Whiskey Historical Events Database (USWA)

No causal attribution to a named whiskey firm. This event does not represent every Indigenous removal.

Peru, Indiana; Wabash & Erie Canal

Places coercion and continuity beside expansion’s land and transport systems.

The dated departure records forced removal, not voluntary migration or the disappearance of all Myaamia people.

October 6, 1846

No assumption of unanimous consent or fulfilled promises. Published transcription, not manuscript collation.

Greenville; Ohio Country

Separates treaty-making from implementation in the Early Republic landscape.

The August 3, 1795 treaty combined territorial cessions with written obligations and protections.

August 3, 1795

Year only; no precise day assigned. Museum synthesis, not independent manuscript collation.

Plymouth / Patuxet, present-day Massachusetts

Makes Indigenous expertise visible without inventing a whiskey origin.

Tisquantum’s 1621 maize instruction is a located agricultural exchange.

1621

Hamm remains the controlling scholarly synthesis. Federal Judicial Center evidence independently verifies the federal caseload, plea-processing, prison-growth, and doctrine components; the Library of Congress independently corroborates illegal-market visibility and stronger gangs. Do not add national crime or revenue magnitudes without separate evidence.

Connects the illicit whiskey economy to the institutional growth and legal adaptation of the federal criminal-justice system without repeating the myth that organized crime began in 1920.

National Prohibition did not create organized crime, but the illegal alcohol market enlarged criminal opportunity while mass enforcement flooded federal courts, accelerated plea-based case processing, expanded prison administration, and shaped enduring search-and-seizure doctrine.

1920–1933

Use as a shared-infrastructure period, not a claim that a named rum business directly became a whiskey business. The two verified secondary syntheses do not establish exact counts, firms, market shares, or a simple institutional genealogy.

Colonial New England; later connections to inland grain-distilling regions

American whiskey grew within an existing colonial distilling economy. The stills, barrels, metalwork, transport, timber trades, and commercial practices used for rum helped create capacities that grain distillers could later share and adapt.

Colonial New England rum production supported cooperage, ironwork, logging, shipping, and commercial distilling capacity that later formed part of the material environment of American grain-spirit production.

Late 17th–early 18th centuries

This is a maturity snapshot, not the founding date of bourbon tourism or the Kentucky Bourbon Trail. The 2011–2012 Lubbers evidence and the 2015 Urban Bourbon Trail snapshot support the period; current venues and economic figures require fresh verification before present-tense use.

Kentucky, especially distillery regions and Louisville

Tourism became more than an accessory to production. It taught consumers how bourbon was made, translated place and history into brand meaning, and distributed whiskey’s economic and cultural activity across distilleries, hotels, restaurants, and regional itineraries.

By the early 2010s, Kentucky bourbon tourism linked distillery visits, sensory education, architecture, hospitality, transportation, and urban tasting venues into a regional interpretive network.

By the early 2010s

Treat the date as an approximate early-2000s period. The supporting source is qualitative, so do not attach precise volumes, a single turning-point year, or a complete list of suppliers and entrants.

United States; Indiana contract-distilling supply; North American sourcing context

The episode reveals a central constraint of whiskey markets: demand can change immediately, but mature supply cannot. It also made the separation between brand ownership, distillation, and aging inventory unusually visible to consumers.

Renewed rye demand depleted mature stocks faster than producers could replace them. Existing mature inventory held by contract distillers helped new brands enter while newly distilled rye still required years of aging.

Early 2000s

Use as early surviving documentary evidence, not as the first American whiskey. Exact manuscript images or an authoritative full transcription remain to be inspected, so confidence is Moderate and the qualification is mandatory.

Massachusetts Bay Colony; correspondence addressed to Pequoyt (Pequot/New London area)

The letters provide unusually specific documentary evidence for rye-based distilling plans and reported activity in an English North American colony. They also show that colonial practice drew on transatlantic knowledge rather than beginning as a self-contained American invention.

In April 1648, Emanuel Downing wrote that he had sold a horse to buy a still and requested a German recipe for making strong water from unmalted rye meal. An October letter reported three months of distilling and local preference for the product.

