Jack Daniel

Jasper Newton "Jack" Daniel ( – October 9, 1911) His paternal grandparents emigrated to the United States in the late 18th century.

Daniel's date of birth is unknown, with various sources placing it in 1846, 1849 and 1850. According to one source, he 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, most likely due to complications from childbirth, 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 not founded until 1875. However, on the company's 150th anniversary in 2016, the company started to tell a different story, that Daniel did not learn distilling from Call, but from a man named Nearest Green (sometimes spelled "Nearis") – one of Call's slaves. was skilled with numbers and was soon doing all of the distillery's bookkeeping.

Early in November 1893, Jack Daniel's farm outside of Lynchburg was the site of a mass murder perpetrated by a large group of mounted night riders from throughout the region, who hanged four black citizens – Ned Waggoner, his son Will and daughter Mary, and his son-in-law Sam Motlow – from a tree. The four were rumored to have been involved in a series of barn-burnings in the area; no clue was offered as to the identities of the perpetrators. Motlow died in 1947.

Daniel died from blood poisoning in Lynchburg on October 9, 1911. However, Daniel's modern biographer has asserted that the story is not true, offering evidence that Daniel raged on the safe a few years before dying of unrelated gangrene.