Making Bourbon: A Geographical History of Distilling in Nineteenth-Century Kentucky

By Karl Raitz

“Raitz examines the rich story of distilling in its Kentucky heartland and traces its maturation from a local craft to an enduring industry.” —William Wyckoff, author of How to Read the American West

While other industries chase after the new and improved, bourbon makers celebrate traditions that hearken back to an authentic frontier craft. Distillers enshrine local history in their branding and time-tested recipes, and rightfully so. Kentucky’s unique geography shaped the whiskeys its settlers produced, and for more than two centuries, distilling bourbon fundamentally altered every aspect of Kentucky’s landscape and culture.

Making Bourbon: A Geographical History of Distilling in Nineteenth-Century Kentucky illuminates how the specific geography, culture, and ecology of the Bluegrass converged and gave birth to Kentucky’s favorite barrel-aged whiskey. Expanding on his fall 2019 release Bourbon’s Backroads, Karl Raitz delivers a more nuanced discussion of bourbon’s evolution by contrasting the fates of two distilleries in Scott and Nelson Counties. In the nineteenth century, distilling changed from an artisanal craft practiced by farmers and millers to a large-scale mechanized industry. The resulting infrastructure—farms, mills, turnpikes, railroads, steamboats, lumberyards, and cooperage shops—left its permanent mark on the land and traditions of the commonwealth. Today, multinational brands emphasize and even construct this local heritage. This unique interdisciplinary study uncovers the complex history poured into every glass of bourbon.

“A gem. The depth of Raitz’s research and the breadth of his analysis have produced a masterful telling of the shift from craft to industrial distilling. And in telling us the story of bourbon, Raitz also makes a terrific contribution to our understanding of America's nineteenth-century economy.” —David E. Hamilton, author of From New Day to New Deal

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9780813178783

Book preview

MAKING BOURBON

MAKING BOURBON

A Geographical History of Distilling in Nineteenth-Century Kentucky

KARL RAITZ

Cartographic Design and Production by Dick Gilbreath, Gyula Pauer Center for Cartography and GIS

Due to variations in the technical specifications of different electronic reading devices, some elements of this ebook may not appear as they do in the print edition. Readers are encouraged to experiment with user settings for optimum results.

Copyright © 2020 by The University Press of Kentucky

Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,

serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre

College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University,

The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College,

Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University,

Morehead State University, Murray State University,

Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University,

University of Kentucky, University of Louisville,

and Western Kentucky University.

All rights reserved.

Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky

663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008

www.kentuckypress.com

Unless otherwise noted, photographs are from the author’s collection.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Raitz, Karl B., author.

Title: Making bourbon : a geographical history of distilling in nineteenth-century Kentucky / Karl Raitz.

Description: Lexington : University Press of Kentucky, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019045519 | ISBN 9780813178752 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813178776 (pdf) | ISBN 9780813178783 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Bourbon whiskey—Kentucky—History. | Distilleries—Kentucky—History. | Distilling industries—Kentucky—History.

Classification: LCC TP605 .R36 2020 | DDC 338.4/766352—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045519

This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting

the requirements of the American National Standard

for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Kentucky Bourbon in Time and Place

PART I. MAKING KENTUCKY’S DISTILLING LANDSCAPE

1. Heritage and Process

2. Kentucky Distilling: Craft to Commercial Enterprise

3. Kentucky’s Distilling Environment

4. Distilling Grain, Feeding Livestock

5. Distillery Configurations

6. Technology’s Tools

7. Complementary Industries

8. Signatures of Risk

9. By-products

10. Connections

11. Making It Work

12. External Control and Landscape

13. Temperance Troubles

PART II. KNOWING FROM THE INSIDE: A TALE OF TWO DISTILLERIES

14. Making and Selling Whiskey at the Henry McKenna Distillery

15. The McKenna Family Distillery: Marketing, Medicine, and Temperance

16. Building James Stone’s Elkhorn Distillery

17. The Elkhorn Distillery’s Demise

PART III. REMAKING BOURBON’S CONTEMPORARY DISTILLING LANDSCAPE

18. Naming and Branding

19. A Reconstructed Past Lives in the Present

Epilogue: Making Bourbon, Making Landscape

Acknowledgments

Appendix: Weights and Measures Circa 1882

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Maps

Kentucky’s distilleries, 1810

Distillery production, 1810

Kentucky’s distilleries, 1840

Distillery production, 1840

Kentucky’s distilleries, 1894

Kentucky’s physiographic regions

Kentucky’s counties and major streams

Physiographic boundaries and soil associations: Bourbon and Harrison Counties

Physiographic boundaries and soil associations: Anderson, Franklin, and Woodford Counties

Physiographic boundaries and soil associations: Marion, Nelson, and Washington Counties

