Elijah Craig

Elijah Craig (1738 – May 18, 1808) was an entrepreneur and Baptist preacher in the state of Kentucky. He has been posthumously credited with the invention of bourbon whiskey, although this claim has been strongly disputed by historians.

Craig was born in Orange County, Virginia in approximately 1738. He was ordained a Baptist minister in 1771, and was imprisoned briefly in South Carolina, apparently for disturbing the peace with his sermons. He then moved to what was then Bourbon County, Kentucky and settled in the area of Frankfort, Kentucky in 1785. In 1777, he became pastor of Blue Run Church.

Craig was a shrewd businessman and a local magnate; he built Kentucky's first fulling mill, its first paper mill, and founded a distillery in approximately 1789. It was this last enterprise that likely led to his posthumous reputation as the "creator" of Bourbon. However, Craig's distillery was not in Bourbon County, but in Fayette County. Even subsequent redrawings of county boundaries failed to place the facility in Bourbon County, lending little credence to later claims that the name was first applied to Craig's product in reference to its point of origin.cite journal | last = Cowdery | first = Charles K. | year = 1996 | month = July | title = How Bourbon Whiskey "Really" Got Its Famous Name | journal = The Bourbon Country Reader | volume = 3 | issue = 1 | url = http://www.straightbourbon.com/articles/ccname.html | accessdate = 2008-08-05 ] As regional historian Charles Kendrick Cowdery has observed, "By the time Bourbon County was formed in 1785, there were dozens if not hundreds of small farmer-distillers making whiskey throughout the region...Ultimately, most of the corn-based whiskey made west of the Alleghenies was called 'bourbon,' to distinguish it from the rye-based whiskies that predominated in the East." .

Craig died in Georgetown in 1808. Heaven Hill distilleries now produces a bourbon named after him which is considered to be one of the firm's premium products.

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