Two-Faced Wilkins: How I Counterstamped a Rare 1799 Large Cent

Gentle reader, you know already that I make whiskey. The county has known it a good while. What I set down here is a worse sin than that. It is the greatest blunder of all my years at the anvil: the day I struck my name on the wrong coin. Barnaby, my black bear, is grumbling at his chain outside the window as I write, as loud and as much in the way of honest business as any selectman. Let him grumble. Every blow of a punch on copper costs a man a little of his good name, and one blow cost me the whole of mine.

The Copper in a Yankee's Pocket

To understand my disgrace you must first understand the pocket change of this Republic. For sixty-odd years from 1793 the American cent was a big fat copper the size of a Sunday biscuit. From 1796 it weighed one hundred and sixty-eight grains, and any storekeeper worth his flour barrel kept a little brass balance on the counter to prove it. In February of 1857 Congress lost its nerve and did away with the large cent, and with the half cent too. In their place came a skinny cent of eighty-eight parts copper and twelve parts nickel, with an eagle flying across it as though running from the tax man. In '59 came the Indian Head, and last year, in '64, they turned it to bronze, thinner still: ninety-five parts copper, the rest tin and zinc. In the same year they gave us a two-cent piece, I suppose because one cent will no longer buy anything.

The same Act of 1857 stripped the Spanish silver of its standing as lawful money. In New England a real was a 'ninepence' and a half real a 'fourpence-ha'penny,' while in New York the very same coins passed for a shilling and a sixpence, a New Yorker being unable to agree even with himself about money. Mixed in with all of it were the bungtowns, lightweight counterfeit British halfpence bearing old King George's fat face, passed off as cents from Portsmouth to Providence. They take their name from Bungtown, the old name for part of Rehoboth in Massachusetts, a place I have never visited and will never forgive.

And what has this to do with the distiller? Copper, my friends, the same copper. For years the Mint bought its cent blanks from Mr. Matthew Boulton's works in Birmingham, England. Then in 1801 Paul Revere, the very same who rode at midnight, opened a copper rolling mill at Canton, Massachusetts, and Yankee sheet copper went to shipyards, to coppersmiths, and to a good many still-houses that never sent Mr. Revere a word of thanks. Today the great American copper comes from the Keweenaw mines in the Lake Superior country of Michigan, down the lakes through the Sault canal opened in '55, then east by rail and wagon. The same red metal goes into the Treasury's purse and into a Merrimack County still pot, and no coppersmith I ever met could swear which way a given sheet was bound.

When the big cent died, every banker, parson and schoolmaster with a cigar box suddenly turned collector. The American Numismatic Society began in New York in '58, the Boston Numismatic Society in 1860. Mark those Boston gentlemen well, for one of them ruined me.

A Deacon's Molar and a Worn Cent

In the spring of '63 Deacon Ebenezer Cate came to me holding his jaw as though he carried a hornet's nest in his mouth. The lower left molar was as black as a stove lid. I strapped him in the chair, applied the forceps, and the tooth came out with a sound like a boot pulled from spring mud: three hooked roots and a piece of the Deacon's jaw he was not using anyhow. He bled upon my apron, my floor and my cat, and when he could speak again he paid me, partly in coppers. One of them was worn so smooth I could read no date on it at all. Liberty's face was as smooth as a river stone and the reverse was all but gone.

I did what I always did with a worn copper. I laid it on the anvil and struck it: 'G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H.,' square across the reverse where it had once said ONE CENT. I spent it at the store on Main Street for a plug of tobacco and thought no more about it.

Eight months later a letter appeared in the Concord paper. Mr. Hosea Philbrick of the Boston Numismatic Society, who keeps a summer house up past the lake, had found my cent in a Pittsfield change drawer. Under his glass, beneath the worn date, he found a nine punched over an eight. Seventeen ninety-nine, the rarest cent this Republic ever made, and I had branded my name across its backside like a farmer branding a heifer. He called me a 'tooth-drawing vandal' and my mark 'vulgar,' though that stamp is the finest lettering in Merrimack County.

A counterstamp on a common worn cent makes a curiosity, and collectors fancy a bit of local colour. A counterstamp on a rare date is murder. It took that coin from a cabinet prize to a damaged freak. The schoolboys followed me down the turnpike chanting 'Two-Faced Wilkins,' and of all the names I have been called, quack, drunk and Democrat among them, that is the only one that ever stuck. I earned it with a four-pound hammer.

The Agent, the Bear, and the Pouch

Philbrick sent an agent up from Boston to learn whether I had 'vandalized' any more rare coppers: a tall, pinched fellow in a beaver hat, smelling of bay rum and contempt. He came round the back of the still-house without knocking, which is the one thing you must never do at Fort Wilkins, because that is as far as Barnaby's chain reaches. Barnaby rose on his hind legs, seven feet of black fur, and swatted the hat clean off, and a fair patch of scalp went with it. The agent ran for the turnpike bleeding down his collar, and Barnaby sat down and ate the hat, silk lining, maker's label and all.

