When Jack Daniel’s Failed to Honor a Slave, She Stepped In<br />“It’s absolutely critical that the story of Nearest gets added to the Jack Daniel story,” Mark<br />I. McCallum, the president of Jack Daniel’s Brands at Brown-Forman, said in an interview.<br />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,<br />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.<br />Green’s existence had long been an open secret, but in 2016 Brown-Forman, the company<br />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.<br />LYNCHBURG, Tenn. — Fawn Weaver was on vacation in Singapore last summer when she first read<br />about Nearest Green, the Tennessee slave who taught Jack Daniel how to make whiskey.<br />With a sampling of her estimated 10,000 documents and artifacts spread across a table between them, it quickly became obvious<br />that Ms. Weaver, who had no previous background in whiskey history, knew more about the origins of Jack Daniel’s than the company itself.
