The Town Around the Distillery

Jack Daniel's sits in a hollow just south of the courthouse square, outside the compact downtown but inside the consolidated government that Lynchburg shares with Moore County. Lynchburg is a county seat of about sixty-five hundred residents, counting the whole county, with a genuine courthouse square that has changed relatively little in outward appearance since the late nineteenth century. The Moore County Courthouse, a modest brick building with a small cupola, has anchored the square for generations.

Around it are shops, a restaurant or two, a barbershop, and the kind of commerce that a small Tennessee county seat has always needed. The brick buildings facing the square hold some souvenir shops oriented toward the whiskey tourists, which gives the square a slight double identity: practical market town for the surrounding farm families and stage set for visitors who came to see the hollow. Moore County remains orchard and livestock country.

Small cattle farms and row crop fields cover the rolling terrain between the limestone ridges, and the drainages run clear through hollows lined with cedar and poplar. Miss Mary Bobo's Boarding House on the square has been serving family-style Tennessee midday dinners to visitors since the early twentieth century, with dishes such as fried chicken, country ham, and vegetables cooked long and slow in the Southern manner. Reservations fill months in advance, which is one indicator of how far a county of about sixty-five hundred people can punch in the economy of American food tourism when it has the right whiskey in its hollow.