April–October 1648

Use as a documented commercial-transition event, not as an absolute world-first claim.

Bordeaux and Picardie, France

This is a useful marker for the shift from medicinal or local distilled alcohol toward documented commercial spirits movement before colonial American distilling.

Bordeaux notarial registers record a shipment of spirits to Picardie in 1513, followed by other small international shipments later in the decade.

1513

Draft-ready as an explicitly attributed OPA account from printed pages 35–36 of the complete report. The underlying Foster & Co. v. Bowles opinion is not yet in the library; consult it before making a doctrinal claim about the court's reasoning.

United States

The dispute shows how wartime price control handled a whiskey brand without its own March 1942 base-period price and how a later standardized ceiling could override an earlier individual price approval across existing contracts.

According to OPA's quarterly report, the Emergency Court of Appeals rejected Foster & Co.'s challenge after standardized dollar-and-cent ceilings reduced the previously approved maximum price for its new packaged-whiskey brand.

September 27, 1944

Controlling instrument verified in the complete August 21, 1945 Federal Register issue, printed page 10179 / PDF page 4. Keep distinct from the later Agriculture Department allocation period.

United States

The revocation ended the principal WPB order that had directed distilled-spirits production during the war, but it did not end separate grain-allocation restrictions administered by Agriculture.

War Production Board Priorities Regulation 31 revoked Order M-69, Distilled Spirits, effective August 31, 1945.

August 31, 1945

Controlling instrument: WFO 141, issued July 26 and effective August 1, 1945, published at 10 FR 9381–9382. The order barred corn and generally barred grain use for beverage spirits, subject to the stated August exceptions. Complete Federal Register issue preserved and verified.

United States

The order demonstrates that post-V-E Day whiskey production resumed through narrow, grain-specific administrative windows rather than an unrestricted reopening.

War Food Order 141 allows registered distilleries to produce beverage spirits from non-corn grain during August 1–6, while qualifying industrial alcohol plants receive a shorter August 1–3 window.

August 1–6, 1945

Exact rate, effective date, and tax timing are verified in the complete 1882 House legal history, which cites the 1862 Statutes at Large pages. The original 1862 scan has not yet been preserved; retain that source qualification.

United States

The Civil War revenue system made federal taxation and warehouse accounting durable structural features of American whiskey commerce.

Congress imposed a twenty-cent-per-gallon federal excise on distilled spirits, effective August 1, while allowing duty to remain deferred until sale or removal from warehouse.

July 1, 1862 (effective August 1)

Primary statute verified in full. Do not infer typical aging duration or consumer preference solely from the legal rule.

United States

The statute tied whiskey storage to federal custody and tax-timed removal, formalizing bonded warehousing as part of the industry's operating structure.

Section 15 required a distiller-provided warehouse approved as a bonded warehouse of the United States, under revenue control, with tax paid before withdrawal.

July 20, 1868

Treat this as Raum's attributed official assessment, not as a quantified causal finding. The letter is reproduced in the complete House report.

United States

The statement provides direct contemporary evidence that federal officials associated longer bonded storage with the development of higher-value aged whiskey.

Commissioner Green B. Raum wrote that extending the bonded period to three years had given 'quite a stimulus' to the manufacture of fine whiskies.

April 3, 1882

The 1926 opinion describes approximately 895 barrels, 69 bottled-in-bond cases, and about 40,000 gallons. It also records that the sellers resigned and new stock, officers, and directors were installed.

St. Louis, Missouri

The transaction documents how Prohibition-era continuity could involve a legal transfer of corporation, warehouse control, and stock rather than uninterrupted production at the original Tennessee site.

Lem Motlow, T. A. Heffernan, and Harry L. Dahlman sold all stock in the St. Louis-based Jack Daniel Distilling Company to Don H. Robinson and transferred warehouse certificates for its stored whiskey.

June 26, 1923

Use as a named case study, not as evidence that every Tennessee distillery followed the same path. Keep site, ownership, stock, recipe, personnel, and trademark continuity distinct.

