Vintage Jack Daniels Tennessee Whiskey T-Shirt 90s

Read the banner across the middle: Lem Motlow, Sole Owner & Prop. His name is still on every bottle, and the reason is a long, stubborn story.

Jack Daniel never married and had no children. In 1907, in failing health, he handed the distillery to his nephew Lem, who’d been keeping the books. Three years later Tennessee banned distilling outright — a decade ahead of national Prohibition. Lem took it to the state Supreme Court and lost.

So he sold mules. For nineteen of his thirty-six years running Jack Daniel’s, Lem couldn’t legally make whiskey, and ran a hardware store and a mule-trading business in Lynchburg instead. He got himself elected to the Tennessee House, then the Senate, and pushed until the state relented. In 1938, at sixty-nine, twenty-nine years after he’d been shut down, he restarted the distillery using hardware store profits to pay for it.

The label also claims the oldest registered distillery in the United States, which holds up — it was registered in 1875.

Printed in 1992 by SSI. Moore County, where the whiskey is made, is still dry.