Oscar Pepper

Oscar Neville Pepper

In 1812, a Virginia farmer named Elijah Pepper moved westward and, with the help of his brother-in-law John and his son Oscar, opened a distillery on Glenn’s Creek near Versailles, Kentucky. In about 1820, Elijah also enlisted the assistance of a Scotsman named Dr. James Crow, who had also recently emigrated to the area. Crow brought innovations in scotch-making to the production of corn whiskey by instituting scientific methods into the distilling process, resulting in a higher grade and a more consistent whiskey. Thanks to Dr. Crow, the Pepper product quickly became locally known for its excellent quality.

When Elijah died in 1831, his son Oscar took over the business, and soon it became known as the Oscar Pepper Distillery. While working for Oscar, Crow continued his work, and the two refined the sour mash fermentation technique while using Crow’s scientific and medical training to perfect the art of managing temperature for the purification of the final product. Crow also insisted on aging bourbon in charred oak barrels, dubbing his higher-quality aged product “Old Crow” but also successfully marketing the unaged and thus cheaper “Crow.” Such techniques as Crow’s are, of course, now common in modern-day whiskey production but were unheard of in backwoods 19th-century America. This continued to make Oscar Pepper’s product the best liquor available in the area and afforded Oscar Pepper relative fame and a good living in a hardscrabble frontier whiskey market.

In all, Dr. James Crow worked for Oscar Pepper for about thirty years, but then, in June of 1865, Oscar died. His estate, including the Oscar Pepper Distillery, was transferred to his youngest son, James E. Pepper, who had toiled for his father faithfully at the operation, but who, unfortunately, was still a minor of only 15 years of age. This meant that Oscar’s wife, Nancy Ann “Nannie” Edwards Pepper, legally controlled the distillery. But by 1872, James, now an adult, successfully sued his mother for sole ownership of the distillery and soon partnered with Colonel E. H. Taylor to help make improvements to the operation. Unfortunately, after about 5 years of mismanaged ownership, James Pepper declared bankruptcy, and the distillery was presently taken over by Colonel Taylor, who himself experienced his own financial ruin not long afterward. Ownership rights to the Oscar Pepper Distillery business were then purchased by the legendary George T. Stagg.

In 1878, James Graham of Frankfort, Kentucky, and a French wine merchant named Leopold Labrot subsequently partnered to purchase the distillery site from Stagg, and it was at this time that its name was changed to Labrot and Graham Distillery. Meanwhile, in about 1880, James E. Pepper emerged from bankruptcy, built a new distillery, and sued Labrot and Graham for the rights to the “Pepper” name; however, James lost the case, and the distillery remained by the moniker “Old Oscar Pepper Distillery,” though it was still owned by Labrot and Graham.

The Old Oscar Pepper Distillery continued to produce quality spirits in the fashion of Oscar and Dr. Crow up until the dark days of Prohibition. During those years, Old Pepper was not afforded a “medicinal use” license to produce alcohol for consumption, but it was granted permission to warehouse and bottle some of its products because its owners had boasted of its “medicinal uses” so that it resonated with consumers based on health as well as taste. This helped Old Pepper to remain solvent while many other brands were forever relegated to history. 

After Prohibition, it took a few years for the brand to get back to the business of producing quality whiskey, but in 1941, the Brown-Forman Corporation acquired Oscar’s old distillery and used it to produce Early Times for distribution to soldiers during World War II. In 1959, a downturn in the brown spirits market caused the distillery site to be abruptly and unceremoniously abandoned, where it sat dormant for about 14 years. It was finally sold to a local farmer in 1973 in the expectation that it would be demolished and turned into farmland, but fortunately, that never occurred. Finally, Oscar’s old distillery site was re-purchased by Brown-Forman in 1993 and subsequently refurbished. 

The Glenn’s Creek site of the old Oscar Pepper Distillery is now one of the oldest standing distilleries in Kentucky and has been placed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1995, the site became home to Woodford Reserve Distillery and remains so to this day, thanks to the foresight of Oscar N. Pepper and his commitment to a quality whiskey back in a time when it was neither essential nor even expected.

Contributed by: Tracy McLemore, Dickson, Tennessee