Tennessee; St. Louis, Missouri; Birmingham, Alabama

The sequence shows that continuity could be maintained through a brand and firm operating across jurisdictions even while the original production site was legally inactive.

Tennessee's 1909 manufacture ban displaced Jack Daniel distilling operations to St. Louis and Birmingham. The state ban outlasted national Prohibition; distilling resumed in Lynchburg after Tennessee repealed the ban in 1937.

1909–1937

Use 1958 unless a primary production or bottling record supports a more precise date. Do not rely on uncited exact-day claims.

Loretto, Kentucky, United States

Marks the commercial joining of the matured bourbon and Margie Samuels’s distinctive package system.

Maker’s Mark’s company chronology states that the first bottle was finished and hand-dipped in 1958; a federal opinion independently records use of the dripping red wax since 1958.

1958

Ready with role distinctions: Margie prepared comparative breads and created the core package system; company sources assign the final mashbill selection and flavor vision to Bill Samuels Sr.

Kentucky, United States

Makes visible the creative, experimental, and commercial labor through which a postwar whiskey became an integrated product and visual system.

Maker’s Mark dates Margie Samuels’s creation of the brand name and bottle design to 1953; KDA also credits her with bread-based grain testing, label, lettering, and later wax identity.

1953

Bernheim Forest's June 17, 2019 retrospective dates the founding to January 1872 and describes an immediate brand introduction; Sotheby's August 1, 2025 collector's guide dates first marketing as I. W. Harper to 1879. Keep the brand chronology disputed. Attribute the naming-motive explanation to Bernheim Forest's retrospective. Timeline Date represents the year, not an exact founding day.

Paducah, Kentucky, United States

A named example of how ethnicity, religion, perceived prejudice, and Americanizing brand strategy intersected with the expansion of nineteenth-century whiskey commerce.

Isaac and Bernard Bernheim established their wholesale whiskey business in Paducah in 1872. This is the firm's founding date, not a settled date for the introduction of I. W. Harper.

1872

Approximate dollar amounts and sequence come from Max Shapira’s first-person corporate history and should remain attributed. Identity context is supported elsewhere in the library.

Bardstown and New Haven, Kentucky, United States

Shows post-Repeal institution building as a combination of technical knowledge and family retail capital, while keeping identity distinct from business motive.

According to Max Shapira, people with pre-Prohibition distilling knowledge approached the Shapira brothers for startup capital; the family invested about $18,000 in 1935 and bought out the partners less than two years later.

1935

Printed pp. 525–526 are the evidentiary core. Attribute contemporary rankings to the Census Office. The generated OCR misreads 50,000 cattle as 60,000; the high-resolution page image controls.

Peoria, Illinois

Provides contemporary federal evidence that a major American distilling center functioned as an urban industrial ecosystem rather than an isolated collection of stills.

The Census Office connected Peoria’s nationally prominent spirits output to corn, river and rail transport, distillery swill, stockyards, and large-scale livestock handling.

1880

The same official nomination narratively foregrounds Charles Nelson while reproducing maps that name Louisa. Present this as a contrast in source framing, not evidence of deliberate erasure. Later 1913 and 1921 sheets retain the business style but mark the plant inactive or altered.

Greenbrier, Robertson County, Tennessee

Supplies a dated primary-document sequence that makes Louisa Nelson’s formal business or facility attribution visible without conflating that evidence with unsupported claims about her daily technical role.

Four reproduced Sanborn sheets label the operating Greenbrier Distillery under the business style “Louisa Nelson as Chas. Nelson.”

1893–1908

The KHS finding aid is authoritative for the repository’s archival description. It does not specify the exact start date, duration, scale, output, equipment, or whether Catherine performed every production task personally.

Lincoln County, Kentucky

A named, independently recoverable early-republic episode that distinguishes a woman’s income-producing distilling from inherited-property shorthand or later legend.

Following Adam Carpenter’s death in 1806, Catherine Spears Frye Carpenter used whiskey distilling as one source of income.

