Lem Motlow and the Survival of the Distillery

Jack Daniel transferred the running of his distillery to his nephew Lemuel Motlow, known as Lem, around nineteen oh seven, and it was Lem who inherited the operation at Jack's death in nineteen eleven. Lem Motlow was born in eighteen sixty-nine and had spent years working alongside his uncle, learning the business from the inside. He came into his inheritance almost immediately facing a problem Jack had not had to deal with: the end of legal whiskey.

Tennessee passed statewide prohibition in nineteen ten, the year before Jack died. Lem moved his whiskey operations out of state, setting up production in Saint Louis, Missouri, a state that had a longer window before its own prohibition laws took effect. Then came national Prohibition in nineteen twenty.

Lem diversified into mule trading, a commerce that required no federal license. When Prohibition was repealed nationally in nineteen thirty-three, he came back to Tennessee and found that the state's own manufacturing ban had not yet been lifted. The state did not permit distilling again until nineteen thirty-seven, and Moore County held its own vote the following year to permit the distillery's return to its historic site.

Lem Motlow spent those years in Nashville, lobbying and building political relationships. He served in the Tennessee state senate while his home county was dry, a situation that his political opponents found useful to mention. Lem ran the distillery until his death in nineteen forty-seven.

Nine years later, his heirs sold controlling interest to the Brown-Forman Corporation of Louisville, Kentucky, which has owned Jack Daniel's ever since.