How Lem Motlow Got Away with Murder

When describing Lemuel ”Lem” Motlow, the nephew of Jack Daniels and eventual owner of Daniel’s distillery, a company website mentions his service in the Tennessee legislature and his reputation as a businessman, concluding that he was “known to be a fair and generous man.”  What it fails to mention is that in 1923, Motlow, shown here, shot and killed a man in cold blood and got away with it by playing “the race card.”

Jack Daniels, the famed Tennessee distiller, never married. His sister, Nettie, wed Felix Motlow and had four sons, among them Lem, born in November, 1869.  The  young man early on began working for his uncle at his Lynchburg distillery, learning the whiskey trade from the ground up.  When Daniels became enfeebled near the end of his life, about 1907 he gave the distillery to Motlow.

For the next 13 years, Motlow ran the Daniels distillery with intelligence and skill, increasing its capacity and its reputation for good whiskey.  Jack Daniel’s Tennessee whiskey cost more than than other whiskey.  The company claimed no other distiller made whiskey with “pure limestone water” or mellowed the product through hard maple charcoal — both adding to the cost.  Recognizing the need to market the price differential effectively, Motlow coined the slogan:  “All Goods Worth Price Charged.”

Lem used that slogan with his name on jugs of Jack Daniels whiskey.  Shown throughout this post, the ceramic containers came in several varieties, including two-toned jugs with Albany slip brown tops and bristol glaze bodies.  The jug below left left recently sold at auction for $1,576.00. Motlow also featured a range of jugs below with a bail handle, a feature that made carrying easier.

In 1920 when National Prohibition shut down his distillery, Motlow started a mule auction.  Tiny Lynchburg became one of the largest mule trading centers in the southern U.S.  This success meant little to Lem who was seething at having to shut down making whiskey.  Morover, he had been left with a sizeable amount of liquor on his hands with nowhere legitimately to sell it.   As a counter, he moved his operations to St. Louis, taking over a building on Duncan Avenue, shown below, and moving his liquor stash there.  In 1923 he made a deal to sell it to a local St. Louis businessman.

Before the deal could be concluded, an incident occurred that cast suspicion on Motlow.  Prohibitionary laws dictated that liquor already distilled had to be kept under strict guard and a crew were employed by the Feds to watch Motlow’s 1,000 barrels of Jack Daniels whiskey. In August 1923, however, thieves in St. Louis managed skillfully to siphon away 893 barrels of liquor through a hidden hose that fed the whiskey to containers outside and then disappeared.  Federal authorities fingered Motlow as the culprit and charged him with bootlegging.  

Whether Lem was a habitual drinker seems unlikely but the stress of suspicion and a court appearance early on March 17, 1924, may have impelled him that afternoon to drink heavily with friends.  Drunk and packing a pistol, Lem boarded the Louisville & Nashville night train back to Tennessee.  Tired, he headed for a Pullman berth.

A black sleeping car porter named Ed Wallis asked Motlow for his ticket.  When Motlow was unable to produce one, Wallis refused him a berth. Motlow became enraged at being balked by a person of color.  Hearing the argument, Conductor Clarence Pullis, who was white, tried to intervene.  As the train slowly made its way through a downtown tunnel toward the Mississippi, Lem reached for his pistol, apparently to shoot Wallis.  In his drunken state, he fired two shots, one errantly, the second striking Pullis in the abdomen.

Taken off the train, Pullis died in a local hospital, leaving his widow and two minor children.  Motlow was charged with murder.  Local sentiment ran high against the Tennessee distiller.  The newspapers gave the story front page treatment.  As  wealthy man, however, Lem had ample resources at his disposal.  He hired a phalanx of lawyers to defend him.  They included Patrick Cullen, a prominent St. Louis attorney.  Shown below is a photo from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch showing Motlow, seated far left, and seven of his legal team.

