Nathan Nearest Green was an enslaved distiller who taught young Jack Daniel to make Tennessee whiskey. Green became the first master distiller for Jack Daniel's Distillery in 1866.
Nathan Nearest Green rose from the inhumanity of slavery to lift American spirits around the world. Green lived in bondage in the years before the Civil War. He operated a farmhouse distillery for minister slave owner and grocery-store operator Dan Call in Lynchburg, Tennessee. It was there that the middle-aged, African-American distiller taught a poor, hardworking and curious pre-teen Scots-Irish boy named Jack Daniel how to make whiskey on a barnyard still in backwoods America.
But Green's influence is gaining wider audience now, thanks in large part to Nearest Green Distillery in Shelbyville, Tennessee, which has earned critical acclaim for its products and praise for its devotion to whiskey history since opening in 2017. 'Nearest Green is definitely the godfather of Tennessee whiskey,' Fawn Weaver, founder of Nearest Green Distillery, said in a 2019 interview with FOX Business.
Daniel’s mother died soon after he was born, no more than a few months later. He was about 10 years old when he went to work for Minister Call; and he was around 15 when his father, serving in the Confederate army, died of pneumonia in 1863. Jack Daniel was a teenage orphan. 'He worked as a chore boy for the preacher ─ milking cows, feeding slop to the pigs, getting water from the springhouse and all the other things farm hands do,' according to NearestGreen.com.
There has never been a drop of Jack Daniel's made without a member of the Green family working somewhere in the company,' said whiskey historian Cowdery. Jack Daniel’s today is owned by international wine and spirits conglomerate Brown-Forman. It manages a vast complex of global trade, distribution and marketing logistics. 'It really is a huge company,' said Cowdery. 'But at the distillery in Lynchburg, it really is local people working there for years.
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