By Tabitha Evans Moore
Editor & Publisher

It’s sometime in the mid-1970s. There’s a single red light on Majors Boulevard and the Moore County Co-op still operates from the historic Lynchburg Square. Images from Jack Daniel’s now-famous Postcards from Lynchburg advertising campaign grace the pages of national magazines like Time, Sports Illustrated, and Playboy, as more and more folks head to Lynchburg to see for themselves the fast-rising, newly-hot American whiskey brand and the small-town mythology that would eventually make the names Jack Daniel and Lynchburg synonymous.

On the Lynchburg Hardware and General Store shelves — and in its mail-order catalog — sits a now highly collectible snapshot of our charming, rural community, told from a reliable vantage point: the southern kitchen. It’s called the Country Recipes from the Ladies of Lynchburg tin, and it holds nearly 30 recipes from names the world would eventually know as the Jack Daniel’s and Lynchburg story became woven into brand lore.

Barringer, Wallis and Manners of Mansfield, England produced the vintage-inspired tin the cards came housed in — a landscape of the old Lynchburg Square decorates the lid, with side panels illustrating the cycles of rural life: crafts, domestic work, fieldwork. It resembles other collectible tins made during the same era, like the Jack Daniel’s 1904 Gold Medal tin. It also held category dividers — Breads, Desserts, Dressings, Meats, Pickles & Relish, Pies & Pastries, Soups & Salads, Vegetables, and Old Fashioned Bar-B-Que & Fish Fry — plus blank cards for the owner’s own favorites.

As originally sold, nestled inside the set was a note titled A Confession from Herb Fanning. What he confessed to is a story for another day. Fanning was once the oldest living employee of the Jack Daniel Distillery; he died at 92 and is immortalized today in bronze outside the Lynchburg Hardware & General Store, a life-size statue of the “unofficial mayor” of Lynchburg playing checkers, commissioned by the distillery from sculptor Harry Webb in 2004.

FILLED WITH FAMILIAR NAMES

Jack Daniel’s tour guide and vintage aficionado Brandi Smith spotted a set of the cards on a local auction site two weeks ago and immediately knew she had to have them.

“There weren’t many bids,” she says. “It wasn’t in its original tin, so I don’t think people understood what it was. I decided to be the winning bidder no matter how high it went.”

She eventually paid just $18.

When the cards arrived, familiar names jumped out — Tipps, Parks, Dickey, Tolley, Motlow. Former Master Distiller Frank Bobo is in there. So is Mary Evans Bobo of Miss Mary Bobo’s Restaurant fame, Proprietor Lem Motlow’s second wife Ophelia Evans Motlow, and Jeanie Motlow, spouse of former Jack Daniel’s President and later Tennessee State Senator Reagor Motlow. Also in the mix are famous-in-a-small-town names like Bill Dance’s grandmother, Mary Lou Dance, and beloved local schoolteacher Elizabeth Cobble, whose home — the Seven Gables House — went on to become a Lynchburg landmark.

Brandi posted her find on Facebook and Miss Mary Bobo’s Chef Chris Dickey commented nearly immediately when he spotted his great-grandmother’s name.

“See if Mrs. Lem Tolley’s angel food cake recipe is in there,” he asked. “If not, she took it to the grave with her.”

The cards Brandi won at auction didn’t come with the tin itself. She tracked one down separately on eBay for another $20 — a small price, she says, for something she now considers a priceless piece of the Jack Daniel’s memorabilia collection she shares with her father, Jim Ed Smith, which by now takes up an entire room of his Shelbyville home.

“It’s mostly bottles, antique signs, and vintage postcards,” she says. “I just bought a huge lot of old Jack Daniel’s Squire’s calendars from the 60s and 70s.”

THE MAKING OF A COMMUNITY ARTIFACT

Nearly every Moore County household, including mine, possesses a version of the same family heirloom: a metal recipe box, its cards soft at the corners from handling, filled with names of women who taught the rest of us how to cook.

