Long before bourbon became a liquid emblem of American independence, its commercial story began with a Welshman on the banks of the Ohio River.
That man was Evan Williams. Born in Dale, Pembrokeshire, in 1755, Williams emigrated to Kentucky at the end of the eighteenth century, and in 1783 built a distillery in what is now Louisville. Historical indicators and bourbon histories describe it as Kentucky’s first commercial distillery, shipping whiskey down the Ohio River by flatboat and helping to establish the industry that would become one of America’s defining exports.
For Sutton, who grew up in Tredegar and has spent decades tracing Welsh echoes across the United States, Williams’s story is more than a historical curiosity; it is part of a wider attempt to recover Wales’s overlooked place in America’s making.
A measure of Welsh influence
For Sutton, Evan Williams matters to Wales because bourbon is more than a drink: it is an American declaration shaped by cornfields, charred oak, limestone water and the westward hunger of a young republic. Yet one of its first commercial acts was carried out by a man whose name still sounds unmistakably Welsh.
On West Main Street in Louisville, the Evan Williams Bourbon Experience turns that history into a public-facing landmark. For Sutton, the force of the story lies partly in the name itself: Evan Williams could just as easily have appeared above a chapel door, on a rugby club list, in a miners’ lodge or on a Welsh street. Behind the name was a frontier story. Williams set his still near the Ohio River and turned surplus grain into portable value. Corn was heavy; whiskey could travel. On a rough frontier, it became commerce, currency, comfort and community.
Williams’s genius was practical: local corn, limestone-filtered water and oak barrels. Whether he learned distilling in America or carried knowledge from Wales remains uncertain, but the figure that emerges is recognisably frontier-minded: self-reliant, skilled, enduring and unwilling to be cowed by rank.
From Pembrokeshire to the Ohio River
Williams’s Pembrokeshire background matters to the shape of that story. The land around Dale and Milford Haven, close to the ancient Landsker Line, had prepared him for Kentucky: a place of seafarers, builders, boundaries and movement. His Atlantic crossing carried him from one frontier to another.
In Louisville, Williams became more than a distiller. He served as a city trustee, wharf master, contractor, stonemason and respected figure in a growing town — a civic builder as well as a whiskey maker. Anecdotes of him arriving at meetings with a jug of whiskey, rules notwithstanding, capture a practical, mischievous and entrepreneurial character. He did not merely distil whiskey. He distilled opportunity.
The hidden hands behind Tennessee whiskey
From Kentucky, the story moves south, from bourbon’s commercial birth to the wider whiskey mythology of Tennessee.
There, Jasper Newton “Jack” Daniel of Lynchburg became one of whiskey’s most recognisable names. Jack Daniel’s is not bourbon in branding or identity; it is Tennessee whiskey, shaped by charcoal mellowing through the Lincoln County Process. Yet it stands beside bourbon in the wider American whiskey family.
Long-standing claims of Daniel’s Welsh ancestry run through his grandfather Joseph “Job” Daniel, recorded in family tradition as having been born in Wales, and through naming patterns that point back towards south-west Wales. The evidence is not presented as certainty, but as historical probability: the pattern a people leave behind when official records are burned, Anglicised or lost.
Nathan “Nearest” Green is also central to any honest account of American whiskey. Green, who had been enslaved and was later emancipated, taught Daniel the craft and was later hired as the distillery’s head distiller; the role now known as master distiller. The company’s own history recognises that Daniel learned whiskey-making from the Reverend Dan Call and Green.
A braided inheritance, not a simple claim
The article’s argument is careful not to turn a shared history into a simple claim of Welsh ownership. Together, Evan Williams, Jack Daniel and Nearest Green reveal something larger than genealogy. Welsh and Celtic migrants carried craft, naming, chapel culture, stubbornness, humour and survival, while Black expertise, too often erased, helped define the taste and technique of American whiskey. The result is not ownership by one people, but a braided inheritance.
A personal journey through Welsh America
Sutton’s personal connection to the story runs through Tredegar, where coal, iron, steel and rugby shaped his sense of Welsh identity. Decades of travel across the United States repeatedly revealed Welsh echoes in American place names, families, industries and legends. The whiskey trail in Kentucky and Tennessee becomes, in that light, not a borrowed story but evidence of a wider transatlantic legacy.
That inheritance later came full circle when Sutton took an unsigned Welsh rock band to the United States to perform alongside Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band Lynyrd Skynyrd and arranged sponsorship from Penderyn. The Welsh whisky brand helped revive commercial whisky-making in Wales after more than a century, and many of its expressions draw flavour from bourbon casks. The connection between Wales and America was not only historical, but sensory.
The journey had come full circle: from Wales to America and back again, with guitars, pride and whisky in the hold. Evan Williams had carried Welsh skill to the Ohio River. Jack Daniel, through claimed Celtic roots and the mentorship of ‘Nearest’ Green, helped turn whiskey into global myth. Penderyn revived Welsh whisky for a modern age, drawing flavour from the barrels made famous in Kentucky.
The central lesson is that America’s national drink was never only American. As Sutton put it:
“It was shaped by people who crossed oceans with little more than names, skills and nerve, then built something lasting from corn, oak, charcoal, water and will. America raised the glass. Wales helped fill it.”
The Fighting Welsh: The Original Britons Who Helped Build America by Andrew J. Sutton is available now on www.amazon.co.uk to mark the 250th anniversary of American Independence.
More from Robert G Davies
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