Surrounded by Uncle Nearest Premium Whisky
You may know Jack Daniels, but do you know Nearest Green? I was so excited about an opportunity to visit Tennessee’s Nearest Green Distillery during this month’s Black National Business Month.
During the 3 hour tour, I learned that in the mid-1800’s, over the hills above Lynchburg, there was a Tennessee farm owned by a preacher who had a small whiskey distillery as side hustle. Nathan Green aka “Uncle Nearest” was the enslaved black man who distilled the whiskey using a special charcoal filtering technique used to clean water in West Africa. Still used today, his method of filtering whiskey through sugar maple tree charcoal became known as the famous ‘Lincoln method’.
When a young white boy named Jasper came to the preacher in search of work, he was introduced to Nathan ‘Uncle Nearest’ Green, who was told to teach him what he knew. Jasper put his natural entrepreneurial skills and passion for whisky to work in selling bottles across the region. With the passing of the 13th amendment in 1865, Uncle Nearest was a free man. Not long after, Jasper Daniel bought the distillery and named it after his nickname, Jack Daniel. He asked Nathan to be his very first master distiller and they worked together until Nathan retired.
As I listened to this story of the founding of the Jack Daniel’s brand and Uncle Nearest, I thought about how privilege was intertwined into Jack Daniel’s becoming the top selling American Whiskey in the world and the generational wealth that followed. But most of all, I thought about my own family history and my Uncle John.
My maternal grandmother on the property where her and her siblings grew up in Hamilton, NJ.
Uncle John was the 1st of the Valdosta, GA Griffiths to migrate to Trenton, NJ. Uncle John had run into an issue with a group of white men in 1920’s Valdosta and ran to New Jersey to avoid being lynched. Fearing the horrific fate faced by many black men failed by a biased legal system, he changed his name from John Griffith to John Reed, creating a whole new identity in the Garden State. Accompanied by his brother, Sylvester aka “Uncle Ponzel”, it wasn’t long before his nephew (my great-grandfather, Oltine) also made the move to New Jersey with his wife. (CLICK HERE TO READ HOW OLTINE’S DAUGHTER INSPIRED PINK GIRLS RUN THE WORLD).
Finding factory work at American Steel (one of the many factories that led to the capital adopting the motto Trenton Makes The World Takes), Uncle John begin making moonshine on the side to supplement his income (non-white worker wages were less). Nationwide Prohibition lasted from 1920 until 1933. The Eighteenth Amendment—which illegalized the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcohol. One of the most common source of alcohol in Prohibition was alcohol cooked up in illegal stills, producing what came to be called moonshine.
The son of a sharecropper, my Uncle knew he had something that could take him and his family to the next level. He eventually bought land where he would build a house and a barn in a township just outside of the city. Uncle John would hire acts from all over the tri-state area to perform at his barn and charge admission to his “juke joint” experience where he also sold his moonshine to patrons. The barn became a lucrative business venture as he would also rent it out to the local community and the land would be divided amongst 5 other extended family members to build their homes. Uncle John knew that it was harder for black families to get loans from the bank and when they were able to secure a loan the interest rates were outrageous. As an alternative to the borrowing from a bank, John would provide loans to family members who wanted to build homes on the land that he owned outside of the cramped conditions of the city.
Bootlegging, the illegal manufacturing/sale of liquor went on throughout the decade, along with the operation of “speakeasies” (like Uncle John’s barn), the smuggling of alcohol across state lines and the informal production of liquor (“moonshine” or “bathtub gin”) in private homes. This was a pivotal point in US history where many influential white men built generational wealth. A recurring rumor, alleges that Joseph Kennedy, whose nine children included President John F. Kennedy, and U.S. Senators Robert and Edward Kennedy, made his early fortune as a bootlegger during Prohibition.
Wandering through the corridors of the Nearest Green Distillery, I not only wondered how the narrative surrounding the lives of Uncle Nearest and Uncle John might have been different if black men had access to the privilege that many of their white counterparts were given as a birthright, but how it may have impacted the generations that came after them.
CLICK HERE TO CHECK OUT MORE PICS FROM MY TRIP TO NASHVILLE
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