Hi Y'all - Terra made me feel guilty so thought I'd better add something to the list before you all forget me. Our discussion about stills in pioneer estates has had me wondering exactly how they built a still and what all the copper tubing was for, so I was thrilled to find a good explanation in a novel I'm reading, one of those 3 generation stories, by Henry Morton Robinson, copyright 1960 and reprinted 1978, title - "Water of Life" about a brewery family. I hope this doesn't raise havoc with the list, Mike, but from what I've learned to make a really good still required a little money so the poorest pioneers probably couldn't afford it. It seems to be something the larger plantations would do, using left over corn from their annual corn harvest once a year to make corn liquor that would last most of the year. And there was no waste in this process. Morton begins: "There was, of course a knack to making good whiskey. Even a skillful man using the best ingredients could produce a brutal liquor that made hog tracks all the way down your throat....." This man made his whiskey on the banks of the Ohio River in a fictitious county and he is touted a paid-up member of the oldest lodge in the world, the Ancient, Honorable and Self-Reliant Order of Husbandmen. He knew how to attract and capture a swarm of bees to take their honey, to dowse for water, and to make good, potable liquor. "...one could buy any quantity of the stuff for twenty-five cents a gallon - the only hitch being that a thrifty man with a cash income of seventy dollars a year didn't like to part with that kind of money. The usual practice was to lend a hand to some whiskey-making neighbor, borrow his 'receet', then go home and cook up a year's supply of whiskey at a cost of maybe two cents a gallon. Tax free, of course. ...the pot still that converts corn into alcohol has no moving parts. Distillation, like the seepage of glandular fluids into the blood stream, or the burning of oxygen in body cells, is as noiseless and mysterious as the chemistry of life itself. The belly (so to speak) of the still was a round-bottomed copper kettle supported trivet-wise by pylons of fieldstone. Past the kettle ran an inclined sluiceway of rough planks; cold water from the creek raced down this trough, eddied around a coil of tubing - an ingenious twist of copper known as the 'worm' - a device of singing fust below the wheel and lever in the choir of human inventions. ...maple bucket in each hand ...(he) began transferring the contents of his mash tub into the copper kettle...kindled the hickory faggots (under the pot) with a spark from his tinderbox ... and began stirring its contents with a barrel stave. " CONTINUED: