'Never Get To Work Too Early' — The Story Behind Jack Daniel's Untimely Death

Jack Daniel (of Tennessee whiskey fame) is a legend of the distilling world, having crafted one of the world's most popular whiskies (Jack Daniel's Old No. 7). However, his death was decidedly less than legendary, because depending on how you look at it, he died from kicking a safe in a moment of rage.

Daniel died in 1911 at the age of 61, but the story starts around five years earlier at Daniel's distillery. One morning, Daniel was the first in the door for the day at the distillery. Unsure of the combination to a safe in the office, he tried a few options, and angry at being unable to open it, he kicked it hard enough to break his big toe.

Things got worse from there: His toe became infected, and considering this was a couple of decades before the discovery of antibiotics, treatments were limited. It's now sometimes joked that he could have helped stop the infection by dipping his toe in whiskey. The infection spread up through his foot and leg, which needed to be amputated: Yet it was too late, and gangrene spread throughout his body, eventually costing Daniel his life. Fittingly, his last words are rumored to have been "one last drink, please," although there's little to back this up. The safe still exists in the Lynchburg, Tennessee, distillery (now a museum) to this day, with the moral of the story now immortalized as "never go to work too early," according to the Jack Daniel's website.

It's worth noting that some have poured cold water on the idea that Jack Daniel was killed by a kick to the safe. His biographer noted that with the injury occurring about five years before his death, this was far too long for Daniel to have lived with such an infection. His theory is that Daniel may have suffered from diabetes, which could have led to an amputation, and this caused the infection that killed Daniel. Officially speaking, while the safe story is arguably more commonly passed around, the official cause of death is considered unknown.

Since Daniel was unmarried and without children, he left the distillery to his nephew Motlow, and a cousin, Richard Daniel; the handover was in 1907, when Daniel was still alive but in poor health. Motlow soon bought out Daniel's share. However, in 1909, Tennessee had passed a prohibition law, meaning the company was effectively unable to make its main product. An aggrieved Motlow moved production elsewhere (although nationwide Prohibition thwarted this, with one odd exception for "medical whiskey") and eventually became a state senator, helping to repeal prohibition in the late 1930s. However, it had to stop production again due to World War II-era rationing. The distillery stayed in the family until the 1950s, before being sold to the Kentucky-based distilling company Brown-Forman, which owns it to this day.