Wallis testified that an enraged Motlow had asked Pullis, “Where did you get that black….”  The porter related that he was shoved by the defendant, who then pulled the pistol from his coat and fired.  The defense built its case on Wallis’s race.  The porter was quizzed on whether he belonged to any civil rights organizations.  Cullen mocked him by adopting a black dialect.  In his testimony Motlow, seen here as sketched on the witness stand, claimed that Wallis had been arrogant.  The newspaper reported:  “…He said Wallis grabbed him by the throat.  ‘I reached for my pistol,” Motlow said, “‘then somebody grabbed my hand from behind and the pistol accidentally discharged twice.’”  

No subtlety attended the defense playing “the race card.” In closing arguments one of Motlow’s lawyers said:  “There are two kinds of (blacks) in the South. There are those who know their place ... and those who have ambitions for racial equality. ... In such a class falls Wallis, the race reformer, the man who would be socially equal to you all, gentlemen of the jury.”  The all white, all male jury took little time in bringing a verdict of “not guilty.”  The foreman told reporters:  “We didn’t believe the Negro.  Jurors shook hands with Motlow as he left the courtroom on December 10 — a free man.  The photograph above shows him, third from left, departing with his attorneys.  

In time, to his great relief, Motlow also was cleared of the bootlegging charges. If convicted he could have been stripped of his ownership of the Lynchburg distillery and subjected to other penalties.  Again ably defended, his lawyers convinced the jury that the Tennesseean had been double-crossed by his associates.  For a second time a St. Louis jury absolved him.

With the slate clean, Motlow returned to Tennessee to resume trading mules and subsequently decided to run for office when local courts denied him the right to begin distilling immediately after Repeal.  He was elected to the Tennessee House of Representatives in 1933 and was successful in being licensed to distill in 1938, although his county officially continued to be a “dry.”  In 1939, Lem ran and won a seat on the Tennessee Senate.  With his wealth, Motlow bought thousands of acres of farmland in at least two counties while engaging in his hobby of raising Tennessee walking horses.

Motlow was married twice. His first wife, Clara Reagor died in 1901, leaving him a son, J. Reagor Motlow.  He then married Ophelia Williams with whom he had a daughter, Mary, and three more sons. Connor, Evans — called “Hap” — and Robert.  As the boys matured he employed them in the Jack Daniels Distillery learning the business.  After Lem suffered a stroke in 1940 the youths began to play more important roles in the operation, Reagor as general manager.  Dying in September 1947 at the age of 77, Motlow was buried in the Lynchburg Cemetery.

The Motlow brothers, with Reagor now as the president of the company, continued to increase production and maintained the reputation for quality initiated by Daniels and their father.  Although Jack Daniels remains the titan of Tennessee whiskey, Lem has been remembered from time to time with a brand of his own.  In 1956 the Motlow family sold its distilling interests to Brown-Foreman of Louisville, Kentucky. 

Nearest Green and the Education of Jack Daniels

The old adage goes:  “Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan.”  So it goes with speculation on who taught Jack Daniels to make his famous Tennessee whiskey.  In past posts I have profiled two individuals that others have contended gave Daniels the secret of distilling.  Neither story is convincing.  Now comes Nearest Green, a former black slave, whose claim on being Daniel’s whiskey mentor seems to have the greatest validity, to the point of being recognized by the current distiller.  

In April 2014 I profiled Hop Lee.  According to a narrative in the Granville, Tennessee, local museum, Hop Lee, shown here as a mannequin in a display, taught Jack Daniels how to make whiskey.  Lee’s having been part of the Jack Daniels operation almost certainly is apocryphal, however, since that distillery incorporated at Lynchburg, Tennessee, in 1866.  At that time Hop still would have been a youngster.  Later Lee became thoroughly familiar with distilling and it is possible he was hired for a time at Jack Daniels distillery — but no real evidence.

The second claimant is a Pennsylvania woman named Mary Stout Jacocks.  Her method for making whiskey was a prize procession of distiller Billy Pearson, illustrated here. Billy was the ex-husband of Mary’s granddaughter.  Ostracized from South Carolina, Pearson, so the story goes, went to Tennessee with Mrs. Jacocks’ recipe were he is reputed to have sold it to Jack Daniel.  Pressed by Pearson’s descendants on the issue, a Daniels’ spokesman in 2003 issued this ambiguous reply: “’Mrs. Mary Stout [Jacocks] of Bucks County, PA, deserves to be warmly remembered for her early distilling skills back in the mid-1700s.”

