When Jack Daniel’s Failed to Honor a Slave, She Stepped In
“It’s absolutely critical that the story of Nearest gets added to the Jack Daniel story,” Mark
I. McCallum, the president of Jack Daniel’s Brands at Brown-Forman, said in an interview.
Scouring archives in Tennessee, Georgia and Washington, D. C., she created a timeline of Green’s relationship with Daniel, showing how Green had not only taught the whiskey baron how to distill,
but had also gone to work for him after the Civil War, becoming what Ms. Weaver believes is the first black master distiller in America.
Green’s existence had long been an open secret, but in 2016 Brown-Forman, the company
that owns the Jack Daniel Distillery here, made international headlines with its decision to finally embrace Green’s legacy and significantly change its tours to emphasize his role.
LYNCHBURG, Tenn. — Fawn Weaver was on vacation in Singapore last summer when she first read
about Nearest Green, the Tennessee slave who taught Jack Daniel how to make whiskey.
With a sampling of her estimated 10,000 documents and artifacts spread across a table between them, it quickly became obvious
that Ms. Weaver, who had no previous background in whiskey history, knew more about the origins of Jack Daniel’s than the company itself.
