Jack Daniel

Jasper Newton "Jack" Daniel (c. January 1849 – October 10, 1911) was an American distiller and businessman, best known as the founder of the Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey distillery.

Daniel was the youngest of ten children born to Calaway and Lucinda Matilda (née Cook) Daniel. He was of Scots-Irish, Scottish, and Welsh descent; his grandfather, Joseph "Job" Daniel, was born in Wales, while his grandmother, Elizabeth Calaway, was born in Scotland. His paternal grandparents immigrated to the United States in the late 18th century.

According to one source, Daniel was born in January 1849, in or around Lynchburg, Tennessee. A town fire had destroyed the courthouse records, and because his mother died shortly after his birth, conflicting dates on Daniels' and his mother's headstones have left his date of birth in question. On June 26, 1851, his father remarried and had another three children with Matilda Vanzant.

Daniel was raised in the Primitive Baptist church. The company that now owns the distillery claims that Jack Daniel's was first licensed in 1866. However, in the 2004 biography Blood & Whiskey: The Life and Times of Jack Daniel author Peter Krass maintains that land and deed records show that the distillery was actually not founded until 1875.

According to company histories, sometime in the 1850s, when Daniel was a boy, he went to work for a preacher, grocer and distiller named Dan Call. The preacher, as the stories went, was a busy man, and when he saw promise in young Jack, he taught him how to run his whiskey still. However, on June 25, 2016, The New York Times reported the company's view that Daniel didn't learn distilling from Call, but from a man named Nearis Green – one of Call's slaves.

Daniel's safe

Daniel never married and did not have any children. However, he took his nephews under his wing, one of whom was Lemuel "Lem" Motlow (1869–1947). Motlow, a son of Jack's sister, Finetta, was skilled with numbers and was soon doing all of the distillery's bookkeeping.

In 1907, due to failing health, Daniel gave the distillery to two of his nephews. Motlow soon bought out the other nephew and went on to operate the distillery for about 40 years (interrupted between 1942 and 1946 when the U.S. government banned the manufacture of whiskey due to World War II). He died in 1947.

Daniel died from blood poisoning in Lynchburg in 1911. A common tall tale is that the infection began in one of his toes, which Daniel injured one morning at work by kicking his safe in anger when he could not get it open (he was said to always have had trouble remembering the combination). However, Daniel's modern biographer has asserted that the story is not true.