Honoring the Enslaved Man Who Made Jack Daniel’s First Whiskey
Uncle Nearest is building a fast-growing brand inspired by the first Black master distiller.
Barrels at Nearest Green Distillery in Shelbyville, Tennessee.
Photographer: Joseph Smith for Bloomberg Businessweek
In 1864 a Tennessee farm boy named Jack Daniel started cooking up whiskey. His mentor and guide in that process was an enslaved man named Nathan Green—known to most folks in the area as Uncle Nearest—who’d mastered the craft of distilling on a plantation. The two became friends, and after emancipation, Daniel hired Green to run the distillery he opened in the small town of Lynchburg, a job Green held for more than a decade. But over the next century, even as Jack Daniel’s became one of the biggest whiskey labels on the planet, Nearest Green’s name was forgotten.
Fawn Weaver is changing that. In 2016 the historian and entrepreneur stumbled on Green’s story and a year later founded a company to honor him. She soon bought and began restoring the farm in Lynchburg where Green worked as Daniel’s first master distiller, a position he later bequeathed to his sons. In 2019, Weaver purchased a horse farm 16 miles to the north, in Shelbyville, and built the Nearest Green Distillery.