Jasper Newton Daniel, Who Called Himself Jack

The man whose name is on the most famous bottle of Tennessee whiskey was, by most accounts, a small, neatly dressed, and quietly charismatic person who wore a wide-brimmed hat nearly every day of his adult life, never married, and had a gift for commerce that outpaced his formal education. Jasper Newton Daniel was born sometime around eighteen forty-eight or eighteen forty-nine in Moore County, the youngest of ten children. The exact year is a genuine uncertainty.

Jack apparently did not know with certainty when he was born and gave different answers at different times. He began learning distilling as a boy working for a man named Dan Call, a Lutheran minister who also operated a still and who employed an enslaved man to do the skilled distilling work. After the Civil War, Call gave up distilling for religious reasons, and Jack Daniel took over the operation, moving it to the hollow just south of the square and registering it with the federal government.

The company dates that to eighteen sixty-six, though his biographer found records pointing to eighteen seventy-five. He spent the next four decades building the operation into the most recognized distillery in America. Jack Daniel developed a talent for salesmanship and promotion, entering his whiskey in competitions and winning awards that he then used in his advertising.

He transferred the running of the distillery to his nephew Lem Motlow around nineteen oh seven. He died on October ninth, nineteen eleven, of blood poisoning that reportedly began when he kicked his office safe in frustration after forgetting the combination, injured his toe, and the infection worsened over the following years until it killed him.