Foreword: Given the leadership of Protestant clergy in the movement to halt the making and sales of alcoholic beverages in the United State, it may come as a surprise that a few preachers were themselves distillers of whiskey. Following are vignettes of three such men, including one whose name today appears on a national selling brand.
Corn liquor distilled in central Virginia about 1620 has been cited as the first whiskey ever made in North America, sometimes hailed as “a predecessor to modern-day bourbon.” The distiller was George Thorpe (1576-1622), who came to the New World from England with the objective of converting the indigenous population to Christianity. It cost him his life.
Trained in British law and, by some accounts, an ordained priest of the Anglican Church, Thorpe arrived in The New World in March 1620. His contacts and reputation earned him immediate recognition as a leader at the Berkeley Hundred, a Virginia settlement on the James River. The newly arrived Englishman put his efforts toward making Berkeley function agriculturally. The colonists having been introduced to corn by the Indians, he looked to make the crop potable. Earlier settlers providently had brought a copper still. Thorpe set about to turn corn into alcohol. In December 1620 he wrote a friend: “Wee have found a waie to make soe good drink of Indian corn I have divers times refused to drink good stronge English beare and chose to drinke that.” Those spirits would have been clear in color and more akin to “moonshine” or “white lightening” than contemporary whiskey.
Thorpe also was charged with converting the Indians to Christianity. He seemed to score an early success when a chief of the Powhatan tribe named Opechancanough (meaning “Soul of White”) agreed to meet with him. The Indian seemed welcoming and open to converting to Christianity. Far from conversion, however, Opechancanough was the leading tribal voice for expelling white men from Native American territory. On the night of March 22, 1622, the Indians struck in a coordinated attack against English settlements along the James. An estimated 347 men, women and children were slaughtered. Among them was George Thorpe, apparently the object of particular fury, his mutilated body parts found strewn widely over the bloody ground.
Anointing Thorpe as America’s first distiller seems reasonable, since he apparently was the first to write about it. Whether his product is to be considered the forerunner of modern day whiskey requires examination. Author Patrick Evans-Hylton makes the case that Thorpe’s “corn beer” was a predecessor of bourbon. He cites an 1634 inventory of Thorpe’s estate in which a copper still with three small barrels of liquor were found, opened and drunk. At that point the contents had aged at least 12 years and likely had achieved some color from the wood. No longer just “moonshine,” the color of Thorpe’s spirits might have resembled bourbon even if the taste almost certainly did not.
***
Elijah Craig (1738-1808) was born in Orange County, Virginia. From his boyhood he displayed unusual intellectual gifts, with a strong streak of religiosity. Virginia was state where all residents were required by law to tithe to the Anglican Church and attend Anglican worship at least once a month. The official faith was deemed by elite Virginians as essential element of the Commonwealth’s social structure. Other theological ideas were in the air, however, with Baptists considered by many to be particularly dangerous.
Nevertheless, Craig was drawn to Baptist beliefs and in the mid-1860s began to hold meetings in his tobacco barn. In 1866, along with other family members, he was formally baptized. Full of fervor, he began to preach even though still a layman, resulting in his being jailed in Fredericksburg for several weeks for preaching without a license. Ordained in 1771 Craig became the pastor of a small Virginia church. Unwilling to submit to obtaining a license, he was jailed several more times. Following the American Revolution, Craig pulled up stakes in Orange County and led his congregation west to the newly formed “Kentucky County” in western Virginia. There he purchased 1,000 acres of land where he planned and laid out a town.
About 1789, Craig took his place in whiskey history by building a distillery, making use of the cold stream of pure water coming from a local spring, giving rise to a legend that the preacher “invented” bourbon. At the time, however, dozens of small farmer-distillers west of the Alleghenies were making whiskey from corn that some called “bourbon” to distinguish it from the rye whiskies coming from Pennsylvania and Maryland.
Nonetheless, the legend prevailed, repeated over and over. Whiskey guru Michael Veach has a plausible suggestion of how the Elijah Craig story got started: “He was an early Kentucky preacher and he was a distiller, and that is why in the 1870s when the distilling industry was fighting the temperance movement, they decided to proclaim him the father of bourbon. They thought, well, let’s make a Baptist preacher the father of bourbon, and let the temperance people deal with that.”
Heaven Hill Distilleries in Bardstown, Kentucky, is happy to perpetuate the bourbon legend. Elijah Craig bourbon whiskey is made in both 12-year-old "Small Batch" and 18-year-old "Single Barrel" formats. The latter is touted by the distillery as "The oldest Single Barrel Bourbon in the world at 18 years ….” It is said to be aged in hand selected oak barrels that lose nearly 2⁄3 of their contents through evaporation, known as the “Angel’s share.” Needless to say, Preacher Craig’s whiskey is pricey.
***
A Civil War soldier, farmer, store keeper, and lay preacher of the conservative Union Lutheran Church in Lois, Tennessee, Daniel Houston Call (1836-1904) might have fallen into the obscurity that history accords most of us, except for one decision. Faced with the question of hiring and harboring a 16-year-old orphan boy of uncommonly small stature, Dan Call said yes and the rest is history. The boy was Jack Daniels.
To feed and clothe his large family Call could rely in part on profits from a distillery he had built behind his general store before riding off to fight for the Confederacy. The still apparently had been left idle during the Civil War but the machinery was still intact. The facility was conveniently located on Louse (aka “Stillwater”) Creek, an odd name for a pristine stream that gushed from springs in a nearby glade. The water maintained an ideal temperature and flowed in a stream a few yards from the Call homestead. With the abundance of corn grown on the family farm and some expertise at distilling, the prospects for a “cash cow” were evident.
A problem stemmed from diffidence on the part of Call. He had become a lay preacher in a rural Lutheran Church not far from his home, a rustic house of worship. Lutherans were known to be ambivalent about alcohol. This same uncertainty seems to have infected Call. Although his distillery was making whiskey and he was selling it, he forbade drinking on his farm or in his general store. As Lutheran churches increasingly went “dry,” Call decided that soon he would have to give up making whiskey or lose his ministry.
While Call had been away at war, his wife had hired an orphan boy named Jack Daniels to help her with the farm and general store. Call let Jack stay on. Although raised a Baptist, Daniels had no compunctions about alcohol. He was drawn to the distillery. In his biography of Daniels, Author Peter Krass observes: “As young Jack mulled over the contraption, he quickly grasped that whiskey was a means to escaping poverty. He determined to learn the noble art of distilling.” Faced with vigorous importuning from young Daniels, Call instructed his African-American former slave and master distiller, “Uncle” Nearis Green, to teach the boy all he knew about making whiskey. And the rest is history.
Notes: Longer pieces on each of the preacher “whiskey men” may be found elsewhere on this website: George Thorpe, October 28, 2021; Elijah Craig, November 30, 2021; and Dan Call, Novmber 14, 2021.
No comments:
Post a Comment