Both claims fade when the subject turns to Nathan Green, known as “Uncle Nearest.”  Beginning life as a slave of a minister, grocer and distiller named Dan Call, Green got short shrift from the Daniels distillery for many years.  Preacher Call himself frequently has been given credit for Daniels’ whiskey.  Shown here with his family in front of his Lynchburg plantation house, Call was said to have seen promise in young Jack and taught him the whiskey trade. 

More recently that story has been seriously challenged. In June 2016, The New York Times published an article identifying Daniel’s instructor as Green.  The Times asserted that Uncle Nearest’s story had been known to historians and locals for decades, even as the distillery officially ignored it. In lieu of any known photograph of Green, his proponents have commissioned an artist to paint a likeness, shown here.

A 1967 newspaper article reputedly recreates a conversation when Call introduced the young Daniels to the slave, the preacher’s master distiller.  Call is quoted saying to Green, "I want [Jack] to become the world's best whiskey distiller — if he wants to be. You help me teach him.”   Nearest apparently was enthusiastic about the assignment.  He is known to have loved children, siring eleven of his own with wife Harriet, nine sons and two daughters.  When slavery ended at the end of the Civil War in 1865, the Green family stayed with Call. 

A year later the now mature Jack Daniels opened his own distillery, employing two of Green’s son, George and Eli.  Speculation is that one of them is the black man shown here, sitting in a gathering of the distillery workforce.  Immediately next to him is Daniels wearing a white fedora and beard.  Yet another of Nearest’s sons, Edde, also was employed by Daniels. 

At least four of Nearest's grandchildren joined the Jack Daniel Distillery:  Ott, Charlie, Otis and Jesse Green. In all, seven generations of Nearest Green descendants have worked for the distillery.  Three direct descendants continued to work there in contemporary times.   As shown below, the larger distillery staff was an integrated group.

The success of Jack Daniels’ Tennessee whiskey was notable.  As the company letterhead shown here indicates, it was awarded gold medals for excellence at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition, the World’ Fair in Liege, Belgium in 1905 and the Ghent International Exposition in 1913.  The brand’s cache’ with contemporary Americans has been signified by a recent auction of an early Daniels whiskey jug.  Shown here, it fetched in excess of $1,000.

The whiskey that Daniel’s originated now stretches toward a century and a half of success, a remarkable tradition.   As one author has written: “However, Green’s story — built on oral history and the thinnest of archival trails — may never be definitively proved.”  Nevertheless, Author Fawn Weaver has founded and helps finance the Nearest Green Foundation to commemorate the former slave at Lynchburg.  Green is celebrated with a museum, memorial park, and with college scholarships for his descendants.  The Foundation is funded by the sales of “Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey,” not made by Daniels, and the sales of Jack Daniel's official biography entitled, Jack Daniel's Legacy.

Since August 2017, the Brown-Forman Corporation that owns the Jack Daniel's Distillery and brand name officially recognized Green as Daniel's first head distiller, adding his story to their website.  In October 2017, the company also added a narrative about Nearest Green’s contributions to their distillery tours.  Nevertheless, It remains to be seen if these steps end speculation about who taught Jack Daniels to make whiskey.

The Gunters Gave A Helping Hand to Jack Daniels

  

When Jack Daniels in Lynchburg, Tennessee, needed assistance in developing a market for his whiskey,  brothers in Nashville, William Thomas and Charles David Gunter, recognized the quality and appeal of Daniels’ product and helped make the distiller’s “No. 7” a widely recognized brand.  Relatively isolated in Lynchburg, a small town with one traffic light about seventy miles south of Nashville, Daniels needed the “big city” resources the Gunters could provide from their wholesale liquor house.

