Women Moonshiners of New England and the Mountain South

A Debt Long Owing

Barnaby, my black bear, stood up on his chain this evening and grunted at a chickadee as though it were the county sheriff. He is as jumpy as a deacon in a dance hall. I mention him only because he and I are both bachelors of the Suncook, and so we are fit to say what the married men of this valley will not. The women of these hills deserve their due. Sisters, widows and gray-haired grandmothers ran more rye through New England and the mountain South than half the roosters who bragged about it in the tavern, and they did it with a baby on one hip and a ladle on the other. Every man in Merrimack County who boasts that he runs his own still has a wife at home who knows just where he hid the key, and why the jug is lighter than he left it.

The Tavern-Widow and the Kitchen Limbeck

Begin where the country began. In colonial days, when a man died of fever, a falling tree, or a cider-drunk tumble off his own barn roof, his widow got no pension. She got a mortgage and six hungry mouths. The county courts of New England then did a sensible thing, which does not happen often. They granted innholder and tavern licenses to widows, so that a poor woman might feed her brood by pouring for travelers. Up and down the old post roads stood Widow So-and-So's tavern, with cider in the cellar, rum on the shelf, and a cider brandy that could take the varnish off a church pew.

Do not suppose the women only poured what the men had made. Read the old household receipt books. The grandmothers of Portsmouth and Exeter kept little alembics and limbecks in their kitchens for distilling cordials, strong waters, and what they called simples, which were herb tinctures for colic and coughs and for the melancholy that comes with a New Hampshire February. Distilling was kitchen work, the same as putting up pickles, and the man of the house understood it no better than he understood a needle.

Then came the war of sixty-one to sixty-five. The boys marched off to the Virginia mud, and the women ran the farms, the gristmills, the cider presses, and the copper pot up behind the sugar house. A neighbor of mine up toward Barnstead, whom I shall call the Widow Tilton to spare her kin, kept her husband's rye going all four years while he served with the Twelfth New Hampshire. He came home with one good leg and a pension of eight dollars, and found the farm paid off and a new roof on the barn. When he asked how she had managed it, she told him to hush and eat his supper. I once asked her the secret of her rye myself. She said the first step was to stop asking her.

The Yankee women were not alone in it. In the Tennessee hills lived Mahala Mullins, a real woman, born in eighteen and twenty-four, who sold her brandy out of a cabin on Newman's Ridge. Legend says she grew so large she could not fit through her own door. When the deputies came to haul her to court, one of them is said to have reported her catchable but not fetchable, which is also how I would describe my bank account. They would have had to take the cabin apart log by log, and no county in the Union pays a deputy enough for carpentry.

The men never want to hear this part, but those women were often the more careful distillers. They had spent their lives nursing sick children and boiling linens. They knew a clean pot, and they knew a bad smell when they caught one. My own grandmother could out-swear a canal boatman and out-pray the minister, both in the same sermon, and I never once saw a dirty kettle in her kitchen.

The Revenue Man's Confession

This month I sat across from a man I would ordinarily set the bear on. Captain Donald Vance is a retired revenue officer who spent twenty-eight years tramping the White and Green Mountains with a badge and a bad attitude. I asked him plainly whether the ladies of the hills had ever made a fool of a federal man. He told me they made a career of it.

In the Kearsarge hills, word came that a widow, a little bird of a woman, was running rye. The Captain walked into her parlor and found six neighbor women around a quilting frame, stitching a wedding quilt for a niece. He searched the pantry, the cellar, the woodshed and the privy, found nothing, tipped his hat and went away. Ten years later, at that same niece's anniversary, the widow told him the condenser coil had been rolled up inside the quilting bolster the whole time, with six good Christian ladies sewing on top of it. No man alive has the courage to look under six Congregationalist ladies and a wedding quilt. I would sooner walk into Barnaby's den with a pork chop in my pocket.

Near Plymouth his office seized a grandmother's account book written out plain: knit four, purl two, cast off three. They spent a solid month on it, and a clerk from Concord was sure it was a cipher from the Rebellion. Half of it was. Purl two meant two jugs to the mill foreman, and knit four meant four to the Grange. The other half was an honest mitten pattern, and the judge's wife made a pair from the evidence copy and said they fit beautifully. A woman's knitting is the only cipher the federal government never cracked, and the only one that keeps your hands warm while it beats you.

