Weaver, who had no previous background in whiskey history, knew more about the origins of Jack Daniel’s than the company itself. With a sampling of her estimated 10,000 documents and artifacts spread across a table between them, it quickly became obvious that Ms. McCallum, the brand president, in the makeshift office she had set up in a run-down house on her newly acquired farm. Nothing stays quiet in Lynchburg (population 6,319) for long, especially when it involves the biggest employer in town, and by late March Ms. “We knew it in our family, even if it didn’t come from the company.” “It’s something my grandmother always told us,” said Debbie Ann Eady-Staples, a descendant of Green who lives in Lynchburg and has worked for the distillery for nearly 40 years. Through dozens of conversations, local people, many of whom worked or still work for Jack Daniel’s, told her about learning Green’s story from their parents and grandparents, holding it as fact even as the company kept silent. Weaver discovered an unwritten history, hidden in forgotten archives, vacant land and the collective memory of the town’s black residents. What was meant to be a quick trip to Lynchburg turned into a monthslong residency, as Ms.
Green, already adept at distilling, took Daniel under his wing and, after the Civil War and the end of slavery, went to work for him in his fledgling whiskey operation. Weaver, Green was rented out by his owners, a firm called Landis & Green, to farmers around Lynchburg, including Dan Call, a wealthy landowner and preacher who also employed a teenager named Jack Daniel to help make whiskey. Green’s story changes all that by showing how enslaved people likely provided the brains as well as the brawn in what was an arduous, dangerous and highly technical operation.Īccording to Ms. Even as black innovators in Southern cooking and agriculture are beginning to get their due, the tale of American whiskey is still told as a whites-only affair, about Scots-Irish settlers who brought Old World distilling knowledge to the frontier states of Tennessee and Kentucky. The company’s decision to recognize its debt to a slave, first reported last year by The New York Times, is a momentous turn in the history of Southern foodways. McCallum, the president of Jack Daniel’s Brands at Brown-Forman, said in an interview. “It’s absolutely critical that the story of Nearest gets added to the Jack Daniel story,” Mark I. She even discovered that Green’s real name was Nathan Nearest (not Nearis, as has often been reported) was a nickname. Through that research, she also located the farm where the two men began distilling - and bought it, along with a four-acre parcel in the center of town that she intends to turn into a memorial park. By her count, she has collected 10,000 documents and artifacts related to Daniel and Green, much of which she has agreed to donate to the new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington. Weaver believes is the first black master distiller in America.
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Scouring archives in Tennessee, Georgia and Washington, D.C., she created a timeline of Green’s relationship with Daniel, showing how Green had not only taught the whiskey baron how to distill, but had also gone to work for him after the Civil War, becoming what Ms. She rented a house in downtown Lynchburg, and began contacting Green’s descendants, dozens of whom still live in the area.
Weaver dug in, determined to uncover more about Green and persuade Brown-Forman to follow through on its promise to recognize his role in creating America’s most famous whiskey. “I went on three tours of the distillery, and nothing, not a mention of him,” she said. But when she got to Lynchburg, she found no trace of Green. Determined to see the changes herself, she was soon on a plane from her home in Los Angeles to Nashville.
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