In the early 1870s, Edmund H. Taylor, Jr. purchased a small distillery in Woodford County, Kentucky and placed his eldest son, Jacob Swigert Taylor in charge of the production. They named the distillery for Jacob Swigert Taylor. The distillery was a small pot still distillery on the banks of Glen’s Creek near the town of Millville. The production was very small at about a barrel a day. Taylor paid cash for this distillery and since he placed his son in charge of the distillery, he never used it as collateral for loans or took out any loans to improve the distillery. This was fortunate in that it never became entangled in Taylor’s financial troubles of the Late 1870s. Taylor lost ownership of his O.F.C. Distillery in Frankfort to the St. Louis firm of Greggory and Stagg, but held on to ownership of the J. Swigert Taylor Distillery. When Taylor severed all ties with Greggory and Stagg in the mid-1880s, It was the J. Swigert Taylor Distillery where he turned in order to rebuild his business. He formed a new company E.H. Taylor, Jr. and Sons, and renamed the distillery the Old Taylor Distillery. The distillery was rebuilt and expanded and received the familiar castle shaped building of today.
Warehouse receipts became a part of the distilling business during the American Civil War. Bonded warehouses were established to hold barrels while they aged during the bonding period. Upon entering the warehouse, a warehouse receipt was created showing the number of barrels entering the warehouse, who owned the barrels, the proof of the whiskey in the barrels and the number of gallons in the barrels. At the end of the bonding period when the taxes were paid or whenever the barrels were sold and shipped to a customer, whichever came first, the warehouse receipt would then be cancelled.
The bonding period started as a one year period, but by the 1880s the period was increased to three years. In the early 1890s, the period was increased again to eight years and remained at eight years until 1958 when it was increased to twenty years. Warehouse receipts were often used as collateral for loans by the owner of the barrels which was in reality, using the barrels of whiskey for collateral. Whoever held the warehouse receipt, owned the barrels on that receipt.
This particular receipt is from the Special Collections at the University of Kentucky. It is a blank receipt and no barrels are shown on the receipt. The full name of the distillery as on the receipt is “J. Swigert Taylor’s Hand Made Sour Mash Distillery”. The distillery was probably using steam to heat the pot stills. If they were still using direct fire, Taylor would have probably added “Fire Copper” to this title. There were many distilleries of the time using the term “Old Fashioned Fire Copper Hand Made Sour Mash Distillery” in their name. The distillery was in Woodford County, but the receipt states the distillery office was in Frankfort, Kentucky. The barrel illustration on the receipt shows the trademark. The trademark, like the one E.H. Taylor, Jr. designed for the O.F.C. Distillery, covers the majority of the barrelhead and has J. Swigert Taylor’s signature as proprietor.
This warehouse receipt is an interesting image of the past. It represents an earlier stage of ownership of the distillery that is now Castle & Key Distillery. There are very few references to this stage of ownership of the distillery, but it is an important part of the present-day heritage of the Old Taylor brand and the Castle & Key Distillery.
Image from Special Collections at the University of Kentucky
February 13, 2021 at 5:54 am
I was pleased to read you highlighted the Jacob Swigert Taylor distillery in your lastest post. With a similar name it and another distillery owned by Edmund Taylor II – the Swigert Old distillery – both played crucial roles in the development of Kentucky’s whiskey history – as the distilleries still do today as Buffalo Trace and Castle & Keys.
Daniel Swigert built the original Swigert Old distillery, his father, Jacob Swigert and brother Philip owned the land plot. The distillery was built and apparatuses installed between 1857 and 1858 at the Leesville site, next door to the Frankfort township, on the Kentucky River, known since 1999 as Buffalo Trace distillery, because buffalo herds followed their road traces to cross through the river shallows. While there was likely a small still house occasionally operating at Cove Spring site since 1812, Daniel Swigert erected the first commercial distillery. The river site has commodious cove to accommodate steamboats serving as Frankfort’s port, where local produce was loaded onto steamboats transited to Mississippi River market towns. It also had a reliable limestone cove spring feeding a small stream. Jacob and younger brother Philip Swigert bought the four Leesville acres and a small warehouse in 1838 for $600. They erected a new larger warehouse to process pork and bacon, ship rope (flax was a major Kentucky industry), tobacco, flour and whiskey produced in Frankfort and the surrounding farmlands to Louisville and other towns.
Edmund Taylor II was a close and respected friend of Jacob Swigert, so much so he named his first son in honour of this relationship. When Daniel Swigert needed a significant loan to construct and kit-out his new distillery (over $110,000 in 2021 value), financing was arranged by Edmund Taylor II, the local banker in Frankfort.
