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Elijah Craig

Elijah Craig's name is now a brand of Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey marketed by the Bardstown Bourbon Society

Rev. Elijah Craig (1738/1743 – May 18, 1808) was a pioneering Baptist preacher, educator and Christian capitalist entrepreneur in the state of Kentucky. He has been credited with the invention of bourbon whiskey, although this claim was later disputed by some historians.

Rev. Craig was born in Orange County, Virginia in 1738 or 1743, the 5th child of Polly Hawkins (descendant of John Hawkins) and Toliver Craig, Sr. (descendant of Scottish Dominican friar John Craig, condemned to the stake for reading Calvin ca. 1600 but escaped). He was converted by David Thomas, ordained a Baptist minister in 1771, and, like other independent Baptists, was jailed at least once for preaching without episcopal ordination from the Anglican establishment. He was imprisoned briefly in South Carolina, apparently for disturbing the peace with his sermons. In 1777, he became establishing pastor of the Blue Run Church (halfway between Barboursville and Liberty Mills).

Rev. Louis Craig and his brother Rev. Elijah (with the third of the ordained brothers, Rev. Joseph, and their extended families) led the famous 1781 exodus of the "Travelling Church" of 600 walking over the wintry mountains into pioneer Kentucky District. Rev. Elijah purchased 1000 acres in Scott County, in 1782 planning and laying out the nearby town of Lebanon, incorporated in 1784 (in 1790 renamed George Town in honor of Gen. Washington).[John E. Kleber, ed., The Kentucky Encyclopedia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), xxii, 47, 371-72, 374, 591, 897-98] He preached at several churches and became pastor of the Great Crossing Church, still active in the Georgetown area (in the cemetery of which he was buried alongside his mother, though they are now under a parking lot).

Rev. Elijah Craig established the first classical school in Kentucky; his advertisement in The Kentucky Gazette reads: “Education. Notice is hereby given that on Monday, 28th of January next, a school will be opened by Messrs. Jones and Worley, at the Royal Spring in Lebanon Town, Fayette County, where a commodious house, sufficient to contain fifty or sixty scholars, will be prepared. They will teach the Latin and Greek languages, together with such branches of the sciences as are usually taught in public seminaries, at twenty five shillings a quarter for each scholar. One half to be paid in cash, the other half in produce at cash prices. There will be a vacation of a month in the spring, and another in the fall, at the close of each of which it is expected that such payments as are due in cash will be made. For diet, washing and house room for a year, each scholar pays L3 in cash, or 500 weight of pork on entrance, and L3 cash on the beginning of the third quarter. It is desired that, as many as can, would furnish themselves with beds; such as cannot may be provided for here, to the number of eight or ten boys, at 35s a year for each bed. ELIJAH CRAIG. LEBANON, December 27, 1787.”(Henry Perrin, History of Bourbon, Scott, Harrison and Nicholas Counties Kentucky). The school was later linked to the Rittenhouse Academy, also founded and led by Rev. Craig in 1798, and its successor, Georgetown College, the first Baptist college founded west of the Allegheny Mountains and still thriving today.

Rev. Craig was also a shrewdly productive businessman and a local magnate, providing many jobs and further socio-economic development. He built Kentucky's first fulling mill (for cloth manufacturing), its first paper mill, its first ropewalk (for manufacturing rope from hemp), the first saw and grist mill at Georgetown, and founded a distillery in approximately 1789. It was this last enterprise that likely led to his subsequent reputation as the "creator" of Bourbon. Rev. Craig is said to be the first to age the distillation in charred oak casks, "a process that gives the bourbon its reddish color and unique taste."[Kleber, ed., The Kentucky Encyclopedia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 103] Regarding the name of "bourbon" given to the end product, Rev. Craig's distillery was not in what later became Bourbon County, from which some say the name derives, but the name may also derive from the fact that both the later Bourbon County and Craig's still were within the originally much larger Fayette County, named in honour of the noted Revolutionary War Gen. Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de LaFayette of the French nobility and its royal House of Bourbon, from which Bourbon County gets its name.¹ As regional historian Charles Kendrick Cowdery has observed, "By the time Bourbon County was formed in 1785, there were dozens if not hundreds of small farmer-distillers making whiskey throughout the region...Ultimately, most of the corn-based whiskey made west of the Alleghenies was called 'bourbon,' to distinguish it from the rye-based whiskies that predominated in the East." ¹.

Rev. Craig continued to prosper, eventually owning over 4000 acres and operating a retail store in Frankfort, until he died in Georgetown in 1808. The Kentucky Gazette eulogized: “His preaching was of the most solemn style; his appearance as of a man who had just come from the dead; of a delicate habit, a thin visage, large eyes and mouth; the sweet melody of his voice, both in preaching and singing, bore all down before it.” Some Baptist sources say he sold out to the world, but “He possessed a mind extremely active and, as his whole property was expended in attempts to carry his plans to execution, he consequently died poor. If virtue consists in being useful to our fellow citizens, perhaps there were few more virtuous men than Mr. Craig.” In addition to his role as community patriarch in economic development, his church and educational work today continue their contributions to society's benefit. Yet his perhaps most widely-known legacy comes via Heaven Hill distilleries, who now produce a bourbon named after Rev. Craig which is considered to be one of the firm's premium products.

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Cowdery, Charles K. (July 1996). "How Bourbon Whiskey Really Got Its Famous Name". The Bourbon Country Reader 3 (1), http://www.straightbourbon.com/articles/ccname.html. Retrieved on 5 August 2008. 

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