Born in Draperstown, County Derry in Ireland in 1819, Henry McKenna moved to Nelson County, KY with his family at the age of 18. He worked in an Irish distillery before he moved but had no intentions of working in the whiskey industry when he came to America. In 1855...
Born in Garrard County, KY in 1835, George T. Stagg would start a spirits distribution company out of St. Louis, MO, importing and shipping Kentucky whiskies all over the mid-West. in 1878, due to a world economic downturn, Stagg would purchase the O.F.C. Distillery...
Born circa 1740 in Virginia, Evan Williams founded the first commercial spirit distillery in KY, “K.S.P. #1” in an area that was later admitted into the Union in 1792 as the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Under the guidance of Earl Beam, Heaven Hill Distillery...
Colonel Edmund Haynes Taylor, Jr. was born in Columbia, Kentucky in 1832 and was a descendant of two U.S. presidents: James Madison and General Zachary Taylor. As Mayor of Frankfort, KY, he used his influence to help pass the “Bottled-In-Bond Act of 1897”...
Born in Orange, VA, Elijah Craig would become known as the “Father of Bourbon” for his discovery of charring barrels for aging whiskey. He was not only a reverend, a farmer, and a fire chief, but he would open a clothing manufacturing plan, a paper mill, a...