Swigert fitted-out a large, modern all-copper distillery to make ‘Sour mash hand made fire copper whiskey’. He installed several copper pots stills, direct-fired by wood fuel, as he rejected steam and other manufacturing practices popular amongst Kentucky’s bourbon distillers. Swigert employed the slower sour mash fermentation using sixty small tubs (bushel per tub), hand stirred with a grain bill of up to 80% corn, 10% rye and 10% malted barley. The type of distillery equipment and sour mash methods is directly traceable to James Crow’s influence and authority in making high quality, premium whiskey in adjacent Woodford County. While Crow died in April 1856, most of the distilleries on Glenn’s Creek, Woodford County used his methods. Since the late 1820s, he worked for many of these small farmer-distillers, assisting them in plant and process upgrades to make Glenn’s Creek the center of Kentucky’s sour mash whiskey fame. None of Glenn’s Creek’s whiskey was despatched to a rectifier, as it was much sought after throughout Kentucky and beyond as the finest whiskey in America. For more content see Chronicles of James Crow https://thewhiskeywash.com/whiskey-styles/bourbon/the-james-crow-chronicles-part-1-crow-in-scotland/
Swigert’s Old distillery eschewed the production methods used to manufacture lower grade bourbon whiskey. The bulk of the bourbon whiskey was made by sweet mash, using wooden ‘bourbon’ steam-injected stills, and many distillers added ‘deleterious drugs’ to hasten the ferment’. Sweet mash could be fermented in a couple of days, whereas sour mash was at least five days in small washback tubs. This meant more plant, labour, and more time for the flavor complexity to develop in the sour mash beer wash. The triple chambered bourbon steam stills were also much more economical than traditional pot distillation; however, they passed over larger volumes of fusel oils to the doubler and into the final distillate, making for a more noxious and unpalatable spirit. Due to bourbon whiskey’s inferior quality to sour mash whiskey is was significantly cheaper but less esteemed by trade and consumer. It sold into wholesale at least twenty per cent less than sour mash whiskey.
By the late 1860s, the sour mash whiskey produced at Swigert’s Old Distillery gained ‘merited celebrity’ status amongst Kentucky’s whiskey connoisseurs and praised as comparable to Crow’s sour mash whiskey. Daniel Swigert may well have paid for Crow’s advice on design and plant engineering before his death a year earlier. Most likely, Swigert employed one of Crow’s acolytes to complete the fit-out and head distillation. Within two years of the distillery’s starting production, Swigert sold the and three-storey stone building housing the new distillery to Clement and Ashton for $3,500 in December 1859. His father and uncle retained ownership of their Leesville land, warehouse and outbuildings. By the late 1860s, the distillery was sold or leased to Messrs Ira Major (public printer), Richard Tobin (Frankfort mayor), and James Graham (carpenter/builder, in May 1878, Graham bought the Old Oscar Pepper distillery where Crow was head distiller 1840 to 1855). When Edmund Taylor purchased the distillery and land in early November 1870, it had been idle for several years. In March 1869, Jacob Swigert died forcing Philip to sell this valuable land asset for probate tax. Taylor immediately replaced many of the old tubs and repaired the distillery equipment to start operations in early 1871. Taylor demolished the old distillery and built the state-of-the-art Old Fire Copper distillery to sell OFC hand made sour mash whiskey.
Jacob Swigert Taylor, Edmund’s 26-year-old son, bought the Yancey & Johnson distillery on nearby Glenn’s Creek from James Johnson in 1879 and renamed it Jacob Swigert Taylor distillery, producing J S Taylor sour mash whiskey. It was the same distillery where James Crow died when he worked his sour mash methods for Anderson Johnson from 1855 to 1856. Records indicate Anderson Johnson, James’ father, was employed by Edmund Taylor to help repair the Swigert Old distillery in late 1870 and headed distilling until the OFC distillery opened. In 1882, Jacob’s father, Edmund Taylor, bought the distillery from his son and formed E H Taylor jr & Sons. The J S Swigert distillery was razed in late 1886, and the Old Taylor distillery rose in its place in 1887; another all-copper sour mash distillery. Due to the scale and larger volumes at the new distillery, metal tanks with industrial stirrers did much of the mashing, except one short period when the mash was transferred to manual wooden tubs so that the whiskey could claim ‘hand made’.
Mike, keep up the great whiskey work
February 19, 2021 at 5:02 pm
Thank You Chris for adding this information. I hope you are doing well and please feel free to add similar comments anytime you wish. They are always high quality research.
September 11, 2022 at 10:28 pm
Thank you both for this fascinating record of bourbon history. I was so curious about how Jacob Swigert Taylor got his name… and thankfully you provided the answer!..Mich
September 13, 2022 at 1:16 am
Hi Mike.
I can add a little more information to this name query. Jacob Swigert Taylor was named after a family friend of the Taylor’s and a colleague of Edmund H. Taylor Jr.: Jacob Taylor’s father.
Jacob Swigert was a Frankfort lawyer and local judge. He and his brother Philip bought four acres of land at Leestown for $600 in 1838. They built a pork house by the Kentucky River. Richard Taylor, Edmund H’s grandfather later sold them land adjoining this property on Stoney Point; probably the site near the distillery. Philip Swigert bought out his brother and family members erecting a modern steam distillery in 1857. He sold it to a succession of owners before Edmund Taylor bought the Old Swigert distillery in 1870. It became the O.F.C distillery, today Buffalo Trace.
Jacob Swigert Taylor bought the Yancey-Johnson distillery on Glenn’s Creek from James Johnson in 1879, renaming it the J. S. Taylor distillery. It was razed in 1886, and rebuilt as the Old Taylor distillery with his father in 1887. Today, it is the Castle & Key distillery.
For more information see Part 3 i
Whiskey Chronicles of Edmund H. Taylor jr. on the Whiskey Wash site reporting these distilleries and people.