The Gunters bottled whiskey for Daniels. They had the staff and equipment to decant the barrels from his distillery into ceramic jugs that they ordered from area potteries and glass bottles bought from local glass houses.  Shown here are examples of the jugs that the brothers used for Daniel’s “No. 7.”  Early jugs have a primitive look to them with the labels in cobalt and black.  In time the presentation improved with more legible and professional-looking stenciled labels.  These jugs varied from quart size to one and two gallons. 

  

The Gunters advertised for Daniels.  In Nashville the brothers had access to a number of publications to run ads for “Jack Daniel No. 7” and his Old Time Distillery.  In the ad shown below

they proclaim themselves “sole agents” for the Lynchburg whiskey.  The Gunters also had access to modern printing techniques and specialists to design attractive labels for the glass bottles and flasks they merchandised under Daniels’ name.

The Gunters assisted distribution for Daniels. Nashville was a hub for roads and, more important, rail lines.  Nashville had good access to the North through the Louisville and Nashville (L&N) railroad, incorporated in Kentucky in 1850.  Several other Middle Tennessee railroads also provided Nashville connections. The Nashville and Decatur (N&D) ran from Nashville through Columbia to Tennessee's southern border, where it connected with the M&C and an Alabama railroad to Decatur.  The Edgefield and Kentucky (E&K), completed in 1860, ran from the Nashville suburb of Edgefield to Guthrie on the Kentucky boundary where it connected with other lines.  Shipment of Jack Daniels whiskey was possible to all points of the U.S.

Assistance from the Nashville brothers became particularly important after 1904 when Daniels’ No. 7 received a surge in popularity after receiving a gold medal for the finest whiskey at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.  The resulting demand required marketing capacities considerably beyond the capacity of the Lynchburg distillery — and over the next five years the Gunter brothers did their best to provide it.

The Gunters could not, however, hold off the “dry” forces that were sweeping the state.  In 1909 Tennessee passed a statewide prohibition law, banning the production and sale of alcohol, effectively ending the legal distillation of Jack Daniels whiskey.  The distillery, now under Lem Motlow, challenged the law in a test case ultimately appealed to the state supreme court where it was upheld as constitutional.   

The ban also shut down the W.T. & C.D. Gunter’s Nashville liquor business. That blow must have seemed particularly stinging since the Gunter family had deep ties to Tennessee.  Shown here, the progenitor was W. T. Gunter, born there in 1830, who served in the Tennessee militia during the Civil War.  He married Mary Elizabeth Ramsey and the couple had six children.  Among them were William, born in May 1855,  and Charles, born in December 1857.

When Tennessee went “dry,”, both men were married with families.  William, wed to Mary Reese of Moore County, Tennessee, had six children;  Charles, married to Delia Belle Newton, had three.   They were firmly rooted in Tennessee soil — and now their livelihood had been taken from them.  The brothers quickly decided to move their liquor house and chose Evansville, Indiana, as their new home, 150 miles north of Nashville.  That state seemed determined to remain “wet” despite prohibitionary forces.  By 1910 W.T. & C.D. Gunter Wholesale Liquors was recorded in local directories at 108 Main Street in Evansville, a major commercial avenue shown here on a postcard.

Although William appeared in Evansville business directories as co-owner of the firm, he continued to make Shelbyville, Tennessee, his home.  Charles, in contrast, had moved Delia Belle and his family to Evansville where they lived at 414 Chandler Avenue.   Two of William’s sons, Clyde and Herbert, also relocated to Evansville, working for the Gunter firm and listed as living at the business address.  Clyde was a salesman and Herbert a clerk.

Without Jack Daniels whiskey to sell, in Indiana the brothers turned to blending and bottling their own brands. using the names “Gunter’s IXL,” “Gunter’s IXL No. 7,” and “Gunter’s Landing.”  As shown here, they issued a series of shot glasses for their brands.  Those giveaway items would have been provided to restaurants, saloons and bars featuring the Gunter brands. 

The Gunter family appears to have prospered in their transplanted liquor house, in 1911 moving to new quarters at 23 Main Street.   Clyde married about the same time, his wife listed as Nana R.  In August 1913, Charles Gunter died in Evansville at  the age of 56 and his body was returned to Shelbyville, where he was buried in the Willow Mount Cemetery, not far from where his father and mother lay.  Delia Belle would follow him to the grave seven months later.

