Anyone who enjoys a drink now and again will have tried Jack Daniels. The smooth, sweet sour mash alcohol has earned a reputation for quality and taste for more than 150 years.
Invented in Tennessee in a distillery founded in the 1870s, the Tennessee whiskey made the distillery’s founders, including the eponymous Jack Daniel himself, rich men. But it seems, at least with the founder, all this money could not buy common sense.
Jack Daniel may have had it all, but all it took was one moment of ill-tempered stupidity to take it all away.
An Enigmatic Man
For a man born in the 1840s in the United States, we know surprisingly little about Jack himself. It is believed that he was born in Lynchburg Tennessee but a town fire destroyed the courthouse records of that time. Daniel’s mother herself died in childbirth.
It is believed that Jack learned to operate a whiskey still when he was just a child from a local grocer and preacher named Dan Call. The preacher was often occupied and unable to be in his shop, and when he saw how smart the young boy was he came to trust him with the running of the place.
And, amazingly, that’s almost it. We know he founded a whiskey distillery, probably around 1875 which would make Jack himself somewhere in his mid 20s. We know the distillery was a success, but almost everything else is a blank.
Jack Daniel never married, never had any children. The most we see of Jack’s interest in his family comes from him taking some of his brighter nephews to work for him at the distillery.
And so it goes on, until the end of Jack’s life. By 1907 Jack, then almost 60, had begun to become a little infirm and was looking for somebody to take over the running of the business. It would be the nephew that Jack had taken on at the distillery who would run it, but Jack would remain too.
It was this decision that was to prove Jack’s downfall. The distillery, a huge success and with offices which saw lots of money pass through, had a large safe to keep valuables in. Jack, apparently not a particularly patient man, had never got on with this safe.
He found himself often forgetting the combination, and unable to access the contents just when he needed them. This failing memory led him on occasion to lash out at the safe, and so he did in the fall of 1911, kicking it for refusing to give up his contents.
Sadly, this kick would be the end of Jack Daniel. Injuring his foot with the kick, he broke his toe and contracted blood poisoning, or sepsis. Jack died on October 9, 1911, aged 62.
Top Image: Jack Daniel, died aged 62 because he couldn’t remember the combination to his own safe. Source: Unknown Author / Public Domain.
By Joseph Green
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