When the dust settled, my coin pouch was gone from the stump by the door. Barnaby had eaten that too: seven stamped cents and a fourpence. I waited three days and panned his leavings like a forty-niner at the most disgraceful placer diggings in New England. I got back six cents and the fourpence, polished brighter than the Mint ever made them. The seventh is in him yet. As for the 1799, it lies on a velvet tray in Philbrick's Boston cabinet, labelled, I am told, 'Defaced by a Pittsfield tooth-drawer.' So I am in a museum after all.

What the Revenue Man Found in the Till

Not long since, Captain Donald Vance of Manchester, retired from the federal revenue service, called at Fort Wilkins. He respects a clean pot as much as he hates a poisonous one. He laid on my table a cent from a tavern till in Woodsville, taken after his men broke up a still in the hayloft above the taproom. It bore my mark, G. G. WILKINS, but the town read PITTSFEILD. Some teamster had cut a punch from an old file and forged my counterstamp without being able to spell my town. I have stamped coins drunk, in the dark, in a thunderstorm, with a bear licking my ear, and never once misspelled Pittsfield. The forgery is nailed over my door.

The Captain told me coins often betrayed a distiller. Under a still-house floor in Sanbornton he found a stoneware crock brim full of cents, every one carrying some storekeeper's mark: a dry-goods man in Laconia, a harness maker in Bristol, a grocer in Plymouth, a dozen more. He laid them out on the kitchen table like a map, and they told him where the whiskey had gone. A hard-shell distiller in Canaan paid his assessment with a sack of worn Spanish fourpences, swearing they were worth sixpence apiece. At the druggist's balance, weighed against good silver, they came up nearly a third short, and he paid the balance in forty pounds of maple sugar, which the Captain gave to the orphan asylum. And in Danbury a widow of eighty, doubting his badge, bit it as she would a gold piece, and left her last front tooth standing in the eagle like a fence post. 'Well, it is harder than I am,' she said, 'so it must be government.' In my trade we call that a successful extraction with an unusual fee.

Copper at the Apparatus

First the law. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and what follows is history and instruction. A man who has had a great scare over a cent thinks hard about metal. Never melt coins to patch a still. The bronze cent carries tin and zinc, the nickel cent carries nickel, and many a cheap bungtown carried lead. Defacing money for metal will put you before a magistrate besides. Build of clean, heavy, pure sheet copper, joined with silver solder or tight mechanical joints, and never lead.

Corn is starch, and yeast cannot eat starch. Crack the corn and cook it into a thick porridge, cool it until it will sting a finger but not scald it, and stir in malted barley or rye, for the malt turns the starch to sugar. Rest it covered an hour or more until it tastes sweet, then cool it to the warmth of new milk before pitching the yeast, lest you cook the yeast like an oyster. Ferment it in a warm, airy room several days until it stops talking and the cap falls. Charge your pot with the thin, sour wash and keep the fire low and steady. A hard boil spits mash into the head, and a leaking joint near open flame makes a bonfire of you. Never leave a running still.

The cuts are the whole religion, and each run is an experiment to be judged. From a five-gallon pot throw out the foreshots, the better part of a cup at the least, for they carry the wood spirit that blinds and kills. Throw out the heads too, which smell of the cabinetmaker's glue pot. When the smell sweetens like warm grain, those are the hearts. Then come the oily, wet-dog tails, set aside for the next run or thrown away. Catch the run in many small jars, line them up in order, and judge them by nose. Never be greedy about the heads. Copper earns its place by taking up the sulfur stink of the mash, which iron and tin will not do; that is why an old pot goes black and green, and why it must be scrubbed bright after every run.

Ash, Oak Shavings, and the Lying Bead

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asks whether his uncle is right that hickory ash or red oak shavings in the thump keg clean out bad heads. Water poured through hardwood ash gives lye, fine for soap and hominy and a poor thing for a doubler, where it may foam up and choke your line, and a choked line on a hot still costs men their eyebrows and their barns. The wood spirit comes off at the start of the run, and no ash, no shaving and no prayer will catch it. Only a man with the nerve to pour his foreshots and heads on the ground will. Red oak shavings lend colour, tannin and a woody taste, which is flavouring, not cleaning, and red oak is so porous the coopers will not make whiskey barrels of it.

As for the shaken bead: it tells you roughly how strong the spirit is and nothing more. The bubbles hang longest at about half alcohol and care not a particle whether wood spirit is present. A deadly batch may bead as prettily as a deacon's daughter's necklace. So I have stamped Rabbit a fresh worn cent, having checked the date under my glass first this time, and I bid you all the same counsel: keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low, and look at what lies on your anvil before you swing.