Corn production and improved farmland

Corn production and feeder livestock

Louisville distilleries, cooperages, and tanneries

Louisville’s Whiskey Row

Turnpikes in the New Haven–New Hope–Loretto area

Nelson County distilleries

Marion County distilleries

Washington County distilleries

Harrison County distilleries

Bourbon County distilleries

Anderson County distilleries

Woodford County distilleries

Franklin County distilleries

Louisville and Jefferson County distilleries

E. L. Miles and New Hope Distilleries

Tax collection districts

Prohibition map

Site of the Henry McKenna Distillery

Henry McKenna Registered Distillery No. 111

Midway, Kentucky, topographic map

Photographs, Drawings, and Art

Painting of Old Crow Distillery by Paul Sawyier

Painting of Old Taylor Distillery by Paul Sawyier

E. H. Taylor Jr.’s O.F.C. and Carlisle Distilleries

Illicit Distillation by A. W. Thompson

Old log distillery

William and George Robson’s improved alcohol still

John Peden’s distilling process and apparatus

John E. Turney’s rotary drier

Stack-style brick warehouse

Henry Reedy’s hoisting machine

Frederick Stitzel’s bourbon barrel racking system

Maker’s Mark warehouse under construction

Loretto Distilling Company’s dedicated sawmill and cooperage

Advertisement for Fishel & Gallatine

John Whitford’s corn sheller

August Adams’s corn sheller

Iron window shutter at Elkhorn Distillery’s brick aging warehouse

Women bottler-labelers leaving the Yellowstone Distillery

Jacob Spears house

John Dowling house

Thomas Ripy house

Storekeeper’s office at the Willett Distillery

Women’s Christian Temperance Union camp meeting

Henry McKenna Distillery

Supplemental plan for H. McKenna Registered Distillery No. 111

Henry McKenna’s Irish harp emblem

Letterhead of N. E. Crenshaw

Letterhead of H. McKenna

H. McKenna advertisement

Half-page advertisement for H. McKenna

Circular to druggists and medical professionals

Elkhorn Distillery site plan

Elkhorn Distillery warehouse

Tank truck loading Maker’s Mark slop

Label for Old Tub Brand Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey

Jim Beam’s American Stillhouse visitors’ center

Labrot & Graham Distillery

Old Taylor Distillery

Truck carrying filled whiskey barrels at the Chapeze Distillery

T. J. Samuels Distillery

Willett Distillery

Sign at Jim Beam American Stillhouse

Tables and Graphs

Kentucky distillery census

Distilling grains produced in the United States

Kentucky corn production and distillery consumption

Wheat production in the United States

George Elliot household

Power sources and workforces of selected Kentucky industries

Distilled spirits in warehouse storage

Urban population growth

George Sibert household

Seasonal cooperage sales by Oots

Cooperage sold to distilleries by Oots

Distilled spirits lost by fire

Fire insurance rates

Cattle and hogs fed at Kentucky distilleries

Kentucky turnpikes chartered

David Durnan household

Value of Ohio River commerce

Whiskey shipped from Cincinnati and Louisville

Carrol Blincou household

William Snyder household

Distiller–slave owners, Boone County

Distiller–slave owners, Anderson County

Distiller–slave owners, Nelson County

Distilling-related employment, Anderson County

Distillery-related employment, Nelson County

Austin Kaufman household

Distillery employment categories, Nelson County, 1910

Distillery employment categories, Nelson County, 1920

Joseph Werner household

Ardent spirits consumption

Henry McKenna household

Distillery-related employment, Fairfield Precinct

Slaves owned by James Stone

James Stone household

Account of T. J. Mefford

Elkhorn Distillery grain freight charges

Elkhorn Distillery account with John G. Brooks

Elkhorn Distillery account with W. W. Hedges

Transactions between McConihi & Company and Elkhorn Distillery

Introduction

Kentucky Bourbon in Time and Place

I was born into a culture that then, as now, treasured place and geography more than time and history.

—Edmunds V. Bunkše

The manufacture of whisky is one of the most extensive and valuable interests of the entire Blue Grass Region. Indeed, the blue grass seems to have a beneficial effect on whisky, as it has on everything else that comes in reach of it.

—William H. Perrin

In the heroic age our forefathers invented self-government, the Constitution, and bourbon, and on the way to them they invented rye. Our political institutions were shaped by our whiskeys.… They are distilled not only from our native grains but from our native vigor, suavity, generosity, peacefulness, and love of accord. Whoever goes looking for us will find us there.

—Bernard De Voto

Kentucky distillers have produced alcohol spirits for more than two centuries. The frontier craft began by utilizing simple equipment and traditional techniques to convert Indian corn into a clear spirit sometimes called white whiskey.¹ When barreled and aged, this raw spirit was transformed into mellow red bourbon. Some distillers adopted mechanization and became commercial businesses during the nineteenth century, despite being reproved by temperance advocates and subjected to increasing government taxation and regulation. A national recession in the 1870s destabilized capital markets. Grain production faltered. The demand for bourbon was unpredictable. Overproduction and marketing problems dogged the industry from the 1880s into the 1910s, and few distillers survived the national prohibition experiment that began in 1920 and continued until its repeal in 1933. During World War II, the few remaining Kentucky distillers converted their factories to industrial alcohol production. By the late 1940s, distillers had resumed making whiskey. Those distillers that successfully negotiated some eight decades of difficult market conditions not only maintained whiskey production; by the end of the twentieth century, they were leading an industrial revival. In 2018 the thirty-three member distilleries of the Kentucky Distillers’ Association produced nearly 1.7 million barrels of bourbon, and there were 7.5 million barrels stored in aging warehouses. Kentucky distillers currently account for about 20,000 jobs with an annual payroll that exceeds $1 billion. In addition to being in demand nationally, bourbon’s market now extends worldwide.²

To see a contemporary distillery from a distance is not to understand how it works; how it relates to its site, employees, or neighboring properties; or how it evolved to become a tangible artifact. While the distillery is a largely anonymous place to the casual observer, its image and its product have come to represent the industry, and the state of Kentucky, to the world.

The place and landscape of distilling have always been important elements in promoting and advertising Kentucky bourbon. Nineteenth-century advertisements and bottle labels prominently featured the name of the county of origin and often included real or fanciful images of operational distilleries. Bourbon producers have long revered traditional distilling techniques. Distillers followed proven recipes and branded their whiskeys as Old, as in Old Times and Old Log Cabin. Or their brands alluded to historical places and personages, such as Rolling Fork and Evan Williams. While many manufacturers of consumer goods tout their products as new and improved, contemporary bourbon advertising campaigns continue to emphasize tradition and heritage. Perhaps more than any other industry in America, the Kentucky bourbon whiskey business has purposely maintained its traditions and methods. Bourbon’s heritage has its own folklore and founding narrative. Its heritage is iconic; it is tangible; it is the essence of the industry’s legendry. And heritage is marketable. Present-day distilleries welcome tourists with guided tours, visitors’ centers, and museums. While marketing to tourists is a comparatively new phenomenon in the bourbon distilling business, the industry image presented to visitors is infused with tradition. Indeed, many distilleries operate, at least partially, in old buildings, a venerable legacy of the past. Distilling’s most valued images, those depicted in museums, on tours, and in advertising, are taken from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the era when this frontier craft became a modern industry.

The general historical outline of Kentucky distilling has been well documented, and there is no need to duplicate those studies.³ Rather, the purpose here is to examine the geographic history of the transformative nineteenth century, when distilling changed from artisanal craft to large-scale industry, and to examine how distillers created the signature distilling landscape that remains at the core of the contemporary industry’s identity.

Distilling has long been associated with farming and milling. It also has supply linkages to the timber and cooperage industries, which provided staves and barrels; the copper mining and smithing industries, which contributed still equipment; and the pottery and glass industries, which provided the stoneware jugs and bottles in which the product was sold in the retail market. Raw materials and supplies arrived at distilleries by road or by railroad, and perhaps by river in some locations; the finished product was transported to customers first by packhorse trains, then by wagons and river flatboats, and later by steam-powered conveyances. All these things—the farms and mills, the lumberyards and cooperage shops, and the turnpikes, railroads, and steamboats—contributed elements to the distilling landscape.

As a manufacturing process, distilling is simple in concept and complex in execution. Distilling is a serial or stepwise operation in which raw materials are processed to make raw alcohol spirits that are further transformed by special aging techniques before eventually yielding a potable and salable product. Distilling begins with enzymes in malted barley that convert the starch in a slurry of water and milled grain into sugar. Cooking the mixture produces a mash, which the distiller ferments; adding yeast converts the sugar into alcohol. When fermenting is complete, the product is referred to as distiller’s beer. The liquid then passes through a two-stage distilling process. The first stage produces a low wine, which is then redistilled in the second stage into a high wine, often in a traditional copper pot still or doubler. Complexity arises because the distiller must work with precision and speed, using varied recipes. Corn mash requires a different cooking temperature than rye or wheat mash. Malted barley enzymes lose their effectiveness if the mash is too hot. Yeast requires oxygen to work effectively and may die if the mash pH is too acidic or too alkaline or if the mash temperature is too high. The selective movement of raw materials and the precise control of the distilling process in an industrial distillery require a dense rookery of conveyors, vats, pipes, pumps, valves, gauges, and filters. This assemblage demonstrates that the modern distilling process is intricate and demands exacting attention to detail.

