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Jan 30, 2020 · This enriched landscape is filled with a vast amount of history dating to the earliest of explorers and the American Indians to the statehood of 1796 and further into the Civil War and present day. Over the next several months, Piedmont Trails will explore the early trails leading into Tennessee.
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Names in Lawrence County 1850 census offer the possibility that James (aged 51) and Frederick Green (aged 40) were also sons. His son, John Green (1813-1869), was born in Georgia but came to Tennessee with his family when he was a child.
- Overview
- An Enslaved Distiller Shares His Knowledge With a Young Orphan
- Uncovering Nearest Green’s Story
Nathan 'Nearest' Green, who taught Jack Daniel the art of whiskey distillation, went unacknowledged for more than 150 years.
Jack Daniel’s stands as one of the most iconic American brands and most popular spirits in the world. Yet while the whiskey and its eponymous founder have become dominant names in American liquor lore, the person perhaps most responsible for its success—an enslaved man named Nathan “Nearest” Green, who taught Jack Daniel the art of whiskey distillation—went unacknowledged for more than 150 years.
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Researchers are discovering that the role enslaved people played in America’s early whiskey-making went beyond manual labor like gathering grain and building barrels. Distillation was notoriously laborious and tedious work, and some plantation owners—including George Washington and Andrew Jackson—used enslaved workers to run their distilleries.
The old office beside the Jack Daniel's cave on the grounds of the Jack Daniel's distillery.
Little is known about Green’s early years, beyond that he was born in Maryland in 1820. It’s not clear, for instance, if he was born into bondage or was enslaved later in life. What is clear is that, by the mid-1800s, Green had gained renown as a skillful whiskey distiller in Lincoln County, Tennessee—so much so that his enslavers, the Landis & Green company, often rented Green out to area farms and plantations eager to partake of his whiskey-making skills. It was in this capacity that Green met young Jasper “Jack” Daniel and forged what would become an iconic partnership.
Around 1850, Daniel, a 7-year-old orphan looking for work and escape from a tough family life, found his way to the property of Dan Call, a Lynchburg preacher, grocer and distiller who had been previously credited with teaching Daniel how to distill whiskey. While working as a laborer on Call’s farm, Daniel took an ardent interest in Call’s distillery. Eventually, after much badgering from the young Daniel, Call introduced him to Green, who he called “the best whiskey maker that I know of,” according to a 1967 biography, Jack Daniel’s Legacy. He instructed the enslaved man to teach the young boy his distilling magic.
Green taught Daniel “sugar maple charcoal filtering” (known today as the Lincoln County Process), a universally accepted critical step in the making of Tennessee whiskey. With this process, whiskey is filtered through wooden charcoal chips before being placed in casks for aging, a technique food historians believe was inspired by similar charcoal filtering techniques used to purify water and foods in West Africa. The process imparted a unique smoothness of flavor that set Jack Daniel’s whiskey apart from its competitors.
As years passed, Daniel continued to learn from Green, building a friendship with his mentor and eventually perfecting the Lincoln County Process and selling his whiskey throughout Lynchburg and in surrounding towns. By the time the Civil War began, Daniel had developed into an adept salesman, peddling his smooth brand of Tennessee whiskey to soldiers and cementing his varietal as the most popular in the area.
Once the war ended and emancipation came, Daniel bought Call’s distillery, renaming it after himself. Shortly after, Daniel opened a larger distillery on a nearby plot of land where Green’s sons Lewis, Eli and George also began work. Their employment began a tradition of more than seven generations of the Green family working either for or with the Jack Daniels brand.
So why, despite Green’s role, and Daniel’s seeming admiration for him, were his contributions obscured?
Early company record-keeping was notoriously spotty, making it easy for facts and histories to become obscured and forgotten.
“I don’t think it was ever a conscious decision” to leave the Greens out of the company’s story,” Phil Epps, the global brand director at Brown-Forman, told The New York Times in a 2016 interview. Brown-Forman bought Jack Daniel’s from the Daniel family in 1965 for $20 million (about $190 million in 2022 dollars).
But it took time before the company made that conscious decision to include Green.
Jack Daniel's company historian speaking in the old office of company founder Daniel on the grounds of the Jack Daniel's distillery, pointing to the photograph showing Daniels and Green, 2018.
In 2016, as the brand’s 150th anniversary approached, the company began gathering ideas on how to finally pay it due to Green. It vowed—via distillery tours, social media posts, and official company histories—to begin acknowledging Green’s role.
This 1919 Craftsman-style bungalow in West Tennessee has been transformed into the Alex Haley Museum, where visitors can sit on that same broad front porch, sharing their own stories.
When James Gideon Green was born on 26 January 1849, in Lawrence, Tennessee, United States, his father, Frederick Green, was 40 and his mother, Rutha Dial, was 34. He married Martha Jackson Taylor on 30 July 1874, in Weakley, Tennessee, United States.
- Male
- Martha Jackson Taylor
A coffle of slaves being marched from Virginia west into Tennessee, c. 1850. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Virginia. When Delores...
Frederick William Green (March 31, 1911 – March 1, 1987) was an American swing jazz guitarist who played rhythm guitar with the Count Basie Orchestra for almost fifty years. Early life and education. Green was born in Charleston, South Carolina on March 31, 1911.
