Lynchburg and the Whiskey You Cannot Buy Here
Near Lynchburg, Tennessee
Moore County, Tennessee is a small rolling county in the limestone hills of middle Tennessee, home to roughly sixty-five hundred people and one of the most famous whiskey distilleries in the world. Its county seat is Lynchburg, a town of a few thousand residents arranged around a traditional Tennessee courthouse square. The county was named for William Moore, a state politician of the early nineteenth century.
The town's own naming is disputed: some sources credit a local settler named John Lynch, others say Thomas Lynch, and the historical record does not settle the question. What Lynchburg is known for around the world has nothing to do with any of its founding families. In eighteen sixty-six, a young man named Jasper Newton Daniel registered a whiskey distillery in a hollow south of town, drawing on a cold cave spring for his water and on a method of charcoal filtering that his mentor had taught him.
That registration is the oldest distillery registration on record in the United States. Jack Daniel's is now the best-selling American whiskey in the world, exported to more than one hundred sixty countries. The county has a paradox at its center that surprises nearly every first-time visitor.
Moore County is a dry county. The sale of alcoholic beverages in retail stores or across a bar has been illegal in Moore County for most of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The county that makes the world's most famous whiskey cannot legally sell that whiskey in its own grocery stores or restaurants.
The distillery operates under a series of special dispensations that allow it to give tastings and to sell certain commemorative products at the gift shop, making the distillery the only place in the county where you can legally buy alcohol. It is a particular and enduring irony of Tennessee law. The town of Lynchburg is pleasant and unhurried.
The Moore County Courthouse, a brick building with a small cupola, stands at the center of the square, and around it are a handful of shops, a restaurant or two, and enough Jack Daniel's signage to make the brand's ownership of the town's identity clear. The main reason most people come to Lynchburg is the hollow to the south, and what it has been making for a hundred and sixty years.