Yeast was (and distillers might argue it remains) the key to making quality whiskey, and some yeast recipes have been proprietary family secrets for generations. In the early nineteenth century Lexington porter and ale brewer John Coleman made and marketed beer, but he also made yeast of preeminent superiority that he sold to scientific and experienced distillers.⁴ In the 1830s yeast makers in Scotland and Ireland learned their profession through apprenticeships, and yeast makers were often distillers as well.⁵ Richard Cummins (or Cummings), for example, was born in County Carlow, Ireland, southwest of Dublin, in 1830. He began a four-year yeast-making apprenticeship at age fourteen. Cummins migrated to America in 1848 during Ireland’s Great Famine. After holding several distilling jobs, he moved to Raywick in Marion County, Kentucky, in about 1868. He built and operated the Coon Hollow Distillery near New Hope and distilled Old Cummins straight bourbon whiskey. Some say that his was the first post–Civil War distillery to mash and distill with machinery.⁶

Many nineteenth-century Kentucky distillers claimed Scottish and Irish heritage. Some migrated to America in the 1830s and 1840s. The exceptional hardships leveled on Ireland during the Great Famine of 1845 to 1849 produced a diaspora of more than 1 million to foreign lands; many ended up in America. These famine-motivated migrants likely included a cross section of the general population, including, no doubt, distillers and others experienced in the distilling business. Less well documented were distillers prompted to migrate by an Irish temperance crusade lasting from 1839 to 1842. Father Theobald Mathew of Cork, along with several other Catholic clergy, led a movement to convince thousands of people to pledge total abstinence from alcoholic beverages. Many public houses and distilleries closed, and the consumption of spirits fell by half. It is possible that this transformative movement led some Irish distillers to move to America to resume their trade, but in the absence of definitive biographical information, the issue remains open to conjecture.⁷ A determinist might argue that whiskey distilling was established in central Kentucky because of its limestone water. But such a simplistic explanation discounts the importance of an experienced, knowledgeable cadre of craftspeople, many of them with Old World traditions, whose proficiencies attracted like-minded people who contributed to the development of the industry, among them distillers, millers, coopers, coppersmiths, blacksmiths, mechanics, farmers, merchants, and financiers.

The distilling process has undergone comprehensive change over the last two centuries, prompted in part by technical and procedural innovations. Kentucky’s frontier distillers were happy to use Indian corn of several different varieties as their primary distilling grain. Contemporary distillers prefer non–genetically modified or organic grains if they can obtain them, although more than 85 percent of America’s commercially grown corn crop is now genetically modified. But as distilling technology and business practices became more sophisticated, legal policies became more burdensome. Those engaged in distilling, or those whose businesses were linked to distilling, had to adjust to volatile market geographies while defending themselves from the political intrigues of temperance enthusiasts and adapting to the grasping authority of tax collectors.

Elements of Geographic History

This analysis of geographic history centers on three concepts that merit some elaboration: making, landscape, and historical ecology.

Making

People make things based on what they know. They refine or modify things based on what they learn. Knowing and learning may spring from demonstrations or tutorials, but they can also be the product of self-learning or self-discovery.⁸ Making is a comprehensive expression that encompasses specific types of creative processes and haptic skills such as crafting, building, constructing, fashioning, producing, and manufacturing. Those who study landscapes recognize that built environments have many contributors. Some are local, unlettered, and vernacular; vernacular making may yield a useful structure that follows an age-old functional form. Other contributors are ingenious mechanics whose primary concern is making structures and machines that perform a function or task in a comprehensible, useful, and efficient way. Some contributors may be experienced professionals, trained in formal design and design history. They may adopt ideas from formal catalogs of building principles that reference grand historic design themes that are weighty with prescribed meaning. Formal, considered design and construction may produce a functional structure, but this type of making may also declare the builder’s concern for art and beauty, elegance and refinement. Each contributor possesses a different personal repertoire of interactive knowledge—customs, habits, values—about how to make and use things. Importantly, every person who participates in making a landscape element—be it a clearing in the forest, a building, or a road—becomes a part of that element because it captures a bit of what they knew, what they learned, and, perhaps, what they imagined.⁹ Over time, different forms of knowledge intertwine to yield practices that people employ to make practical and functional material landscapes.¹⁰ And each form or sphere of knowledge has equal value or equal potential to contribute to the creation of functional structures and infrastructures.

Kentucky artist Paul Sawyier’s painting of the Old Crow Distillery, ca. 1870. The Old Crow Distillery operated on a wide terrace along Glenns Creek in northern Woodford County. The large white gable-roofed building housed the mash tubs, fermenting barrels, and still. Smoke from the steam engine issues from the tall brick chimney. A cooper’s shed to the left is flanked by two piles of stave wood; the red brick building in the upper left is likely the storage warehouse. The small cabin between the distiller’s house and the warehouse may be the government storekeeper’s office. The site represents the medium-sized industrial works that replaced the limited-production distilleries operated by farmer-millers from the early 1800s to the 1860s. (Courtesy of William Coffey, Paul Sawyier Galleries)

Paul Sawyier’s painting of the Old Taylor Distillery, ca. 1910. Millers and distillers were building works on the lower reaches of Glenns Creek near Millville by the early nineteenth century. E. H. Taylor Jr. acquired a distillery here in 1882 and, over several years, rebuilt it, achieving a grand industrial scale. Stonemasons built the turreted castle-form still house (seen in the distance in the upper right) of Tyrone limestone, which weathered to a brilliant white. Warehouse B (in the foreground), at four stories tall and 530 feet long, was thought to be the largest whiskey aging warehouse of its type in the world. Workers installed a sunken garden, next to the still house, in 1906, and the following year the Kentucky Highlands Railroad completed a spur to the site, providing high-capacity rail access for large-scale distilling (mashing capacity reached 500 bushels of grain per day). The railroad track traces a light gray arc across the center of the painting. In addition to delivering grain and hauling away whiskey, the connection allowed Taylor to hire laborers who commuted from Frankfort, and it allowed the distillery to entertain train-borne visitors. (Courtesy of William Coffey, Paul Sawyier Galleries)

