Georgetown, Kentucky: The Baptist Preacher Who May Have Invented Bourbon

Georgetown, the county seat of Scott County, sits just north of Lexington along a stretch of the Bluegrass that was settled in the turbulent years when Kentucky was still part of Virginia and the frontier was genuinely dangerous. The town's founder was a Baptist preacher named Elijah Craig, who led his congregation here from Virginia in seventeen eighty-two, established a settlement he called Lebanon, and within a few years had built mills, a paper manufactory, a school that eventually became Georgetown College, and a distillery.

It is that distillery that made Craig's name famous two centuries after his death. Local tradition, first recorded in an eighteen seventy-four history of Kentucky, holds that Craig was the first distiller to age whiskey in new charred oak barrels, a practice that is now legally required to produce straight bourbon. The story says the charring was accidental, that Craig had used fire to reclaim old barrels and liked what the char did to the flavor. Historians debate whether this is true. Bourbon historian Michael Veach, among others, has argued the evidence is thin and that charred barrels were already appearing in Kentucky distilling by the eighteen twenties at the latest, making Craig's specific claim unverifiable. But the tradition is old and persistent, and the bourbon brand bearing his name keeps the story alive on every shelf that carries it.

The town was renamed Georgetown in seventeen ninety, in honor of President George Washington, and became the seat of Scott County when Kentucky achieved statehood in seventeen ninety-two.

Two hundred years after Craig's distillery, Georgetown made news for a different kind of economic transformation. In nineteen eighty-six, Toyota selected Scott County farmland as the site of its first North American manufacturing plant. The Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky facility opened in nineteen eighty-eight and grew into the largest Toyota plant in the world, employing about ten thousand workers and producing more than fifteen million vehicles over the decades since. A small Kentucky county seat founded by a Baptist preacher became a pillar of Japanese auto manufacturing in America.