Walking In and With Legacy: Love, History, and Responsibility at Uncle Nearest Distillery in Shelbyville, TN — By Christina Simone Coker
This past weekend, with Fawn Weaver’s Love & Whiskey as a guide, we walked the grounds where history, entrepreneurship, and ethics act harmoniously. The experience revealed not only what it means to honor a legacy but also how complicated it is to transform history into brand, memory into product, and struggle into success.
Inside the distillery’s speakeasy-style room, one wall displayed a framed photograph of suffragists marching in white, surrounded by quotes in the floorboards from leaders such as Ida B. Wells. This image struck me as a kind of love story. The suffrage movement, though imperfect, was driven by a deep love of justice and a determination to leave a legacy for generations to come. Weaver’s mission in Love & Whiskey mirrors this spirit. She calls her work with Uncle Nearest a “love story,” not just because it honors Nearest Green, but because it restores dignity to his descendants and his community. Like the women in the photograph walking together in unity, Weaver walks forward with Green’s story, ensuring that he is no longer written out of history. Similarly, Green’s voice was silenced, his contribution to American whiskey lost through generations. Weaver’s work insists on the same principle Allen outlines: that equality and recognition must be extended fully, not partially.
But the suffrage image also reminded me of the complications that surround every love story. While women marched for freedom, Black women were often sidelined or outright excluded. Ida B. Wells herself resisted being pushed to the back of the line, embodying the tension between unity and exclusion. Similarly, Green’s legacy forces us to confront the uncomfortable truth that America’s most famous whiskey brand was built on his knowledge, yet his name was absent from the story for over a century.
Walking the distillery grounds brought this tension into sharper focus. The blue sky, still water, and peaceful paths seemed to suggest calm harmony. Yet beneath the surface is the weight of what was once erased. Another one of our readings, Freedom Dreams argues that progress always carries contradiction. That the dream of liberation is shaped against the backdrop of inequality. That tension was alive at Uncle Nearest: celebration of success mingling with the unease of delayed justice.
The visit also raised the question of how history intersects with brand. The distillery’s displays carefully curate Green’s story, packaging it in a way that is both celebratory and marketable. At times, this feels like recovery of fact, a long-overdue recognition. But it also risks smoothing over complexity. If his legacy is told only as a triumphant brand narrative, we risk losing the sharper edges of history. The silence, the delay, the injustice that made recovery necessary. Whiskey becomes the vessel through which Green’s name is remembered, but whiskey itself is not neutral. As Weaver acknowledges, it is both delight and danger, joy and harm.
Being physically present at the distillery deepened my sense of historical consciousness. Traveling from Atlanta to Tennessee reminded me that legacies are geographic as well as cultural. Standing in the state where Green once lived and worked was a reminder that history is not abstract. It is tied to landscapes, to communities, to the physical spaces we inhabit. Reading Love & Whiskey gave me the story, but walking the grounds allowed me to feel its weight, to sense how memory lingers in soil and stone.
The distillery also forced me to think extremely outside the box. Specifically about ethics. Weaver’s entrepreneurial success is undeniable, but it rests on selling whiskey; a product that brings pleasure but also pain. What does it mean to succeed through something that delights even as it wounds some? Weaver’s answer seems to lie in responsibility: reinvesting in Green’s family, telling the truth about his role, and creating a business that stands for inclusion and dignity. Success, in this sense, is not only measured by profit but by stewardship of a legacy.
This retreat reminded me that being an honors student is not just about reading hard texts but about connecting those texts to lived experience. Walking these grounds, I felt myself part of a larger story. A story that links equality, Nearest Green’s genius in distilling, Weaver’s passion for justice, and our generation’s responsibility to carry these legacies forward.
The Uncle Nearest Distillery is more than a business. It is a living archive, a reminder that love, struggle, and responsibility are inseparable. To read about Green is one thing, but to walk his land is another. Both together taught me that legacy is not static; it is something we inherit, preserve, and extend.
Love Story
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