Posing analytical questions about the making and maintenance of a built environment requires one to recognize that material landscapes are not simply visual and tactile products of an architect, engineer, or building contractor; rather, they are the consequence of unseen creative processes that involve multiple, complex, intersecting circuits of knowledge possessed by people of many social stations and cultural persuasions.¹¹ Awareness of these knowledge circuits requires what anthropologist Tim Ingold terms knowing from the inside, or knowledge gained from studying with people, which is fundamentally different from the study of people.¹² Applying this principle to the study of landscape suggests that the creative process people engage in to make artifacts may become subsumed in the study of the artifacts themselves. An analysis of factories and farms might produce a compendium of industrial buildings, rail yards, farm fields, and barns but yield little appreciation of the inventive processes and social and economic priorities that gave rise to these structures.¹³ Insight into the modification of an old factory building might be aided by knowing the owner’s name or the year the building was completed. But an appreciation of the cultural practices that produced the building and its new addition might require one to follow the process of modernization and the manner in which the owner evaluated inventions and established relationships with financial institutions and insurers. If an invention were deemed workable, affordable, and insurable, it might be applied to the industrial process, thereby requiring a factory alteration. If such an invention is a dynamic, ongoing process, however, one should take care in judging a building, and a landscape in the larger sense, as finished. Reality is fluid, and landscapes are always in a state of becoming, continually unfolding along paths of creation, expansion, stasis, decay, and regeneration.¹⁴ Understanding how landscape making works requires that we consider how people bring to bear the knowledge and skills that make up the time-specific technologies that prescribe favored forms and processes. It is imperative that we attempt to position ourselves on the inside looking out. Limited insight into landscape making is gained by acceding to an external perspective couched in tabulating a landscape’s visual elements or focusing primarily on enumerating contingent historical economic, political, or social conditions.¹⁵

This study of the creation and historical development of Kentucky’s bourbon-producing landscape employs this knowing from the inside perspective to the extent that resources allow. Numerics, drawings, maps, and photographs provide objective information that documents the growth and expansion of the distilling industry, but they also suggest questions about management objectives, labor profiles and practices, and the invisible influence of legal requirements that might direct or regulate industrial activity. Period documents such as business ledgers and personal daybooks and diaries convey selected objective facts, but they can also provide insights into an individual’s subjective day-today decision making. Details are essential if we are to appreciate a people’s inherent and acquired knowledge and understand how they applied information to make things work, a process that might be termed management strategy in contemporary idiom. Records outlining plans and priorities can convey what people sought to accomplish and amplify our understanding of how they dealt with the obstacles they encountered. To be concise, we wish to learn how people made their lives and, in the process, made their landscape.¹⁶

Landscape

People are necessarily situated in place and time, and their occupation of place through time yields landscape. Landscape can therefore be defined as the tangible, visible, impress of human activity on the surface of the earth.¹⁷ Landscape is both a physical entity and a register of contemporary and historical knowledge; it is the physical and built environment and a way of knowing the world. Humans imprint their activities on the land. Sometimes they do this in obvious ways, such as logging a forest, cultivating a field, or building a town. Or the imprint may be more subtle, such as when a political authority erects a sign to indicate the presence of a prohibitory ordinance or an administrative boundary.¹⁸ Through learned behavior and practices, or culture, people are provided with a storehouse of concepts and tools for utilizing and modifying environments. Dwelling with and in a landscape may involve adapting to and exploiting the natural world while at the same time applying to it structures, technologies, organizations, and other cultural elements and practices that permit and promote making a living.¹⁹

Landscapes are inherently spatial; they occupy space and exhibit geographic patterns and variability. How we observe and describe landscape is not scale bound; that is, landscapes can be small, intimate, and personal—family or community scale—or they can be expansive, dynamic, and collective—regional scale. People alter landscapes in response to cultural change or adjustment. Landscapes are also modified by natural processes. One of our objectives is to sort through the complex natural and cultural processes that shape landscape in order to understand how particular landscapes were formed and maintained or changed.²⁰

We conduct our lives in and on a palimpsest of the overlapping remains of landscapes created by past generations. We may add our own signature atop the historical artifacts if the cost of removing or altering them would be prohibitive; the implication here is that landscapes have inertia—in this case, fiscal inertia. If we revere the past as heritage, and if old landscape elements have symbolic value, we may wish to preserve or reconstruct them, thereby lending them tangible inertia.²¹ There is, therefore, a reciprocity between people and the landscapes with which they live. As Winston Churchill famously noted in a 1943 address to the British Parliament: We shape our buildings, and afterwards, our buildings shape us.²²

Landscape is something that we see and sense, even though it is often constructed and modified by unseen people and practices. But it is also a way of seeing and sensing that is predicated on our cultural context.²³ When viewing landscapes, we must remember that our observations of artifacts constructed by others, during eras different from our own, are biased by our cultural values and traditions and likely are not altogether appreciative of the values and tenets of others.²⁴ Thinking analytically about landscapes from a geographic historical perspective might begin with a reconnaissance of visual landscape signatures: land use, material structures, technologies, transport routes, and boundaries. Documenting a landscape’s geology, geomorphology, hydrology, vegetative cover, and soil types can provide a context for examining how people engaged the physical environment to draw a living from it.²⁵

Finally, thoughtful engagement with landscape requires that we attempt to understand how it is valued and what it means to its occupants and observers. Landscape meaning can have multiple manifestations in times past and at present. Meaning can be reflected in what people write about the landscape, such as in personal memoirs or family records, or how it is depicted in paintings, photographs, or other images. A landscape element such as a childhood home, for example, may connote prideful ancestry, pleasant early-life experiences, and endearing personal histories—identity, in short—for a small cadre of former residents. Passersby, in contrast, may ignore the home entirely or see it as a symbolic display of privilege and wealth or exploitation and marginalization. Necessarily, there is a distinction between making and using something, and a structure or practice may carry different meanings for those who interact with it. A prideful nineteenth-century distiller might have boasted of his work’s high milling and mashing capacity or its out-sized and expensive copper pot still, whereas the laborers who milled the grain, cleaned the still, and moved the filled barrels might have regarded the distillery as a place where they performed demanding work for a low wage. As generations pass, the associations between landscape making and meaning may be recast. For some people, landscapes, or segments thereof, may fade into obscurity and anonymity; others may embrace those same landscapes, perhaps selectively, as their heritage and deem them worthy of formal remembrance, recognition, and preservation.²⁶

Historical Ecology

People live in geographic places where others have lived before. In the process, they create and re-create material landscapes.²⁷ Thus, landscape carries both transient and enduring records of the lives and works of past generations.²⁸ Time is, unavoidably, an important dimension of all landscape; put another way, all landscapes are historical. The adjective historical refers to diachronic study through time.²⁹ The places where people live and the landscapes they create, through time, are multidimensional, comprising physical environments and cultural constructions. Ecology, as the term is used here, refers to the study of the varied and complex relationships among humans and the relationships between human beings and the physical environments they inhabit and their cultural constructions—whatever their form or content. An ecological perspective does not impose an empirical separation between humans and nature.³⁰ Historical ecology, then, is a broad-based investigation of the physical and human elements of present-day landscapes through a diachronic reconstruction of the conjunctions of people, places, and processes through time, with attention to the order, timing, and contingency of influencing or causal events. This perspective is akin to viewing a subject in high-relief detail with binocular vision, as opposed to flat, two-dimensional monocular sight. To undertake such a study requires that we re-create, to the extent possible, the experiences and everyday activity patterns of the people who make or frame landscapes, both past and present, and whatever their gender, heritage, or vocation—enslaved peoples, laborers, farmers, mechanics, merchants, industrialists, bankers, and legislators among them.

