Nathan "Nearest" Green: The Enslaved Man Who Taught Jack Daniel

The process that makes Tennessee whiskey legally distinct from Kentucky bourbon is called the Lincoln County Process. It requires filtering the newly distilled spirit through charcoal before it goes into the barrel. The filtering softens the whiskey and gives it the character that a century and a half of marketing has attached to a single name: Jack Daniel.

What that marketing did not mention, for most of that time, was who developed the process. The man who taught Jasper Newton Daniel the Lincoln County Process was Nathan Green, who went by Nearest. When they met, Nathan Nearest Green was enslaved at the farm of a preacher named Dan Call, from whom Daniel was also learning to distill. Green was the one who knew the process. Daniel was the student.

After emancipation, Nearest Green continued working at the distillery as a free man. His sons and grandsons worked there too, generation after generation, and some of his descendants were still employed there in the twentieth century. None of that appeared in the official history that the Jack Daniel Distillery told about itself. It was a story about a man named Jack, and the other man was not in it.

In two thousand sixteen, a reporter for the New York Times named Clay Risen followed family oral accounts into the distillery's records and wrote about what he found. The distillery, owned by Brown-Forman, acknowledged Green's role. Fawn Weaver, an entrepreneur who had read that story, researched the history further and in two thousand seventeen founded the Uncle Nearest brand, which is now one of the fastest-growing American whiskey brands and centers its entire identity on the man who started the practice.

The Jack Daniel Distillery has since incorporated Nearest Green into its own interpretive history. What the Lincoln County Process actually owes, and to whom, is no longer erased. It took a hundred and fifty years to put the right name on it.