By Tabitha Evans Moore
Editor & Publisher
Every time I write a headline about the latest installment in the Farm Credit Mid-America versus Nearest Green Incorporated lawsuit, I wince.
I grew up in the Lois community, less than a mile from the original still where Jack Daniel and Nearest Green first made whiskey together in what was then Lincoln County. I played near it as a child. Maybe it’s that proximity. Maybe it’s something about history happening in your literal backyard. But I have always felt deeply connected to both men — and fiercely protective of what they built. I’m a native of Lynchburg. I count members of the Green family among my closest friends. And I know, in a way that only comes from being from this place, that Nearest Green is not just a brand of whiskey. He was a real man who lived and died in this county, and his family is still here. Some still work at the Jack Daniel Distillery. And I suspect they wince a little too, every time they see my updates.
I cover this lawsuit because the local public interest is real, and because I have the history and institutional knowledge to report on it with the reverence and nuance it deserves. But it leaves me sitting with a question I can’t shake: Who deserves to control the narrative and legacy of Nathan Nearest Green?
No one alive today knew him. No one eye-witnessed his relationship with Jasper Newton Daniel. But the historical record lets us infer it. In one of the earliest known photographs of the distillery, a young Jack Daniel placed Nearest Green’s son to his right, a position of honor. In fact if you look closely, the young Green descendant — we’re not sure which one — actually sits in the center of that photo with Jack slightly to the side. It’s an arrangement that might seem unremarkable by today’s standards, but at the time would have been quietly revolutionary.
We also know that Nearest Green lived most of his life on the Dan Call farm, first as an enslaved man, then as a free one — and that both men navigated the creation of a whiskey that would eventually become known around the world, during one of the most volatile periods in American racial history. When Jack eventually moved his operation from the Dan Call property to Lynchburg, Nearest stayed behind. But Jack kept him close.
Jack Daniel historian Nelson Eddy once told me a story he heard from an old timer that Nathan Green got the nickname “Nearest” because he was the person always nearest to Jack. In a 2024 interview, Eddy told me that Jack Daniel — who eventually founded the Silver Cornet Band — learned his love of music from Nearest, who apparently played a mean fiddle. Recently, he told me that he’d viewed the early distillery ledgers and that the Green family members were paid the same as everyone else. “Color was not an issue for Jack,” he said. It’s a small detail. It’s also everything.
The ties between the Motlow and Green families in Lynchburg have run deep for generations. You need only look at a photograph of the two family matriarchs — laughing together in a recent Jack Daniel Squire’s calendar — to understand that something real was built between these families, and that it lasted.
Nearest deserves his own distillery. His own brand. His descendant Victoria Eady Butler has done remarkable work channeling her great-great-grandfather into the award-winning bottles that have come out of Bedford County since its founding. That legacy is real and it shouldn’t be diminished by what’s happening in court right now.
But this legal battle may end in ways that put that legacy at serious risk. And when I imagine the worst-case outcome, I keep coming back to the same thing: the Green family deserves to tell this story. It belongs to them by blood and by right.
If I were writing the ending, Brown-Forman purchases the Nearest Green Distillery and gets to work. They research the early methods, the original spirit of how Jack and Nearest worked together on that Dan Call farm, and they produce bottles in that same tradition. At both distilleries, you walk into the bottle shop and find Jack Daniel’s and Nearest Green’s standing side by side on the shelf — exactly the way the two men once stood, together, in this county.
I want Nearest out of Hollywood and Martha’s Vineyard — places the real Nearest Green wouldn’t have found the least bit interesting — and back home in Lynchburg, where he belongs. •
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