Kentucky’s contemporary distilling industry is grounded in traditions and techniques that were more than two centuries in the making. During this time, production methods and technical capabilities developed and changed, as did demographic structures, cultural practices, societal values, and political organizations. The industry’s relationship to nature has not remained static either. Cultural practices can change, sometimes in an evolutionary manner, when people refine and elaborate technologies incrementally with new inventions or by borrowing and improving ideas provided by others. Traditional practices can also change abruptly when an event demonstrates the effectiveness of a new idea or artifact, such as an improved crop variety that produces higher yields while resisting diseases and pests. Both types of change often result in landscape adjustment and alteration. We must also acknowledge that although members of a social group may share a large body of conventional understandings about how the world works, they may not participate in the making of cultural practices equally or from the same perspective. Some may favor using a resource in a certain way, while others object to that use or wish to use the resource differently. Some may deploy various types of leverage to use land and erect and utilize structures that those with lesser influence would not attempt. Cultural practice is neither constant nor consistent. And perceived contradictions in cultural customs may lead to change.³¹

People living in different historical eras and possessing different cultural practices develop distinctive cultural landscapes within the context of their physical world, landscapes that can exhibit both a historical and a contemporary character. Artifact construction must take place within or upon a physical environment that offers certain opportunities—a humid or arid climate, fertile or sour soils, steep rocky slopes or low-gradient alluvial floodplains. Environmental change can be gradual and evolutionary or fitful and abrupt. A forest fire can kill susceptible tree species, allowing their gradual replacement by other vegetation types. Catastrophic floods can erode new channels across floodplains and alter soil profiles. A physical environment is not an undifferentiated terrain or a neutral background on which people act; nor are environments readily separable from human action.

Many landscape elements exhibit a tangible presence that can be empirically reviewed by observation, photography, or inventory and otherwise objectively assessed. A corollary, however, is that landscapes can also be shaped by unseen economic influences, social relations, and political policies. America’s frontier settlers produced staple crops for consumption by family and neighbors. New technology in the form of improved tools and plant varieties permitted those farmers to produce surpluses that could be shipped to distant markets if prices permitted. Governments sought to enhance the production and flow of domestic farm products by leveling tariffs on inexpensive imported goods; alternatively, governments placed controls on that same domestic production in order to extract taxes. Plant genetics, market prices, tariffs, and production controls may not be signatures that are readily visible on the landscape, but they can influence production patterns. And if one knows what to look for, such factors may leave behind subtle signs on the landscape. With some study, the casual observer can distinguish a field of wheat infested by the Hessian fly from a field planted in a resistant seed variety, just as one can differentiate between water- and steam-powered gristmills. Understanding the historical ecology of landscape requires an appreciation of its totality, of the complex conjunctions that lend structure, function, and presence to what people build and how they use land.³²

A Synthesis of Making, Landscape, Historical Ecology, and Distilling

Distillers and their cognate businesses make consumer products, of course. But the production process also creates a material landscape of distinctive structures and land uses. America’s physical landscape is constructed of common materials such as stone, brick, wood, concrete, iron, and steel, which are transformed into structures with foundations, walls, girders, pipes, and so on. Many industrial structures may be familiar to us in profile, but the manner of their design, assembly, and function remains obscure. Yet it is a structure’s purpose that suggests appropriate materials and forms and thereby contributes definitive character to the landscapes that people occupy—be they employees or passersby.

To better understand the connections between the distilling industry and its landscape, we may employ two contrasting but complementary perspectives: the local or vernacular, and the national or formal. The first perspective recognizes that building landscape is a local process and represents the intersection of local practices, materials, economies, social networks, and politics. Each locality has its own cultural center, and its landscape can be examined as the product of local circuits of knowledge and practice. Within this context, local practice is tempered to varying degrees by regional, national, or even international influences such as migration, the development of transportation networks and markets, and the flow of raw materials. Attention to local scale permits a detailed examination of personal economic strategies; the social relations among laborers, farmers, and distillers; and the workings of various financial and political institutions. Knowing how distillers established their businesses, the nature of their labor forces, and their business relationships with grain and barrel suppliers, bankers, wholesalers, and other businesses can provide an appraisal of how distillers functioned and how those functions became materialized in landscape.³³ At the local level, a landscape is made human.

A national perspective on landscape creation self-referentially configures landscape elements according to national or regional trends or models, especially through the development of widely applicable technologies, the creation of a national marketing system for commodities and financing, and the increasing reach of the national government, particularly its regulatory and production control policies. Those local distilling businesses that succeeded financially often increased in size and became large industrial works.³⁴ Such change was enabled, in part, by new technologies whose application was formalized by science, engineering, and the economies of a national marketplace. The Kentucky distiller’s primary product—bourbon whiskey—commanded a profitable price, or distilling stopped. Increased production also compelled distillers to develop business relationships with financiers and insurers. Overproduction reduced prices and profits and implied that other producers were engaged in creating a competitive market. The product was also susceptible to governmental taxation and regulation. Those distillers that competed with other producers, embraced new technologies to enhance production, and acquiesced to governmental regulation created landscape elements that resembled those of their competitors. And all distillers were subject to the controls imposed by regional and national commodity and financial markets. As a result, the distilling process and the landscape it created began to adhere to regional and national norms.

At the local scale, individual distillers operated at different sites that required idiosyncratic adaptations to those places. They constructed buildings with the materials at hand, using whatever carpentry and masonry skills they possessed or could hire. Each distillery was different, its character a reflection of its place and its builder. But at the regional and national scale, each distiller was subject to advances in technology, refinements in business procedures, and increasing government oversight, all of which tended to normalize the distilling process and its landscape.³⁵

The overall objective here is to understand how local-scale industry developed through the insights and innovations of individuals with different origins and life experiences. These individuals included Irish and Scottish immigrants, Maryland and Pennsylvania millers and farmers, and native-born Kentuckians. Nineteenth-century distilling did not emerge as a refined manufacturing process in the complex and chaotic locales of early American industrial development such as New Jersey’s Delaware Valley, the upper reaches of the Ohio and Monongahela River Valleys in western Pennsylvania, or the large East Coast cities of Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. Rather, distilling began as a small-scale enterprise, usually in concert with farming or grain milling; only gradually did it develop into an integrated commercial business operating at an industrial scale. Distilling experience gained in distant locales certainly provided an advantage to those early settlers who wished to carry on the business, but the distilling practices that subsequently blossomed in Kentucky were a product of that specific place and the circumstances presented by the environmental, cultural, social, and political milieu that developed there.

