Jack Daniel’s — Lynchburg’s Tennessee Whiskey

Jasper Newton “Jack” Daniel learned to distil as a boy in the Lynchburg area. His teacher was Nathan “Nearest” Green, an enslaved man and later a free employee who worked the stills on the farm where Daniel was taken in. For much of the twentieth century Green’s part in the story was rarely told.

In 2016 the company began formally recognising Green as its first master distiller. The brand gives 1866 as the year Daniel established his distillery, though historians have noted that surviving records of formal registration date from somewhat later.

Before ageing, the new spirit is filtered slowly through thick beds of sugar-maple charcoal, a step known as the Lincoln County Process. Jack Daniel’s is the best-known user of the technique, and Tennessee state law adopted in 2013 set out requirements for Tennessee whiskey that include it.

That step, rather than geography alone, is what separates Tennessee whiskey from bourbon in most discussions. It gave the brand a technical identity that it could explain on the label and in the distillery tour.

Tennessee adopted statewide prohibition in 1910, a decade before national Prohibition, and the Lynchburg distillery stopped producing. Lem Motlow, Daniel’s nephew, who had taken over the business in 1907, kept the company alive and restarted production in 1938.

Moore County itself remained dry for decades, creating the unusual situation of a world-famous whiskey made in a county where buying it was long restricted.

The square bottle, introduced in 1895, and the black label with its Old No. 7 name became the brand’s signature. Brown-Forman’s purchase of the company in 1956 gave it the resources to distribute that look across the world, and Jack Daniel’s grew into one of the best-selling American whiskeys internationally.