THE BAPTIST PREACHER THAT INVENTED BOURBON WHISKEY! ELIJAH CRAIG!

We may find it odd today that a man of the cloth would be involved in the production of distilled spirts but our ancestors likely wouldn’t have thought anything about it. Many joke and say that they wonder if it was “just for medicinal purposes” but it certainly was not. Bourbon whiskey has become a world-wide product and part of the culture of many families in the Bluegrass Region of Central Kentucky. Hundreds of brands have came along over the last two centuries with ornamental bottles of beauty and class. Many display there bottles in a place of prominence in their homes. Many say it all started at Royal Springs, in modern day Georgetown, Kentucky with the legend Rev. Elijah Craig.

Who is Reverend Elijah Craig? The well known preacher was born in 1738 in Orange County, Virginia. He was the fifth child of Polly Hawkins and Taliaferro or Toliver Craig, Sr. 

When he was 28 years old, he was converted to the Baptist faith, and he began to hold meetings and a tobacco barn. His brothers Lewis and Joseph Craig, were also preachers. Lewis and others were jailed for about a month for preaching without a license from the Anglican Church and disturbing the peace. The prosecutor said “they were incapable of meeting a man on the road without ramming the scripture down his throat”! In 1771 he became ordained, and the pastor of Blue Run Church. Like his brother Lewis, Elijah was also was jailed twice for preaching without a license. In 1774. He was elected with John Waller as apostles to evangelize north of the James River in Virginia. Baptists were often persecuted because they held mixed congregation blacks and whites, and they often encouraged members to free their slaves, or at least treat them very well. 

Elijah worked as a liaison between the churches and the newly formed Virginia Legislature to protect the religious freedoms of the infant country. Once freedom of religion was established, the Baptist membership grew. 

In 1781 Elijah’s brother Lewis led a group of 600 people to Kentucky, known as the Traveling Church. They originally settled at Gilbert’s Creek, south of Lancaster, on modern day Kentucky Highway 39, on the way to Crab Orchard. They built a block house that was also used as a church and established Craig’s Station.

Many members from the congregation moved two years later to establish more churches, and many of those churches are still around today. Then in 1782, Reverend Elijah Craig led his congregation to 1,000 acres in modern day Scott County, Kentucky, and they established a town that they named Lebanon. You might remember Lebanon as “the land of milk and honey” from the Bible. Later the town changed his name to Georgetown, after President George Washington. 

In 1786, Elijah Craig became the pastor of Great Crossing Baptist Church which is still operating today. It is interesting to note, there was later another interesting pastor of Great Crossing Baptist Church, Robert S. James, the father of the infamous outlaws, Frank and Jesse James. Many will not be surprised that those outlaws were “PK’s”, or preachers kids.

Reverend Craig actually ended up getting excommunicated from his church and it is unknown as to what were the reasons. Some say that he was getting “a little bit too big for his britches” due to the amount of wealth that he was acquiring from all of his businesses in and around Georgetown. Later in 1795, Reverend Craig and 35 others founded McConnell’s Run Baptist Church. This church eventually became Stamping Ground Baptist and is now called Penn Memorial Baptist. Family Tree Nuts has a video about the history of this church that you say watch by clicking the picture below.