Evan Williams: The Myth and the Man

A number of years ago in a visit to Bardstown, Kentucky, I visited the Heaven Hill Distillery and took a tour.  The final stop was the end of an automated line where the filled bottles received their labels and were boxed for shipment.  That day the fifths were all labeled “Evan Williams.”  Determined to find out why this individual merited his own brand, I did some research and found that there are two Evan Williams:  One of myth and one of reality.

Since no one has the least idea of what Williams looked like, his picture above, manufactured by Heaven Hill, belongs in the myth category, as do ads purporting to tell his story.  Shown here, a 1957 offering from the National Distillers Products Company headlined:  “Little did Evan Williams know what he was starting.”  The illustration is of a tall, rawboned pioneer watching as his distillery is being built.  It goes on:   “Evan Williams came down to Kentucky from Pennsylvania and set up a small distillery in 1783.  He had heard of the limestone springs of crystalline purity….As he set about his distilling, little did Evan Williams know he was starting a quiet revolution—that this still was to be the birthplace of truly American whiskey—Kentucky bourbon.”

Using the same timeline, in 1983 Heaven Hill celebrated the 200th Anniversary of the vaunted distillery by a magazine ad that headlined:  “Evan Williams started a quiet revolution in 1783.”  Again there was an illustration of a rugged pioneer watching as his distillery is constructed.  This ad declares:  “His was not a large distillery but the ideas he conceived were so revolutionary and so successful that all others have spent the last 200 years matching the rich unique taste he discovered on the Kentucky frontier.”

A historical marker, cannily sponsored by Heaven Hill, is more cautious in its claims but still anoints Williams with the first commercial distillery in Kentucky. Located on Louisville’s “Whiskey Row,” where many major distillers have their headquarters, the Evan Williams Bourbon Experience is a museum cum micro-distillery, event space, and sales shop that claims 100,000 visitors annually.  A stop on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, it perpetuates the mythical Evan Williams. 

Facts about the “real” Evan Williams, though they are few, are not a tidy fit with the myth.  He was born in Pembrokeshire, Wales, about the middle of the 18th Century.  As shown on the map here, the district is a peninsula jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean.  The town itself is an ancient one with remnants of ancient castles and fortifications scattered about.  

The real Evan Williams may have looked more like the drawing here than other depictions.  Rather than being tall, Williams may have been like his fellow Welshmen, quite short.  In World War one, the men of the 17th Welsh Regiment ranged between five feet and five feet three inches in height.  Unlike neighboring Scotland distilling was not a common occupation in Wales.  Thus, it is unclear where Williams learned the craft.

Historian Michael Veach of the Filson Historical Society disputes the much quoted 1783 date identifying Williams as Kentucky’s first distiller.  He points out that the year was first identified more than century after Williams’ death by an amateur Kentucky historian.   Veach explains: “For one thing, the dating is disproved by the existence of a receipt for William’s passage from London to Philadelphia on the ship Pigoe dated May 1,1884.”  Moreover, he says, others were distilling in Kentucky as early as 1779.

We have no way of knowing how long Williams stayed in Philadelphia.  By the late 1780s he was in Louisville, at the time a small town on the banks of the Ohio River.  He initially operated a small still there buying corn from local farmers who often had problems disposing of their surplus crops.  As the historical marker indicates, Williams may have been the first to market his whiskey outside Louisville by sending barrels by flatboat down the Ohio River.  By 1801 he was recorded operating three whiskey stills at 141, 130 and 93 gallons capacity.

The identification as bourbon in the ads and elsewhere of what Williams distilled is bogus. His whiskey would have been sold just as it came out of the still, what we would call “moonshine” or white lightning.  Bourbon is aged in charred barrels.  That technique had not yet been discovered.  Far from the “rich unique taste” claimed in the 1983 ad, Williams is said to have had “a rocky start.” According to whiskey historians:  “Early drinkers would rely on the beverage as ‘a good medicine for chills and fever,’ but decried it as ‘bad whiskey.'”

Williams soon ran into problems with local authorities.  Although Kentucky was something of a frontier, it also was a clone of highly regulated Virginia.  When the distiller claimed the right to sell his whiskey without a license, a grand jury in 1788 indicted him for the offense.  The latter day descriptions of William’s operation also ignore an action against the distiller that condemned his practice of dumping his discharge water, spent mash and other smelly byproducts into the Ohio River.  “Ironically, Williams himself was serving as Louisville’s elected harbormaster and was in charge of the wharf’s cleanliness at the time.”

Louisville Harbor 1780s

William’s run-ins with local authorities do not seem to have darkened his reputation in Louisville.  As harbormaster he facilitated the teeming river traffic traveling the Ohio River, unloading and reloading past the falls at Louisville and shipping onward to the Mississippi and New Orleans.  Shown here, the harbor was small and needed close supervision to avoid traffic jams. Williams enforced a regulation stipulating that all boats had to be unloaded and moved out of the harbor within forty-eight hours after their arrival.  Williams also was one of Louisville’s seven elected trustees.  He is said regularly to have brought a bottle of his whiskey to meetings to share with his fellow trustees.  It reportedly was always empty by the end of the meeting.

Both ads above depicting Williams have one legitimate feature.  They show him with a rolled up paper that contains the plans for his distillery.  The distiller was a builder and very likely would have been involved with such drawings.  Williams also was a master stonemason who oversaw the construction of the first jail and courthouse in Louisville.  I can find no reference to a wife or family for Williams and he may have been a lifelong bachelor.  He died on October 15, 1810, and was buried a local cemetery. 

Williams was rescued from the obscurity that surrounds most of the earliest Kentucky distillers when in 1957 Heaven Hill introduced a brand of bourbon named for him.  When I go to my liquor cabinet this weekend to make Manhattans, the whiskey that comes to hand will be a bottle of Evan Williams.  The contents bear little resemblance to the product made by its namesake and in spite of the bald fictional history,  the whiskey makes a tasty cocktail.

Notes:  Important among the sources for this post were an internet article by Historians Kate Sowada and Christopher Beebout who filled in many details about Evan William’s life, and Michael Veach in his book “Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey:  An American Heritage,” University of Kentucky Press, 2013.