When William “Billy” Pearson left South Carolina as an outcast for Tennessee in 1812, he took with him four of his children, a few personal items, and as his most valuable possession, a recipe for making whiskey inherited from his grandmother. That recipe eventually is said to have found its way to a man named Jack Daniel and the rest is history. At left is an artist’s representation of what Pearson might have looked like.

An alternate story reputedly has Billy Pearson growing up in Pennsylvania and at the time of the Revolutionary War joining the 1st Battalion, Philadelphia Troops Militia. Only later, according to this account did he move with his family to South Carolina. My own research tends to discount that history. In any case, the stories come together in 1777 when at the age of sixteen Billy got married in South Carolina — apparently this was not an uncommon age for a young Quaker to wed. His wife was Sarah Jones Jacks, already a widow at nineteen. She had been married to Edmund Jacks, a revolutionary sympathizer who had been killed by British Loyalists.
Not long after their marriage, Pearson managed to get into his first scrape. His descendant told the story: “In late 1777 or early 1778, Billy had a mare stolen from him. He managed to get hold of a gun (the Quakers or Society of Friends did not believe in force or fighting and were strictly "Pacifist") and went after the horse-thief threatening to use the gun if the occasion required. On March 23rd, 1778 he was condemned in the meeting for his misconduct.” As a result Billy was ejected from the Quaker Church.

Meanwhile Billy and Sarah were having children. Beginning in 1778, they subsequently produced four boys and four girls, including one daughter who died in infancy. No longer welcome in the Quaker Church, Pearson and his family joined the Baptist Church of Padgett’s Creek, South Carolina. Shown here, the Church now is on the National Register of Historic Places.
When Billy’s father died in 1780, he inherited 200 acres of farm land and five sheep. But his mother would bestow on him something that would prove to be even more valuable. From her mother, a woman named Mary Stout Jacocks, Tabitha Pearson had received a formula for making whiskey that she passed along to Billy. As his descendant tells it: “Billy improved the formula and began making a very smooth sipping whiskey from a corn-mash, filtered through charcoal made from hard sugar-maple wood, and aged in oak barrels.” He found ready customers for Grandma’s whiskey from a local clientele.
That success also got him in trouble a second time with a church. The members of the Padgett’s Creek Baptist Church greatly frowned upon drinking any alcoholic beverage. Making and selling it were even worse. Pearson was hauled before the Baptist elders in August 1791. They recorded: “Met in Church Meeting and Laboured with William Pearson about the principle of falling from Grace [i.e. making whiskey] & he held his principle and refused to go with the Church in their standing, and Excommunicated for the same & his hard Spirit with the Church” Having been thrown out of two local church congregations, Pearson with his alleged “hard spirit” continued to make and sell hard spirits.
With the death of Mother Tabitha and increasingly rocky relations with wife Sarah, about 1812 Pearson organized a wagon train and headed over the Appalachian Mountains to Tennessee, taking his four older children with him. Sarah stayed behind with the four youngest and eventually divorced Billy. He bought land and settled at Big Flat Creek in what became Bedford County, not far from Lynchburg. A true pioneer, Pearson is credited with building the fourth log cabin in the area, located at the foot of Bobo Hill, named for another pioneer, Washington T. Bobo. The first log cabin built there was by James Gowen, a Virginian with ties to Martha Washington; the second was by Davey Crockett and the third was the Territorial Courthouse in what was then still Indian Territory.




Over the years several claims have been made about teaching Jack Daniel how to make whiskey. [See my post on Hop Lee, April 2014.] Some validation of the Pearson family claim about grandma’s recipe can be found in a letter on Jack Daniels letterhead to a Pearson descendant, dated September 26, 2003. The letter was written by Joe Rossman, director of the Daniel’s Visitor Center in Lynchburg. In it Rossman says: “If your Billy Pearson did indeed sell his grandmother’s recipe for making whiskey to Alfred Eaton, then the Lincoln County Process” using sugar maple charcoal, which in the hollow is now called our “charcoal mellowing process,” has an even more fascinating history than some of us have imagine. And Mrs. Mary Stout (Jacocks) of Bucks County, PA, deserves to be warmly remembered for her early distilling skills back in the mid-1700s.”
The Jack Daniels letterhead, shown here, features the motto: “Whiskey made as our fathers made it.” Perhaps it should be amended to say: “Whiskey as Billy’ Pearson’s grandma made it.”
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