After 1806

Primary evidence for Brown-Forman’s 2022 public statements and the caption identifying the three employees: displayed pp. 26–27 / PDF pp. 28–29. The report does not give the three employees’ job titles; no production role may be inferred. Its multigenerational and nineteenth-century statements remain corporate historical claims requiring their own underlying records.

Lynchburg, Moore County, Tennessee

This is a first-party corporate record of the public recovery of Black whiskey history and of named Green descendants employed at the distillery in the present. It connects nineteenth-century memory, family continuity, corporate interpretation, and contemporary workforce history without treating them as the same kind of evidence.

Brown-Forman’s 2022 annual report identified Jerome Vance, Debbie Staples, and Jackie Hardin as direct descendants of Nathan “Nearest” Green working at the Jack Daniel Distillery. The report also framed the Green family’s connection as multigenerational and described institutional commemoration and advancement programs.

2022

Primary evidence: complete four-page manuscript, p. 1, with official transcription. Publication boundaries: the document does not identify James’s surname, exact distilling tasks, length of service, or every work assignment. 'Cradler' records an agricultural skill; it should not be converted into a distilling title. The census reflects Washington’s coercive and evaluative viewpoint, not James’s own account.

Mount Vernon, Fairfax County, Virginia

The entry supplies a named person, approximate age, labor status, and direct connection to an operating whiskey distillery. It replaces a generalized assertion about enslaved labor with a recoverable archival episode.

In a census dated July 15, 1799, George Washington identified James, about twenty-four, among the enslaved people whose labor he rented from Penelope French. Washington described James as a cradler and recorded that he had been employed mostly at the distillery.

July 15, 1799

Primary evidence: manuscript ledger p. 42 (scan PDF p. 47), corroborated by the official complete transcription p. 48. Annual-account repetition: manuscript ledger p. 45 (scan PDF p. 50), transcription p. 51. Publication boundary: the entry documents holiday payment in this instance; it does not establish freedom, ordinary wage status, the recipients’ identities, or their precise tasks that day. The source’s period racial terminology should be quoted only when necessary and contextualized.

Mount Vernon, Fairfax County, Virginia

This is direct, contemporaneous operational evidence that enslaved labor was part of Mount Vernon’s whiskey enterprise. It also preserves an unusual payment entry, allowing the labor history to be narrated from a specific date and record rather than a generalized assertion.

The Mount Vernon cash ledger records a December 25, 1799 payment of $1.16 to enslaved workers at the distillery for labor performed during the holidays. The annual distillery account repeats the charge as cash paid at the Christmas holidays.

December 25, 1799

Verified against the complete 1855 book, printed pages 61–63. Date is exact only to the publication year; the account describes Tomes's 1855 journey. Do not frame this as the first iced cocktail or as proof of nationwide routine adoption.

Aspinwall, New Granada (present-day Colón, Panama); linked to Rockland ice commerce and American travel

The account supplies direct mid-1850s evidence that commercially transported ice had entered mixed-drink preparation within an American travel and railroad-commercial network. It links shipping, ice supply, bar technique, and sensory service while showing that cocktail practice moved through transnational routes.

Robert Tomes described a Champagne cock-tail made by pounding crystal ice shipped from Rockland, placing it in tumblers, adding bitters and sugar, and pouring Champagne.

1855

The complete Library of Congress guide supplies only the year. January 1 is a synthetic sorting anchor; display as 1918. Do not infer the organization’s size or influence from this founding fact alone.

United States

Demonstrates that organized national opposition to constitutional Prohibition began before the Depression-era repeal campaign.

Naval Captain William H. Stayton established the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment in 1918.

1918

The HABS source gives month and year but not a calendar day. May 1 is a synthetic sorting anchor only; display as May 1929. Do not generalize Sabin’s motives to all women or all WONPR members.

United States

Provides a dated, named example of women’s organization and party realignment inside the repeal coalition.

After leaving the Republican Party to fight for Repeal, Pauline Morton Sabin founded the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform in May 1929.

May 1929

Keep Senate approval distinct from the House’s February 20 vote and the amendment’s later state ratification.

Washington, D.C., United States

Moved the convention-based repeal proposal to the House for final congressional approval.