Although William continued to be linked to the liquor house in Evansville after his brother’s death, his son Clyde actually was managing the day to day operations of W.T. & C.D. Gunter Co., assisted by Herbert.   They continued in that mode until forced to shut down with the coming of National Prohibition.   William lived long enough to see “The Great Experiment” widely disparaged and on the brink of Repeal.  He died in November 1932 at the age of 80, twenty years after his wife, Mary, had passed.  They too are buried in Willow Mount Cemetery.

Today the Gunters are best remember in Tennessee — not Indiana — because of the many artifacts that remind collectors and others of the contribution that the brothers made to the ultimate success of Jack Daniels’ Tennessee whiskey.   At a time when No. 7 was just getting a start, William and Charles had provided crucial assistance that Daniels’ distillery needed to achieve an expanded customer base and national attention.

  

“Billy” Pearson and Whiskey as Grandma Made It

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. 

Pearson’s story reaches back before the Revolutionary War when he was born in April of 1761.  He was the son of Enoch (sometimes given as Enock) and Tabitha Jacocks Pearson in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. They were Quakers.  Here sources differ about how he got to South Carolina.   A biography by a descendant relates that when Billy was only four years old his family moved to a 1,000 acre plantation near Sedalia in Cross Keys Township.   This likely was Cross Keys Plantation, described as “large and prosperous.  The manor house is shown here.  Enoch Pearson likely was working as a surveyor for the plantation owner.

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.

Although some accounts have accused Pearson of British sympathies, after the Battle of Kings Mountain, in which the Patriot Militia defeated South Carolina Loyalists, he is said to have become an ardent believer in the revolutionary cause and joined the 2nd South Carolina Spartan Militia Unit as a private.  Accounted faithful to the cause until the end of the war,  Pearson likely saw action at the Battle of Cowpens, shown here.  This was a decisive victory by the Continental Army over a British force and marked the reconquest of South Carolina by the Revolutionary Army.  

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.

Sources are quiet about Pearson’s subsequent activities, but the assumption must be that he farmed his land and continued to make whiskey via Grandma Jacock’s recipe and that once again it proved popular to a local client base.  The key to the formula was what has come to be known as “maple leaching.”  The whiskey was distilled from corn mash and then filtered through charcoal made from hard sugar-maple wood. The charcoal is shown above beings made. The whiskey then was aged in oak barrels.  The charcoal leaching removed impurities, added color and some flavor, as did the oak barrels.  Grandma Jacocks was not the only one to discover this method.  Whiskey scholars say it also had been used early in Kentucky but had never caught on.

About 1925, at 63 years old, Pearson sold his whiskey formula to a local distiller named Alfred Eaton.   Eaton with a partner had been operating a still near Lynchburg at Cave Spring, shown here, and immediately began using the leaching process, filtering his whiskey through sugar maple charcoal.   When Jack Daniels in 1865 moved his still house to Cave Spring Hollow, he shared the spring water with Eaton.  The flow that came from the cave was sterile, had no iron content, and was a consistent 56 degrees — perfect for making good whiskey.  Daniels reputedly also bought Grandma Jacock’s recipe from Eaton — and never looked back.

Meanwhile William “Billy” Pearson had died in October of 1844 at the age of 83.  He was buried in what was called a “rock box” in a wire-and-wooden fenced area, shown here, at the foot of Bobo Hill, at the intersection of two local roads north of Lynchburg.  Pearson’s broken gravestone is shown below.  A son and other family members also have been buried at what is known today as Old Pearson Cemetery.

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.”

Note:  Elton Pearson of Toluca, Illinois, was the man to whom the Daniels Company letter was sent.  Pearson in 1926 wrote the material quoted directly in several instances in this post.  He was a descendant of Billy Pearson, an ancestor whom Elton called “A colorful character.”  The drawing of Billy that opens this post is from a website that contains a biography of that pioneer whiskey man.