The story that stings his pride most concerns three spinster sisters near Bristol, all past sixty and sharp as a hay knife. For two years there was never anything to find, until he worked out that the wash line was a signal. Red flannels meant revenue men on the road, and a single white apron meant the coast was clear. He only caught on because they hung their red flannels on a Tuesday, and no decent New Hampshire family washes on any day but Monday. When at last he rode up, the eldest was waiting on the porch with three cups of tea poured. "She said, You took your time, Captain. And I said, Ma'am, so did you." I believe that is the first time a federal man was out-scouted by underclothes.

In the Ossipee country his horse threw a shoe, and an old widow on the road asked him, since he was walking anyhow, to carry her basket of laundry up to the house. He carried it a mile uphill, with the sheets folded as neat as a hymnal, and she paid him in gingersnaps. Years later at a church supper she whispered to him that a five-gallon crock had been under those sheets, and that he had carried it past his own deputies himself. I have pulled teeth for less, and my patients were not half so grateful. Then the Captain gave me a confession I mean to stamp on a penny: "The women I dealt with were the careful ones. Clean pots, fair dealing, no lead in the joints. The dangerous outfits were run by fools in a hurry, and fools in a hurry are mostly men."

At the Apparatus: What the Grandmothers Knew

Now I put on my alchemist's apron. Remember that what follows is history and instruction, and that making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States. Treat your pot as the natural philosopher treats his retort: heat, vapour and copper make an experiment, and you are its observer.

The wash goes in the pot and the fire comes up slow, as patient as a widow waiting out a bad husband. The spirit does not come all at once. It comes in parts, and a distiller who cannot tell them apart is no distiller at all. First come the foreshots, sharp and smelling of solvent. Then come the heads, still carrying harsh, volatile matter that will split your skull and worse. Foreshots and heads go out: not into the jug, not into the cordial, not into a rinse for a sore tooth. Next come the hearts, sweet and clean, and those you keep. Last come the tails, oily and dull, and those are set aside. That is the whole gospel of the cuts. The women of these hills kept it better than the men, because they had buried enough children to have no patience with poison.

Copper does honest work as well. A bright copper surface takes the sulfur stink out of the vapour, but only if it is kept clean, and the careful women scrubbed their pots like company dishes. Every joint must be sound and free of lead. A man who solders a still with lead is no distiller. He is an undertaker drumming up trade. Mind the fire, too. Alcohol vapour burns, and a leaking still beside an open flame will turn your sugar house into a bonfire and your widow into a richer woman than you meant her to be. Never leave the pot untended, and keep the room aired.

Ashes, Oak and the Blue Spoon

A letter came from Cletus "Rabbit" Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina. His uncle swears the old-timers threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. I salute the uncle, who sounds like a man who has never let the truth spoil a good story.

Wood ash is potash, the very stuff every New England grandmother leached in a barrel to make lye for soap. Lye is caustic. It will burn your hands, and it will not separate one drop of bad heads from good. Heads come over early because of the way they boil, and the only cure is the distiller's judgment in throwing them out. Putting lye-ash in the thump keg is like scrubbing a Concord politician with soap: you raise a lather, and the rot stays underneath. Red oak is loaded with tannin, the same stuff that tans a hide. It will give your spirit color, a pucker and a woody taste, the color of tea and the manners of a horse blanket, but it will not take out the heads. The thump keg strengthens the run. It is neither a filter nor a confessor.

While the anvil is warm, here is another myth for the hammer. The old saying goes that if a lit spoonful of whiskey burns blue, the whiskey is safe. That is hogwash. The color of a flame will not show you lead, and it will not tell you whether some fool kept his heads. If a blue flame proved whiskey safe, every lightning-struck barn in Merrimack County would be a temperance hall. You judge a spirit by clean copper, sound joints and honest cuts, not by a parlor trick with a spoon. Tell your uncle, Rabbit, to keep his ashes for the soap kettle.

A Lawful Toast

So raise a glass, a lawful one, to the Widow Tilton, to the quilting ladies of Kearsarge, to the three sisters of Bristol and their Tuesday flannels, and to every grandmother who fed a family with nothing but a copper pot and her wits. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.