, for at least he told you his cut up front. The old story holds that his daughter Hannah was married off with her own weight in shillings for a dowry, and that her husband, a Mr. Sewall, spent the rest of his days praying she would put on weight.

After that we lived on Spanish silver. The milled dollar, the piece of eight, was the true coin of this country for a hundred years. Men cut it into eight bits with a cold chisel, and that is where our 'two bits' comes from. I have seen Suncook Valley men quarter a dollar on a stump with a hatchet so crooked that one fellow got a fat slice and the other a sliver to pick his teeth with. Congress shut those coins out by the Act of February the 21st, 1857, but they still lie in old men's stockings all over Merrimack County.

The Ledger and the Ash Kettle

If you want to know how Pittsfield really kept its blood moving, look to the storekeeper's ledger and not to the mint. A hill farmer might go half a year without touching a coin. He brought down butter, eggs, rags, shingles, maple sugar, and potash, and it went on the credit side. He carried home salt, nails, molasses, calico for his wife, and a jug of something medicinal, and that went on the debit side. Such book accounts ran year to year, and some ran father to son, debts and all, like a family nose.

Potash deserves its own sermon, and the natural philosopher will like it. Every farm that cleared land burned its hardwood, and the ash was money. You leach the ash with water and boil the lye down in a great iron kettle, and what is left is potash, gray and caustic as a deacon's widow. Merchants bought it by the barrel for soap, glass, and bleaching cloth, and many a Pittsfield farm got its first cow from the ashes of its own forest.

Then came the Hard Times. In the 1830s Old Hickory went to war with the national bank, the Panic of '37 broke half the country, and hard money hid under every mattress from here to Ohio. Merchants struck their own copper cents, the Hard Times tokens, and rude ones they were. One showed Jackson as a jackass with the words 'I take the responsibility,' which is as fair a portrait of a politician as was ever struck in metal. Others bore 'Millions for defence, not one cent for tribute,' a fine patriotic sentiment for a coin worth exactly one cent.

Store Cards, Saloon Pennies, and My Own Punch

When the shooting started in '61, every man with a silver coin buried it, and every man with a copper cent sat on it like a broody hen. By '62 you could not make change for a nickel's worth of molasses in all Merrimack County. So from 1862 to 1864, storekeepers, saloon men, and grocers across the North had die-sinkers strike cent-sized tokens for them, tens of millions in all. Some were patriotic, with flags and Liberty heads and 'The Union Must and Shall Be Preserved.' Others were plain store cards. The king of them was a New York saloonkeeper, Gustavus Lindenmueller, who coined near a million by repute. Half of them never came back to be redeemed, which is the only time in history a drunk man made more money than he spent.

At last Washington noticed it had a rival. By the Act of April 22nd, 1864, Congress made a new bronze cent and a two-cent piece. By the Act of June 8th, 1864, it forbade any private person to issue one- or two-cent coins or tokens meant to pass as money. I respect that law the way a husband respects his mother-in-law: quietly, and from a distance.

I stamp my own name on copper, and not entirely from vanity. A counterstamped cent is an advertisement with legs. It goes from my hand to a farmer's purse, to a tavern drawer, to a drover bound for Concord, and every man who handles it reads 'G. G. WILKINS / PITTSFIELD N.H.' It is the cheapest handbill ever printed, for the government pays for the paper. In '63 a storekeeper down the turnpike, Hezekiah by name, had a thousand brass store cards struck in Cincinnati. I put my punch dead center on every one that came my way, and by spring half the tokens in the valley carried his name on one side and mine on the other. He came up the hill in a fury. I told him it was a partnership and he was the silent partner, the first time in his life he was silent about anything.

Not all private money is so honest. Two winters ago a drifter called Pewter Pete tried to buy a jar from me with tokens he had cast from melted spoons, organ pipes, and lead window cames, then tinned to shine like silver. I am a dentist, so I put one between my molars, and it bent like cheese. It was lead. He grabbed the jar and ran past my bear Barnaby's chain, misjudging the length of it by about a yard. Barnaby came away with a mouthful of trouser wool, a fistful of Pete, and eleven lead tokens, which he swallowed like gumdrops. Lead is poison to a bear just as to a man, so I dosed Barnaby with a peck of boiled oats. I got the tokens back three days later by the ancient alchemical method of patience, a shovel, and holding my breath.

