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Size: approx. 1" square
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Size: 1"
Size: approx. 1" square
Whiskey drinkers know that black label by heart, which is exactly why this one stops people. Across the top of a black and gold Old No. 7 enamel pin, where the name should read JACK DANIEL'S, it reads ACK DANIELS. The J simply isn't there. A brand that has spent a century and a half telling the world nothing about it ever changes, caught missing its very first letter.
A small square lapel pin with rounded corners, about an inch across. Raised gold-tone metal lines sit in a black enamel field and follow the Jack Daniel's black label: the rope-and-scroll border, an oval reading "Old No. 7," "Tennessee" in flowing script and WHISKEY in tall capitals. The top line is where it goes wrong: ACK DANIELS, with no J. The back is plain gold-tone metal with a single post and a cream-colored plastic clutch. New old stock, never worn.
Collectors have chased factory errors for as long as there have been collectors. The most famous of all is the Inverted Jenny. In 1918 the U.S. Post Office printed its first 24-cent airmail stamp in two colors, each sheet going through the press twice, and one sheet went through the wrong way round — the blue Curtiss Jenny biplane came out flying upside down. Only one sheet of 100 was ever sold over the counter, to a Washington, D.C. collector named William T. Robey, and those stamps became the best-known error in American philately. A missing letter on a whiskey pin is a humbler cousin of the same idea: the mistake only matters because everybody knows exactly what it was supposed to say.
Jasper Newton "Jack" Daniel is a man whose own birthday is still argued over. His tombstone says 1850, Tennessee State Library records give September 5, 1846, and his biographer Peter Krass settled on January 1849. The distillery's own history remembers him as all of five feet two inches tall and hardheaded to the core — the sort of man who, when everyone else was bottling whiskey in round bottles, chose a square one. He began using the square bottle in 1897. Bottles still read "Est. & Reg. in 1866," although the registration papers show the business was not established until 1875.
Young Jack learned whiskey working for Dan Call, a preacher who also ran a still. The man who actually taught him the craft was Nathan "Nearest" Green, an enslaved master distiller who had been hired out to Call's operation in the 1850s. The story goes that Call told Green he wanted Jack to become the world's best whiskey distiller, and asked Green to help teach him. After emancipation, when Jack opened his own distillery, he hired two of Green's sons, George and Eli, and Nearest Green became the first master distiller at Jack Daniel's — the first known African-American master distiller on record in the United States. Seven generations of his descendants have worked at the distillery since.
For well over a century that part of the story was overlooked. A page-one New York Times story by Clay Risen in June 2016 changed that. In 2017 Brown-Forman Corporation, the distillery's parent company, formally recognized Green as its first master distiller and put him into the Lynchburg tours, and that same year Fawn Weaver launched Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey and the Nearest Green Foundation to carry his legacy forward.
Ask the distillery what the 7 means and the company will tell you plainly that it does not know. That gap has filled up with legend. Some say seven was Jack's lucky number. Some say it was the seventh batch, or the seventh recipe, that finally came out right. Given his reputation as a ladies' man, some swear it honored his seventh girlfriend. A 1940 trademark filing claimed the whiskey had been made the same way for seven generations. And one tale holds that seven barrels shipped to the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis went astray, and when they were found they were marked "Old No. 7" to tell them from the replacements — the same fair where Jack Daniel's won a gold medal for the finest whiskey.
The best-documented answer comes from Peter Krass, author of Blood & Whisky: The Life and Times of Jack Daniel. He turned up an 1877 newspaper showing Lynchburg's distillers grouped in tax district No. 4, with Jack's distillery carrying registration No. 7. When the government redrew the districts and folded Lynchburg in with Nashville, Jack became No. 16 — and kept printing No. 7 anyway, because by then customers knew the whiskey by it. Krass reads that as a small act of defiance toward the revenue men, which would suit the stubborn little distiller who picked a square bottle when the world used round ones.
Mr. Jack's death is one of the best-loved stories in American whiskey. As the distillery tells it, he had trouble with the combination to his office safe one day and kicked it in frustration. The injury turned bad, gangrene eventually set in, and on October 10, 1911, Jack Daniel died. His modern biographer says the safe story is not true and puts the death down to blood poisoning. It hardly matters to the legend. The kicked safe is still the story everybody tells.
Jack's nephew Lem Motlow inherited the distillery in 1907, and his name still appears in the fine print on every bottle. Motlow had little time to settle in: Tennessee went dry in 1910, a decade ahead of national Prohibition, and production was forced out of Lynchburg. Federal repeal came in 1933, but Tennessee's own laws kept the distillery from reopening until 1938 — five more years without whiskey in the town that made it famous. In 1956 the distillery was sold to Brown-Forman.
And the town still sits in a dry county. Moore County does not allow ordinary alcohol sales, so a special act of the Tennessee General Assembly in 1994 opened a narrow door: the distillery may sell a commemorative bottle on site. Visitors buy the bottle as a keepsake, and the whiskey comes along inside it.
The whiskey this pin advertises is made with iron-free water from the limestone spring at Cave Spring Hollow in Lynchburg, and it is filtered through ten-foot stacks of sugar maple charcoal — the Lincoln County Process. In 2013 that step became law, when Tennessee's House Bill 1084 required it of whiskey made in the state and labeled "Tennessee Whiskey." The Lynchburg way of doing things set the standard for a whole category.
The top line reads ACK DANIELS; the J is missing. The rest follows the Old No. 7 black label design.
About 1 inch square, with a post and a plastic clutch on the back.
No. It is new old stock.
The distillery says it does not know. The most documented theory, from biographer Peter Krass, is Jack's original registration number, No. 7 in tax district No. 4.
Nathan "Nearest" Green, an enslaved distiller who went on to run the stills at Jack's distillery.
Lynchburg, Tennessee, in Moore County.
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