Jack Daniel (1849-1911) - Find a Grave Memorial

Businessman. He was the founder of the Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey distillery, who became an American legend with his Old No. 7 Tennessee sipping whiskey being an international sensation. Born Jasper Newton Daniel into a family of Welsh, Scottish and Irish ancestry, he was the youngest of his mother's ten children. The exact date of his birth is in dispute. After his mother died when he was an infant, his father remarried in 1851 and was killed during the American Civil War. When he was a teenager, he ran away from home and was taken in by a local preacher and moonshine distiller named Dan Call and began to learn the distilling trade by the time he was fifteen. In 1875 he received an inheritance from his father's estate and founded a legal distilling business with Call who eventually quit for religious reasons. He then purchased the land where the distillery is now located and his business expanded to include 15 distilleries. His brand of whiskey became very popular and it won the gold medal at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, Missouri. He died as a result of blood poisoning as a complication of an infected toe. In the June 25, 2016 edition of the “The New York Times,” a story reports that company's view that Daniel learned distilling not from Call but a slave named Nearest Green. In the twenty-first century Jack Daniel's Distilleries is worth 5.64 billion United States dollars.

Bio by: William Bjornstad