Weaver now serves as CEO of the company, with Victoria Eady-Butler, a descendant of Green’s, employed as the distillery’s master blender. Later that year she opened the Nearest Green Distillery in Shelbyville. By 2019 she had raised $40 million from investors to create Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey. This gave Weaver the idea to start her own whiskey company that honored Green’s legacy. They told her that “putting his name on a bottle, letting people know what he did, would be great.” Weaver was able to meet Green’s descendants during her research and asked them how they would like to see him honored. While Nearest Green and his descendants do appear to have been paid fairly by the Daniel family, they didn’t own any of the distillery – and, consequently, didn’t get any of those millions.įor decades, Nearest Green’s name, legacy and contribution to whiskey were largely unknown to anyone outside Lynchburg, Tennessee – even though, after the Civil War, according to census data, Nearest Green and his family owned sizable plots of land and were wealthier than many white families living in Lynchburg. In 1956, the family sold it to Brown-Forman for US$20 million dollars – about $190 million in today’s money. Jack Daniel and his descendants made a lot of money from their whiskey company over the years. Although no images of Nearest Green exist, a photograph shows one of his sons, George, sitting next to Jack Daniel.Īltogether, seven generations of Nearest Green’s family have worked for the Jack Daniel Distillery and continue to work there to this day. Nearest’s second-born and fourth-born sons, George and Eli, distilled whiskey on the Call Farm alongside Jack Daniel. Weaver discovered that sometime after 1881, Daniel moved his distillery to its current Cave Spring Hollow location, where several of Green’s children and grandchildren went to work for him.Ī statue of Jack Daniel in Lynchburg, Tenn. Daniel appointed Nearest Green, by then a free man, to be the Jack Daniel Distillery’s first master distiller, and thus the first Black master distiller on record in the United States. As Victoria Eady-Butler, Green’s descendant and former employee of Jack Daniel’s Distillery, noted that there would “ never have been Jack Daniel’s made without a Green on the property.”Īfter emancipation, Call sold his distillery to Jack Daniel. Eventually, he became Green’s apprentice and was taught the Lincoln County Process, which differentiates bourbon from Tennessee whiskey – making Nearest responsible for the Tennessee whiskey we know today. Years later, Jack Daniel, a 7-year-old white orphan, was sent to the Call farm to be a chore boy. This method – which some historians believe was inspired by the techniques of enslaved men and women who had used charcoal to filter their water and purify their foods in West Africa – gave Green’s whiskey a unique smoothness. Nearest was known as a skilled distiller who specialized in a process known as sugar maple charcoal filtering – also called the Lincoln County Process.
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