Kentucky’s distilling landscape shares some common elements with other industries that process agricultural products, such as flour milling and livestock feeding. Yet distilling is distinct, in that it applies traditional knowledge of elementary chemistry and commodity characteristics to produce a potable product whose potential market extends as far as information and transportation permit. At the same time, distillers have had to defend themselves from those seeking to capture their market or to control or even prohibit production and consumption. At each phase of industrial development, Kentucky’s whiskey makers created or adopted utilitarian structures to house their activities and shelter their raw materials and products. When long-standing technology was refined or when new or larger equipment was developed, existing distilleries might be moved or torn down and replaced. Alternatively, many distillers adapted older structures to new purposes and added new buildings to the distillery site. The result, though functionally pragmatic, often presented a rather disorderly appearance.

American distillers did not spawn ancillary industries such as iron and copper metalworking, cooperage, or glass manufacturing. Those industries emerged independently, and their standardized products were accepted by distillers who adapted them to their own needs. A distillery might require copper kettles, brass valves, iron pipes, leather belts, and reciprocating iron and brass steam engines, but these products were not initially custom designed and built for distillers. Rather, distillers initially built their own equipment from bulk material such as copper sheeting or used off-the-shelf products. Gradually, as distilling grew into an industrial business independent of farming but dependent on farmers’ products, distillers began to develop and test ways to improve product quality and production efficiency. They attracted supporting industrial innovations that led to the development of dedicated milling equipment and grain storage facilities. Increasingly, farmer-distillers could disconnect from their dependence on neighborhood mills and coopers and purchase ready-made, custom-built copper stills; specialized valves, pumps, and fittings; cooperage machinery; and patented warehouse storage rack systems. New glass bottle-making technology permitted a radical change in the packaging and sale of distillery products and underwrote a specialty bottle-making industry that allowed distillers to refine their marketing and distribution strategies. Innovations of another type—improvements in botanical crop varieties—increased grain yields but also resulted in grains with superior milling and distilling characteristics.³⁶

All industrial landscapes are composed of intricately layered and interrelated elements, but Kentucky’s nineteenth-century distilling landscape was especially complex. Rural distilleries stood beside springs or creeks and processed grain from surrounding farms. Urban distilleries drew water from rivers or wells and patronized rail lines that delivered their grain and shipped their product. The distillery workers who transformed grains into whiskey may have been enslaved people prior to 1863 or the sons of local farmers. Skilled coopers and coppersmiths found work supplying barrels and still equipment. The land carried the imprint of these and many related activities.

The distilling landscape can be secretive and proprietary, on the one hand, and subject to disclosure owing to governmental regulation and oversight, on the other. Industrial innovations produced new equipment that distillers installed and operated according to their own traditional procedures. But beginning in the 1860s, federal taxing regulations exerted increasing control over the configuration and functioning of the distilling landscape. Regulation enclosed distillery buildings with invisible legal boundaries and ceded operational control to federal appointees. The distillery landscape, then, with the exception of a few signature structures, is partially opaque to the casual observer. But, when it is examined closely, one finds a complex production and marketing system with ties to agriculture, industry, business, government, and law and local, regional, and even national cultural mores.

It is likely that most nineteenth-century distillers were not aware of all the historical contingencies that affected the development of their industry. Similarly, we recognize that we have not discovered all the people and events that influenced the construction of Kentucky’s traditional distilling landscape. Nevertheless, we can construct a narrative that demonstrates that landscapes, however ordinary they seem, are linked to an expansive web of cultural influences and contingencies that entrain from local to regional to national and even international scales. It is also evident that contemporary distillers are keenly aware of their forebearers’ contributions to the development of the state’s signature industry and maintain an appreciation of that heritage as it is manifest in landscape preservation and product marketing.

I

MAKING KENTUCKY’S DISTILLING LANDSCAPE

1

Heritage and Process

My aim is to diffuse new light on everything that relates to the formation of spirituous liquors that may be obtained from grains. Most arts and trades are practiced without principles, perhaps from a want of the means of information. For the advantage of the distillers of whiskey, I will collect and offer them the means of obtaining from a given quantity of grain, the greatest possible quantity of spirit, purer and cheaper than by the usual methods.

—Anthony Boucherie

Building on Heritage

American spirits distilling grew from European and colonial traditions. New England distillers, among them John Hancock and Samuel Adams, made rum out of fermented Caribbean molasses to supply local tipplers with spirituous drink, to stock merchant and whaling ships with the makings for grog, and to serve as currency in the Triangular Trade.¹ In the Middle Colonies, German settlers in southeastern Pennsylvania’s Piedmont and the adjacent counties in Maryland distilled spirits from rye, as did George Washington in eastern Virginia. Protestant Scots-Irish from Ulster country and Catholic Irish from Ireland brought a thousand-year whiskey-making tradition to western Pennsylvania and the Ohio River Valley in the trans-Appalachian West.² In 1794, upon finding themselves subject to federal enforcement of Alexander Hamilton’s excise tax on the whiskey they made, some 2,000 farmer-distillers in western Pennsylvania migrated west, many of them to Kentucky.³ These Whiskey Rebellion refugees further reinforced frontier Kentucky’s rapidly developing distilling economy.

Pioneers and innovators are often rewarded with citations as the first to accomplish something in the legends and lore that make up a founding myth. Evan Williams, Elijah Craig, and other eighteenth-century Kentucky distillers have been so acknowledged, but absent definitive documents, one can only admit of general recognition. It is sufficient to know that distilling was commonplace in 1780s Kentucky.⁴ Second-generation distillers were providentially positioned to see their accomplishments recorded as literacy rates increased, personal circulation and travel reduced isolation, and communication improved with the establishment of local newspapers. Accordingly, the contributions of distiller James C. Crow are more fully understood and illustrate how a talented individual influenced the development of quality whiskey. To him, more than any other man, is due the international reputation that Kentucky enjoys, and the vast distilling interests of the country are largely the result of his discoveries, pronounced the New York Sun in 1897.⁵ Crow was born in Dirleton, Scotland, in 1779. A Presbyterian of the John Knox type, he graduated from the College of Medicine and Surgery in Edinburgh in 1822 as a physician and chemist.⁶ He migrated to America and, after spending a short time in Philadelphia, moved to Kentucky in 1823, where he entered the distilling business on Glenns (also spelled Glens or Glenn’s) Creek, near Millville in Woodford County. Distilling at the time was rarely directed by rules; nor was it exacting in terms of quantity and proportion of ingredients, critical temperatures, or precise timing. Though his still house had a very limited capacity, producing only two to two and a half gallons per day, by embracing chemistry as a hobby and experimentation as a practice, Crow applied scientific methods and advanced instrumentation to his distilling practice. He was eventually able to consistently produce a superior corn spirit and, in the process, changed whiskey distilling from a folk craft to a semblance of a science. Brisk sales soon followed, with Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, and Daniel Webster among his better-known customers.⁷

Kentucky’s frontier folk, whatever their heritage, often engaged in small-scale farm distilling, producing enough corn spirits for themselves and perhaps some to sell to neighbors or ship to southern markets if they had ready access to one of the Ohio River’s navigable tributaries. Kentucky’s first commercial distillery may have been in operation in Louisville, at the Falls of the Ohio, in 1783. Many of the skilled coopers who built the wooden tubs and barrels used to distill and store whiskey had served apprenticeships and worked in Virginia, Maryland, and Ohio, as well as in Belgium, France, and Germany. Distillers who wished to increase the scale of operations beyond what their family members could accomplish hired itinerant and immigrant laborers or pressed enslaved African Americans to provide the workforce.

