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Business Pioneers that Had Quite the Disturbing Background

Khalid Elhassan December 8, 2021 36 min

Coco Chanel, circa 1960. Encyclopedia Britannica

17. The Founder of America’s Top Seller Whiskey Brand

Jasper Newton “Jack” Daniel (circa 1849 – 1911) was a distiller and business entrepreneur, who is best known as the founder of the Jack Daniel’s whiskey distillery in Tennessee. He created the Jack Daniels whiskey brand, bourbon or whiskey, which eventually became the most widely sold American whiskey in the US and the world. It holds that top rank to this day. In 2017, the most recent year for which information is publicly available, 16.1 million cases of Jack Daniels brands were sold worldwide.

Jack Daniel, who was born in Lynchburg, Tennessee, went to work as a child for a preacher who also made money as a grocer and moonshine distiller. The boy did not exhibit much enthusiasm for grocery or the gospel, but when his boss showed him how to operate his whiskey still, or ordered a slave to show him, young Daniel took to it like a fish to water. He exhibited a precocious talent that led him to get his own distillery license, reportedly while he was still a teenager.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.