The Captain's Purse of Bad Money

Captain Donald Vance, a retired revenue officer out of Manchester, sat at my table lately, and he knows bad money better than any man alive. Up in the Pemigewasset country he found taverns taking gray drink-tokens stamped 'GOOD FOR ONE PINT' that bent in his fingers. They were lead again, and a man who casts his drink-money out of lead is not particular about what he solders his still with. Half the village was down with the lead colic: bellies tight as drumheads, a gray line on the gums, hands shaking too hard to button a coat. The Captain followed those tokens up the brook to a sugarhouse, where he found a pot with a worm of lead pipe and seams slathered in lead solder. That is no still. It is a coffin with a spout. He broke the worm with the back of an axe and made the man melt down every token.

He told lighter tales too. In a Green Mountain tavern the keeper drank more than he sold, so his wife had a second batch of the house's brass drink-tokens struck, with 'GOOD FOR NOTHING' on the back. Whenever he paid himself a drink with one, she read it aloud and took the cup from his hand in front of the whole room. In a White Mountain lumber camp the men pasted their company scrip on the walls to keep out the wind. When the Captain came to break up the cook's still, the boss cut a square yard off the wall and offered it to him as a bribe. 'I took the still, Doctor. I left him the wall. A man needs insulation.'

Coin Metal and Kettle Metal

Now to the apparatus. Brass is copper with zinc, the stuff of Hezekiah's cards and of many a good union or fitting. Bronze is copper with tin. But pure copper is king for a still. Of the common metals only silver carries heat better, and nobody but a Boston banker builds a still of silver. Fire under a copper pot spreads through the whole bottom like gossip through a sewing circle, and leaves no hot spots to scorch the mash.

Copper does a second piece of real alchemy. Sulfur rides up in the vapour of a boiling mash, bringing its rotten-egg and burnt-cabbage reeks, and bright copper grabs it and holds it fast. It works best where hot vapour touches the metal: in the cap, the vapour pipe, and the worm. Never put galvanized iron in the hot path. Its zinc leaches into a sour wash, and heated zinc gives off fumes that bring on the shakes and a fever. And never use lead, at any time, for any part.

The Old Method, Jar by Jar

Take this as history and learning only, for making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States. For a five-gallon batch the old-timers cooked about eight pounds of cracked corn in five gallons of water, stirring hard so it would not scorch. Corn is all starch, and yeast cannot eat starch. So they cooled it to about a hundred and fifty degrees and stirred in two pounds of malted barley, whose diastase turns starch to sugar. Next they cooled it to about eighty, blood-warm, pitched the yeast, and kept it warm with air moving over it. In three to five days the bubbling stopped and left a sour, beery wash.

The first run went hard and gave weak, cloudy low wines. The second went slow over a low, steady fire, caught in small jars set in order on the shelf like teeth in a jaw. The foreshots smell like a varnish pot and carry methanol, the wood spirit that blinds and kills. Throw them out, every drop, and then some more. The harsh, solventy heads go out too. Keep the sweet, clean hearts, and set the oily tails aside for the next run. Judge every jar by your nose and tongue, never by the clock or by greed. Alcohol vapour burns invisible, so keep your joints tight, a bucket of water and a sack of sand at hand, and never walk away from a running still. When the run is done, scrub the copper bright, for crusted copper is only an expensive bucket.

Ashes, Oak, and Two Fool's Tests

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asks whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg really clean out bad heads. Hickory ash is mostly potash. It reacts with some of the sour acids, but it cleans out nothing and only turns your liquor halfway to lye soap. Nothing tossed into a thump keg separates the methanol. Only cutting away the foreshots and heads does that. Red oak gives a little colour and tannin, but its pores run open end to end. White oak's are plugged with tyloses, which is why it holds liquor. So red oak shavings look like the genuine article right up until everything you care about leaks out the bottom.

Lastly, two myths. Biting a coin proves nothing, because lead is softer than gold, and a gilded lead slug bites like a sugarplum. Weigh your coin and ring it on a plank instead. The blue flame test is rubbish as well, since wood spirit burns blue just like good spirit does. The only safe test is good copper, honest joints, and honest cuts, so that no man can say your liquor, like a crooked fellow, was cast and not struck. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.