The Senate approved the repeal amendment proposal after restoration of the state-convention ratification provision.

February 16, 1933

Keep this amendment action distinct from Senate passage on February 16 and House passage on February 20.

Washington, D.C., United States

Established the mechanism that would send Repeal to specially elected state conventions rather than state legislatures.

Senator Joseph T. Robinson restored Rainey’s state-convention ratification provision to the Senate repeal resolution.

February 15, 1933

Do not label this the passage of Repeal. Its importance lies in the mechanism that survived the failed resolution.

Washington, D.C., United States

A failed vote supplied the convention mechanism later incorporated into the successful repeal proposal.

Representative Henry T. Rainey introduced H.J. Res. 480 with a state-convention ratification provision; the measure failed to reach the required two-thirds House vote.

December 5, 1932

The 289–121 vote comes from the official House history; the convention requirement comes directly from the complete enrolled S.J. Res. 211.

Washington, D.C., United States

Completed the federal proposal stage and activated the only convention-ratification campaign in U.S. constitutional history.

The House approved the repeal resolution 289 to 121 and Congress submitted the proposed Twenty-first Amendment for ratification by conventions in three-fourths of the states.

February 20, 1933

The official House source supplies the year, not a single campaign-day milestone. January 1 is a synthetic sorting anchor. Retain the source’s “some voters” scope for tax-revenue interest.

United States

Marks the movement of Repeal into a successful national presidential platform and a favorable federal political opening.

Franklin D. Roosevelt made ending Prohibition part of his successful 1932 presidential campaign amid Depression-era interest in legal liquor tax revenue.

1932

This temporary federal regime preceded the Eighteenth Amendment’s operative date and must not be conflated with it.

United States

Bridged temporary wartime alcohol control and the approaching constitutional Prohibition regime.

The Wartime Prohibition Act’s restrictions on beverage alcohol took effect on June 30, 1919.

June 30, 1919

The one-year constitutional delay ran from ratification on January 16, 1919; the Library of Congress chronology identifies January 17, 1920 as the beginning of legal enforcement.

United States

Marks the transition from ratification and implementing legislation to the operative national constitutional regime.

The Eighteenth Amendment became operative and legal enforcement of National Prohibition began on January 17, 1920.

January 17, 1920

The Kansas Historical Society gives the month and year but not the calendar day of ratification. November 1 is a synthetic sorting anchor only; display as November 1880. Enforcement was uneven and is not implied by legal adoption.

Kansas, United States

A major state constitutional precedent demonstrating that prohibition had developed through state action decades before the federal Eighteenth Amendment.

Kansas voters ratified a state constitutional amendment prohibiting the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors, effective May 1, 1881.

November 1880

The Act’s 0.5 percent alcohol threshold comes from the implementing statute, not the constitutional amendment. The Senate completed its override action on October 28; some chronologies display the House and Senate sequence as October 28–29.

Washington, D.C., United States

Supplied the federal statutory definitions and enforcement framework for constitutional Prohibition.

Congress overrode President Woodrow Wilson’s veto and enacted the National Prohibition Act, commonly called the Volstead Act, on October 28, 1919.

October 28, 1919

The League’s influence should be described as an important mechanism within a broader coalition, not as a sole cause of National Prohibition.

Washington, D.C., United States

Created a national, nonpartisan pressure organization that concentrated electoral and legislative work on prohibition.

State leagues joined in Washington, D.C., to establish the National Anti-Saloon League.

December 18, 1895

Use this Ohio formation date separately from the National Anti-Saloon League’s official founding in 1895.

Oberlin, Ohio, United States

Marks the state-level organizational origin of a movement that would soon become national.

A statewide Anti-Saloon League formed in Oberlin, Ohio, creating an organizational model for coordinated, issue-focused prohibition campaigning.

May 24, 1893

Do not describe this as the start of National Prohibition or imply that wartime policy alone caused the Eighteenth Amendment.

United States

Created a temporary federal prohibition regime during the transition to constitutional Prohibition.

Congress enacted the Wartime Prohibition Act shortly after the Armistice, establishing temporary restrictions that would take effect in 1919.