That tradition has deeper roots than most of us think about while we’re thumbing through it for a pecan pie recipe. The standardized 3-by-5 index card started life as a library-cataloging tool. In the late 1800s, Melvil Dewey — yes, the Dewey Decimal Dewey — ran a company called Library Bureau that manufactured standardized filing cards and cabinets for libraries and businesses. That same cheap, easily-alphabetized format got adopted for home recordkeeping by the early-to-mid 20th century, and recipes turned out to be one of its most durable uses.

Women — especially in the rural South — wrote their favorite recipes on those cards and traded the way teenage boys trade baseball cards: carefully, and with pride in what you were handing over. Those scraps of living history got collected in metal boxes and passed down as heirlooms. Eventually, the tradition scaled up into community and charity cookbooks — local favorites like A Taste of Historic Lynchburg Tennessee by Ola Cleek, or Favorites from the Country: Recipes by Moore County FCE Homemaker Clubs — the kind of fundraising cookbook that gave thousands of women a social network long before anyone called it that.

Attributing each recipe to a named contributor is a hallmark of that genre. It’s what turns a set of recipe cards from an anonymous product into a community artifact — naming real local women and crediting them, implicitly, as the keepers of the region’s culinary memory.

Somebody at Lynchburg Hardware and General Store understood that instinct well enough to package it and sell it.

As a sign of the times, the recipe authors are mostly listed by their husband-derived form of address. We consulted several local experts and have added the contributor’s full names here where possible: Mrs. Aldon Tipps or Nell Laws Tipps, Mrs George Spencer or Flora Collins Spencer, Mary Evans Bobo, Catherine Sorrells, Mrs. Jim Tolley or Margaret Lindsay Templeton Tolley, Mary Sue Evans Tipps, Mrs. Lem Tolley or Ethel Tolley, Lula Bobo Holt, Mrs. Charles Harrison or Christine Ervin Harrison, Mrs. Ervin Crutcher or Louise Bobo Crutcher, Mrs. Paul Dance or Mary Lou Forrester Dance, Mrs. Jack Hobbs or Betty Jean Watkins Hobbs, Mrs. Jim Farrar or Mary Virginia Dance Farrar, Jewell Simpson, Mrs. M.P. Riggins or Mary Glyndon Riggins, Mrs. Roy Parkes, Sr. or Laura Mae Waggoner Raby Parkes, Mrs. Roy Parkes, Jr. or Mary B. Moore Parkes, Mrs. R.E. Cobble or Elizabeth Cobble, Mrs. Lem Motlow or Ophelia Verna Evans Motlow, Mrs. Harwell Tipps or Virginia Petty Tipps, Mrs. Bernard Scott or Betty Scott, Mrs. Robert Renegar or Artie Mae Owens Renegar, Mrs. James Dickey or Majorie Tolley Dickey, Mrs. Reagor Motlow or Jeanie Motlow, and Mrs. Mark Osborne or Jim Sawyer Osborne — a former Moore County Public Library librarian.

There were also Old Fashioned Tennessee Bar-B-Que and Fish Fry recipes by then Master Distiller Frank Bobo.

{Editor’s Note: Special thanks to Leanne Durm and Donna Tucker for helping us track down the full names of all the contributors.}

NOT FOR SALE

It’s a fantastic find for someone with both deep roots to the distillery and a love of all things vintage flowing through her veins. Brandi, fellow Jack Daniel’s tour guide Maddy Durm, Durm’s sister Khloe Houlihan, and Jack Daniel’s event coordinator Rachel Honea own To Be Continued, an antique and vintage booth inside Finn & Riley on the Shelbyville Square. Between them they log hours crossing the region hunting for pieces with that certain “it” factor. You can follow their finds on the To Be Continued Facebook page — their shelves are currently stocked with Bedford County horse memorabilia in honor of the 87th annual Tennessee Walking Horse Celebration.

The Country Recipes from the Ladies of Lynchburg recipe tin certainly qualifies as an marketable find but Brandi says it isn’t going anywhere near the shop floor.

“Those cards are not going in my store,” Brandi says. “These are mine.” •

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