Process: A Distilling Primer

Grain starch is the only ingredient used in the manufacture of whiskey. Millers initiated the distilling process by milling corn and rye or wheat to the consistency of a fine meal. Barley has a high diastatic power—that is, malted barley contains enzymes that can convert up to 2,000 times the weight of starch into glucose.⁸ Maltsters prepared barley through a wetting process that caused the grain to sprout; thereafter, the malted barley was dried and milled. Distilling begins with the conversion of grain sugars and starches into grape sugar, which then undergoes vinous fermentation. To make a distillable mash, distillers traditionally mixed milled corn and rye or wheat with boiling water in large wooden tubs. After cooking, the mixture was cooled to about 152°F, at which point the distiller added barley malt. When the starch conversion process was completed, the mixture or mash was cooled, and yeasts began fermenting the sugars into alcohol.⁹ Yeast fermentation, a form of combustion, lasted seventy-two to ninety-six hours. The fermented mash, or distiller’s beer, contained alcohol and congeners such as methanol, fusel alcohols, aldehydes, and tannins, which provided the distilled whiskey with some of its taste and aroma. This process produced a sweet mash; to make sour-mash whiskey, distillers added to the fermenting vat stillage residue, or back set, from a previous batch.

In Kentucky, fine whiskeys were traditionally made in alembics, or onion-shaped copper pot stills; these were later augmented by the vertical column still. In the 1880s commercial-scale column stills were three to four feet in diameter and thirty to seventy-five feet tall. Both still types were comparatively simple mechanical devices whose operation was based on the differential boiling points of water and alcohol. Pot and column stills removed alcohol from fermented beer by heating the beer to about 173.1°F, or 38.9°F lower than the boiling point of water. At this critical temperature, the alcohol goes over, or is vaporized. Since alcohol vapor is lighter than water vapor, it separated and left the water vapor behind. The alcohol vapor was then captured and passed through a coiled copper pipe, or worm, where it condensed into liquid ethyl alcohol, also known as drinking alcohol or spirits.¹⁰ This condensed spirit was termed low wine or singlings, and it was 90 to 130 proof, or 45 to 65 percent alcohol.¹¹ The low wine was then passed into a second still or doubler, commonly made of copper and traditionally heated by a wood or coal fire, where it underwent a second distillation. The alcohol vapor produced then passed through a second worm and emerged as high wine or whiskey of roughly 150 proof, or 75 percent alcohol. By adding distilled or local water, the distiller further reduced the proof to 100 to 110. The mixture of water and spent grain, known variously as grain stillage, wash, or slop, was left behind and required disposal. The contemporary distilling process is little changed, in principle, from that employed in the nineteenth century. The final step in whiskey production is barreling and aging. Nineteenth-century American whiskey barrels held 48 gallons; standard barrel volume was increased to 53 gallons, or 200 liters, sometime during the twentieth century. Laborers moved the filled barrels to warehouses for aging for a period of two years or more. Fine whiskeys may be aged for a decade or longer.

If the spirit so produced was distilled from a fermented mash of not less than 51 percent corn and stored at no more than 125 proof in new, charred oak barrels, it can legally be identified as bourbon whiskey. Whiskeys stored in appropriate containers and aged for two years or more are identified as straight bourbon whiskey.¹² As this standard implies, all bourbon is whiskey, but not all whiskey is bourbon. Nineteenth-century Kentucky distillers sold bourbon whiskey to wholesalers and retailers in full-size barrels or in smaller containers such as half barrels or kegs. Saloon keepers served their customers whiskey from full-size barrels tapped with a spigot. Some distillers sold their whiskey at distillery quart houses to customers who brought their own stoneware jugs.

Kentucky: The Center of Bourbon Whiskey Distilling

How does one explain Kentucky’s traditional association with whiskey distilling? Many of the state’s eighteenth-century Anglo settlers had a modicum of distilling experience, so the industry did enjoy the advantage of an early start and historical inertia. But folk distilling was also widely practiced elsewhere, from the Carolinas and Tennessee north and west to Indiana and Illinois, well into the nineteenth century. One might consider the extraordinary concentration of whiskey distilling in Kentucky to be a matter of rational economic geography that can be readily explained, as it is for other businesses and industries, by an analysis of production costs. Industrial processes incur costs to purchase, move, and process raw materials; to train and pay a labor force; and to distribute a finished product. If, for example, the location of bourbon distilling is dependent on the availability of large quantities of distilling grains, then, according to best economic practices, the industry should be located in the most productive parts of the Corn Belt—Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa—to ensure availability of grain and low transportation costs. It should not be centered in Kentucky. Yet, in 2014, Kentucky distillers used more than 12 million bushels of corn and 4 million bushels of other grains, and farms outside Kentucky supplied about 50 percent of the corn and 80 percent of the wheat and rye processed by the state’s distilleries.¹³ Very little rye or barley was grown in Kentucky during the nineteenth century. In the 1860s and 1870s many distillers bought malted barley from Canadian suppliers, and the majority of contemporary malting barley production takes place in North Dakota and Saskatchewan.

Moreover, distilling is not concentrated in Kentucky because of superior transport access or freight rate advantages. Distilling has a very low weight-loss ratio; that is, the weight of raw materials used in distilling is very similar to the weight of the finished product. Transportation costs for finished products are usually higher than the costs of shipping raw materials, in part because those materials can be handled in bulk by specialized equipment. In addition, finished products may require special handling because they are more perishable than the raw materials. Whether bourbon was shipped in barrels, kegs, or jugs during the nineteenth century or in glass bottles thereafter, transport costs included losses due to breakage and pilferage. Distilleries are most favorably located near their customers, yet the consumption of spirituous beverages in Kentucky is comparatively low, and 48 of the state’s 120 counties are nominally dry.