November 21, 1918

Keep ratification distinct from federal certification on January 29, 1919 and legal enforcement beginning January 17, 1920.

United States

Completed the constitutional ratification threshold while leaving a one-year delay before the amendment became operative.

Nebraska supplied the thirty-sixth state ratification required for the Eighteenth Amendment on January 16, 1919.

January 16, 1919

Keep the House action on December 17 distinct from congressional submission on December 18.

Washington, D.C., United States

Moved national prohibition from organized political advocacy into the formal constitutional ratification process.

After the House passed a modified prohibition resolution on December 17, Congress submitted the Eighteenth Amendment to the states on December 18, 1917.

December 18, 1917

Doran’s letter was printed in the Congressional Record on January 23, 1930, page 2235. It says permits did not limit companies to rye or bourbon. Treat the total as an allotment basis, not proof of completed output, and do not convert the list into a permanent roster for all of Prohibition.

United States; Kentucky; Pennsylvania; Maryland

Provides a dated administrative snapshot of replenishment authority and corrects the common myth of a permanent, exclusive group of six Kentucky distilleries.

Prohibition Commissioner James M. Doran reported manufacturing allotments to eleven named concentration warehousemen that were distillers or successors to distillers, on a basis of approximately 2,000,000 gallons or 40,000 barrels.

January 22, 1930

Exact limits verified through the statutory text reproduced on printed page 7 of H. Rept. 17 (1933). The report marks this as existing law proposed for amendment; do not confuse the proposed 1933 changes with the 1921 rule.

United States

Turned legal medicinal liquor into a quantitatively controlled federal prescription channel rather than an unrestricted exception to Prohibition.

A supplemental act limited medicinal prescriptions to spirituous and vinous liquor, capped the alcohol that could be supplied to a patient within ten days, and generally limited physicians to one hundred prescription blanks per ninety days absent an approved extraordinary reason.

November 23, 1921

Verified from the complete Motlow opinion. Use July 1 as the secure effective date. Reported sources differ between January 20 and January 23 for the law’s earlier enactment or passage date, so that discrepancy is preserved rather than resolved by inference.

Tennessee

Closed the principal intrastate beverage-sales channels months before the separate manufacturing ban became effective.

Chapter 1 completed Tennessee’s four-mile-law system and took effect July 1, 1909, making beverage sales unlawful statewide in the court’s account.

July 1, 1909

The production date, quantity, proof, proprietor, distillery, purpose of sale, trial sentence, and affirmance are verified from the complete opinion. This event does not independently establish later relocation or brand-ownership history.

Moore County, Tennessee

Provides a company-specific enforcement case showing that the manufacturing ban reached whiskey intended for sale even when it was not destined for beverage sale inside Tennessee.

Agreed facts later published in Motlow v. State record Lem Motlow producing 375 gallons of 100-proof whiskey for sale at the Jack Daniel’s distillery; Tennessee’s high court affirmed the resulting conviction.

May 25, 1911

Verified independently in the full-resolution original Senate bill and the complete 1911 Motlow opinion. The act prohibited manufacture for sale; it did not use the broader wording later adopted in 1923 for whiskey and brandy manufacture regardless of sale.

Tennessee

Shut down lawful in-state production for sale roughly a decade before national Prohibition and created the statutory break central to Tennessee whiskey’s twentieth-century discontinuity.

Tennessee’s Chapter 10 ban on manufacturing intoxicating liquor for sale became effective, subject to a narrow exception for at least 188-proof alcohol made for specified nonbeverage purposes.

January 1, 1910

The Tennessee Supreme Court’s complete Motlow opinion states that Chapter 10 passed over the governor’s veto on February 4, 1909. The law did not take effect until January 1, 1910.

Tennessee

Marks the enactment of Tennessee’s production ban before national Prohibition and separates legislative passage from the law’s later effective date.

Tennessee’s legislature passed Chapter 10 of the Acts of 1909 over the governor’s veto, creating a statewide ban on manufacturing intoxicating liquor for sale.

February 4, 1909