TOBACCO FARMER, MINISTER, ENTREPRENEUR
CA. 1743–1808
Georgetown, Kentucky
Elijah Craig was certainly not the inventor of bourbon, as was often once claimed, but he was an industrious frontier farmer, minister, textile maker, and distiller.
Born to Toliver and Mary Craig in Orange County, Virginia, he began his ministry in 1766 in a tobacco barn in Virginia. He and his two brothers were significant early Baptists, and he was jailed at least once in Culpeper for preaching against the doctrine of the state-sponsored Anglican Church. “He preached to people through the grates during his imprisonment,” wrote John H. Spencer, in his history of Baptists in Kentucky. One of Craig’s lawyers warned the court that he should be discharged, as his followers were “like a bed of chamomile, the more they are trodden, the more they spread.” He had a melodic voice and looked “as a man who had just come from the dead,” Spencer wrote. He frequently brought his congregants to tears.
Craig moved to Kentucky in 1786 and took to frontier life. “The temptation was too strong,” Spencer wrote. “He was soon overwhelmed by worldly business … [he] vainly imagined he could serve God and mammon both.” He founded the Kentucky town of Georgetown, where he built a gristmill, ropewalk, fulling mill, and paper mill. The paper mill was what Lewis Collins, in his history of Kentucky from 1882, spends the most time describing; a two-and-a-half-story structure about forty by sixty feet with a large iron screw, presumably part of the papermaking machinery, imported from England. Collins also suggests the first bourbon whiskey was distilled at the same site in 1789, leaving later readers to suspect Craig. Nearly all of the accounts of Craig’s distilling life appear seventy years after his death, so their credibility is questionable.
It’s possible, even probable, that distilling occurred near the mill around 1790, as Collins suggests, but there were other distillers in Kentucky at that time and it could have been that Craig supplied capital or property, but may not have been distilling. Historian Henry Crowgey points out that a prominent Kentucky distiller, Lewis Sanders, once eulogized Craig in 1827, but made no mention of his distilling. Craig was fined in 1798 for making whiskey without a license, but two hundred others in Kentucky were also fined that year.
The modern-day brand of bourbon is distilled at Bernheim distillery in Louisville and ages in warehouses near Heaven Hill’s headquarters in Bardstown, Kentucky. The company does not trace any direct relationship to Craig, but as a start-up after Prohibition, the name seemed as good as any (its other flagship bourbon, Evan Williams, is named after Kentucky’s first distiller, a title that is easily refuted).