Distilled bourbon must be aged in American white oak (Quercus alba) barrels, often for four years or more, to assure a quality product. Indeed, the costs of cooperage and warehousing, insurance, and product loss through evaporation can be higher than the costs of raw materials, labor, and overhead combined. And the expenses associated with aging or warehousing would be similar in other states, so Kentucky does not enjoy an advantage there in transforming raw whiskey into aged bourbon.¹⁴ Given such anomalies in raw material quality and availability and the costs of manufacturing and transport, why is bourbon whiskey production centered in Kentucky? Kentucky distiller John Atherton acknowledged these inconsistencies when he testified before a US congressional committee in 1888 concerning internal revenue regulations. The distillers located in the best grain country (the Middle West and central and northern Great Plains) and with the best railroad facilities would drive other distillers (in Kentucky) out of existence, he said, without the protection of the internal revenue law for fine whiskey production.¹⁵

Perhaps Kentucky possesses optimal environmental conditions that abet distilling. Corn and wheat thrive in Kentucky’s climate and soils, yet rye and barley do not. Accepted lore suggests that early distillers touted the state’s pure limestone water as a favorable factor if not the primary locational criterion for the founding and building of Kentucky’s distilling industry. Kentucky’s groundwater, which was said to be pure and iron free, supposedly lent the finished product a particular taste. Distillers in other states likely vigorously debated this presumption. The Great Valley is floored with limestone for much of its length from Maryland and Virginia to eastern Tennessee, as are many of the fertile farming valleys of eastern Pennsylvania. And what about Tennessee? The famed Nashville Basin is also a limestone plain and a near mirror image of the Bluegrass, to which it is geologically related. If limestone water was the secret to whiskey production, it seems likely that distillers would have favored these other places as well. Meanwhile, central Illinois was covered in many feet of glacial till, yet Peoria became one of the nation’s major nineteenth-century whiskey distilling centers. By the 1840s, distilleries operated in most Kentucky counties, regardless of their geological provenance. Limestone is scarce in Kentucky’s Appalachian counties and is incidental on the Ohio River floodplain downstream from Louisville. Two Kentucky regions, the Greater Bluegrass and the Pennyroyal, are deeply underlain by limestones that husband groundwater and are the source of productive springs and wells. Yet the most extensive development of distilling occurred in the Bluegrass but not in the Pennyroyal.

Can one argue that distilling succeeded in Kentucky because of the social and political attitudes of the public and government officials? Kentucky had an active temperance movement during the nineteenth century. In 1834 the Kentucky Legislative Temperance Society was formed, with Governor John Breathitt (Democrat) as president and Lieutenant Governor James Morehead (Republican) as one of its five vice presidents.¹⁶ Well-attended Temperance Society meetings were often held in towns with large operating distilleries.¹⁷ Temperance activist Carrie Nation was born in Garrard County, Kentucky, in 1846, although she did most of her temperance work in Missouri, Kansas, and Texas.

Perhaps the most compelling explanation for Kentucky’s emergence as the nation’s principal bourbon whiskey producer is that, from the earliest decades, Kentucky distillers sought to make high-quality whiskey, an inclination that became an operative requirement by the last third of the nineteenth century. Neighboring states were major whiskey production centers—Illinois produced more whiskey than any other state. But Kentucky distillers argued that those Corn Belt whiskeys were poorly made and insufficiently aged; the end product, which was made tolerable only by rectifying or compounding the whiskey with flavorings, was deemed suitable only for a nondiscriminating market. Kentucky distillers, in contrast, purposely cultivated their reputation for producing a first-class product and expanded their sales through clever marketing and advertising.¹⁸

2

Kentucky Distilling

Craft to Commercial Enterprise

The rapidity of improvements in the western parts of the United States, is a matter of some consideration to the distillers of the Atlantic states. They have already made considerable progress in the art of distillation, and the vast quantities of grain which are produced by their fertile lands, beyond the necessary consumption, cannot be so well disposed of in any way as in pork and whiskey. Hence we already find Kentucky whiskey in our sea ports.

—Harrison Hall

A Potable Product and Transactional Currency

The bourbon distilling industry has long been associated with Kentucky, although whiskey distilling was common throughout the Atlantic Seaboard during the colonial period. Log cabin distilleries operated by migrants from Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Northern Ireland produced unaged white whiskey on Bluegrass farms and in the town settlements of central Kentucky by 1775.¹ Whiskey distilling was a craft, a vernacular folkway that was perhaps the first widespread industry in Kentucky that processed local resources—water and grain—into a product that could be readily sold. Local customers patronized distillers, but the product was also exported by overland trails to river towns such as Louisville and Cincinnati, where it was sold or loaded onto riverboats for delivery to markets downriver. As corn and wheat production moved into the trans-Appalachian West, whiskey distilling followed, and by 1850, Cincinnati had become the largest whiskey market in the world.²

Distillers used whiskey to barter with farmers; a gallon of whiskey for a bushel of corn was a common equivalence. In lieu of coin money or specie, frontier whiskey often served as currency. Wherever farmers produced grain, it was milled, and any milled grain that was not directly consumed as flour or meal was often distilled into whiskey. Milling and distilling developed in concert, both geographically and historically, and these frontier businesses moved away from the economically limiting barter-exchange system to the medium of debits and credits, which became the basis for the transition from a subsistence to a market economy in communities where these businesses prospered.³

In central Kentucky, whiskey was used in barter-exchange transactions, primarily in rural areas beyond the ready reach of merchants and bankers in commercial towns. In larger settlements, whiskey was part of a cash economy and was not commonly used in lieu of cash. John Moylan operated a general store on Main Street in Lexington in the early 1790s. He offered for sale a wide range of goods: linen and calico; groceries, glassware, and gun locks; hand tools, harnesses, and hymnbooks; and tobacco and whiskey. In 1792 and 1793 Moylan periodically purchased whiskey from Nathaniel Ashby, James Dunn, William Kearney, John McCall, Payton Short, William Trotter, and Robert Wallace for resale to customers. He bought whiskey in amounts ranging from five to more than sixty gallons, for which he paid three shillings six pence per gallon. His whiskey suppliers—the record is unclear whether these men were also distillers—maintained accounts at the store for sundry articles such as hardware and hand tools, including a cooper’s adz, cloth, groceries, sugar, and salt. Moylan sold the whiskey at retail to his customers, sometimes in multigallon lots, for one shilling six pence per quart, or a sales margin of about 25 percent over his cost. One entry in his ledger specified that the spirit for sale was Bourbon. Most of Moylan’s customers settled their accounts in cash, including the whiskey suppliers. Moylan did not receive whiskey in lieu of cash or as part of barter arrangements; he bought spirits for resale in the same manner that he purchased locally produced nails, wood, meal, flour, and vegetables.⁴

Industrial Imprints

During the nineteenth century, distilling changed from a vernacular artisanal craft to a commercial industry, and this resulted in pronounced alterations in operations and landscape. While the craft distillers’ landscape was never static, the adoption of industrial techniques and technology led distillers to radically alter their traditional procedures. Some of those alterations were nuanced, and others were conspicuous, but they all reflected distillers’ preferences