Loren Jones- Class of 2029-Carrying History Forward: Reflections from the Uncle Nearest Retreat

    The drive from Atlanta to Shelbyville, Tennessee, is more that’s miles on the road—it is a movement through layers of history. Traveling into rural Tennessee, we left behind the city’s pace and entered a quieter landscape where the story of Nathan “Nearest” Green, an enslaved man who became the first known African American master distiller, now anchors a thriving business. The Uncle Nearest Distillery is not just a place of production; it is a monument to legacy, resilience, and reclamation. Being there made history tangible in ways no book alone could accomplish. 

    Walking the grounds, I felt the weight of history in my body—the uneven terrain, the air heavy with the scent of whiskey, and the reminders that Nearest Green’s genius once went unnamed in the broader story of American entrepreneurship. Reading Fawn Weaver’s Love & Whiskey had already impressed on me the importance of telling hidden stories, but being present at the distillery impressed something deeper: history is not static. It lives in the land, in the practices carried forward, and in the communities reclaiming their own narratives. The trip from Atlanta to Tennessee reinforced this lesson. Our journey mirrored the long paths stories travel—from obscurity into light, from silence into song.

    Yet, the distillery also ask hard questions about ethics and responsibility. Whisky delights, yes, but it also wounds—through addiction, broken families, and broader health cost. Weaver acknowledges this tension insist that legacy requires discernment. Success cannot simply be measured in responsibility. In this way, the story of Uncle Nearest echoes Danielle Allen’;s argument in Our Declaration: freedom and flourishing are not individual achievements but collective ones. Just as democracy demands that we weigh liberty with equality, entrepreneurship demands that we weigh success with accountability. To successes honorably is to refuse to separate delight from responsibility. 

    This raises the pressing question: when does entrepreneurship cross into responsibility for what you sell? For Weaver, responsibility seems to mean telling the full truth, honoring Green’s name, and ensuring that wealth flows into the communities that have historically been excluded. This model pushes against a tradition of American businesses that have profited while erasing the very people who made their success possible. Robin D.G. Kelley’s Freedom Dreams invites us to imagine alternative futures, and Weaver’s stewardship of the Uncle Nearest brand seems like one such dream realized. She demonstrates that capitalism does not have to mean exploitation; it can mean repair, recognition, and redirection.

    Stepping outside the classroom into this retreat shifted my perspective on myself as an honors student. Too often, academic work can feel sealed off—abstract debates and footnotes obtained within library walls. But standing on the land where history was both made and neglected reminded me that ideas matter because they live in the world. Frank X Walker’s Turn Me Loose insist that memory and history are always contested, always lived. The poems challenged us to the personal in this historical, the intimate in the personal in this historical, the intimate in the political. At the distillery, I felt that same challenge: to see my learning not a mine alone but as pat of a collective responsibility to carry stories forward. 

    As an honors community, our retreat underscored the value of what Dr. Hite calls “curated inwardness.” To learn in a place like Uncle Nearest Distillery is to practice seeing oneself differently. I left Tennessee not only with greater respect for Nearest Green’s genius ur also with clearer sense of what it means to belong to a tradition of students who read for engagement. Reading calls us to action. History calls us to responsibility. And being in that space reminded me that my education is not about accumulation of knowledge but about how I live differently because of it.

    The Uncle Nearest Retreat was not simply a field trip; it was an invitation to inhabit history, to wrest with ethics, and to imagine a future shaped by responsibility and care. To carry Green's story forward is to commit to telling the truth, to dreaming differently, ad to living in ways that honor those who came before. 

Complication or Tension:

Love Story Evidence:

Brand vs. History:

- Loren Jones