America has rarely, if ever, been depicted as a land of gracious winners. I suppose it’s inherently difficult for any place with a culture of exceptionalism to foster that kind of value: Americans are taught to value winning and victory at all cost, and we tend to venerate champions who loudly proclaim their own greatness. We’re simply a nation that enjoys a good gloat. And if that opportunity to rub our victory in the face of a fallen foe should coincide with the chance to denigrate a woman of historical significance, then so much the better, right? Two American passions, pettiness and misogyny–three, actually, if you throw in “purposefully avoiding historical context”–together at last. They’re all tied up in the odd case of famed temperance leader Carrie Nation, the disastrous 2025 implosion of Kentucky’s Garrard County Distilling Co., and the wider disrespect that is all too often still shown toward women–be they marketing symbols or employees–in the American whiskey industry.
This is a story about how one ambitious Kentucky distillery, in the course of apparently biting off far more than they could chew, decided to center its marketing and branding almost entirely around the mockery of one of the American temperance movement’s most famous historical figures, while willfully ignoring the entirely reasonable, logical reasons for why a woman born in 1846 might have grown up dreaming of a world without alcohol. Nor does this story simply reside in the historical record. At the same time as it was erecting statues of Carrie Nation, and moving her childhood home brick by brick onto the distillery grounds, the same company was also touting its hiring of a woman (Lisa Wicker) as its master distiller … only to then fire her 11 days after her hiring was publicly announced. Today, little more than a year after opening, Garrard County Distilling Co. is already out of business, caught up in a labyrinth of lawsuits, recrimination and broken agreements. And I think it’s safe to say that neither Carrie A. Nation, nor women who love bourbon in the 21st century, would be shedding a tear.
The Rise and Fall of Garrard County Distilling Co.
When Garrard County Distilling Co. officially opened and began distilling spirit in January of 2024, it was with a level of pomp, circumstance and ambition rarely seen even at the height of the now receding bourbon boom. With dual, 45-foot column stills, they described themselves as “the largest all-new independent distillery in Kentucky,” with a $250 million facility capable of producing “up to 8.5 million proof gallons or 150,000 barrels of whiskey a year.” Right out of the gate, that would have put their max as something close to the recent likes of Bardstown Bourbon Co., which took 11 years after founding in 2014 to grow into one of the major, modern players in both producing their own spirit and large amounts of contract distillation. Garrard County Distilling Co. had immediately set their sights on similarly lofty ceilings, with the 210-acre site being home to the 50,000 square foot distilling facility and plans for 24 aging warehouses by 2030. They claimed to already be aging more than 17,000 sourced whiskey barrels on site, celebrating their status as the first legal distillery in the titular Garrard County, which had been dry for decades if not centuries until Nov. 2023, when alcohol sales finally became legal. The distillery was obviously meant to be a major economic boon for the county.
For its most prominent marketing symbol, Garrard County Distilling Co. looked to low-hanging local fruit: The county was the birthplace of famed temperance leader, evangelical zealot and “hatchet granny” Carrie Nation (also spelled “Carry,” more details to follow), iconic and infamous for her spate of turn-of-the-century hatchet attacks on Kansas and Missouri taverns and saloons. In addition to naming their line of flagship bourbon whiskeys “All Nations”–in reference to signs and postcards cheekily displayed in taverns of the day that read “All nations welcome except Carrie”–the distillery went completely all-in on Carrie Nation branding. Their gift shop sold her name and image on bottle labels, hats and sweatshirts. Outside of the gift shop, visitors were greeted by a larger than life bronze statue of the woman, of course swinging her iconic hatchet. Facebook posts from Garrard County Distilling Co.–complete with people in the comments mocking Carrie Nation–detail what was no doubt their boldest and most laborious move to turn her into a marketing symbol for the product she spent her entire life decrying: The demolishing and reconstruction of Nation’s childhood home (an entry in the National Register of Historic Places since 1977) on the distillery grounds, 12 miles away from its original site on the banks of the Dix River. It’s still not entirely clear what purpose this building was meant to serve for the company, beyond being an incredibly petty taunt at Nation from beyond the grave, justified under the guise of historical preservation.
Facebook commenters pile on to mock the moving of Carrie Nation’s home onto the distillery grounds.
Suffice to say, we’ll probably never untangle the company’s intent here, because as quickly as Garrard County Distilling Co. burst onto the scene with its plans to become a huge player in the Kentucky whiskey industry, its business began to unravel at the seams. By the spring of 2025, shortly after celebrating its first anniversary, the mounting financial catastrophe had become clear: The distillery was placed in the hands of a receivership, with Truist Bank currently suing Garrard County Distilling Co. parent company GBRE, LLC for $26 million, and making the case that it believes the value of existing GCDC assets are less than the value of its outstanding loans. But that’s just a hint of the various suits and liens facing the company, as it also reportedly owes more than $250,000 in unpaid property taxes, along with a $2.2 million lawsuit from its construction contractor, and potential other suits involving “a warehouse roof collapse and a crane accident,” among other things.
Garrard County Distilling Co. employees (the ones who weren’t fired) were subsequently furloughed “temporarily,” and the distillery phone line has long since been disconnected, with no obvious way to reach any company representative for comment. Ray Franklin, founder of GCDC’s originally listed parent company Staghorn, based in Atlanta, meanwhile left the business before the financial problems began publicly coming to light, seemingly deploying an escape parachute to get out while the getting was good. He’s now listed as the chief revenue officer of digital barrel exchange platform Spirits Capital, having seemingly managed to wash his hands of anything to do with the spectacular collapse of GCDC.
Mere months after trumpeting themselves as the next big thing in Kentucky bourbon distillation, the company has effectively ceased to exist. Questions such as “Who were they contracted to distill for?” and “Who actually owns most of the spirit they distilled?” will no doubt be tied up in the court system for a painfully long time, so allow me to instead focus on my own, specific area of interest: Why did the company feel it was so necessary to employ marketing taunting a woman who died 114 years ago?
The bronze Carrie Nation statue outside of Garrard County Distilling Co.
Carrie Amelia Nation was born in Garrard County in 1846, into a nation that was completely and utterly soused. It can scarcely be understated just how thoroughly inundated with alcohol America was during this specific period, and gaining knowledge of the historical context of this moment is absolutely essential if you want to make a good faith effort in understanding why someone would one day make a name for themselves in chopping up saloons with a hatchet. Nation was quite literally born at the height of American physical and psychological dependence upon alcohol, and she suffered its ill effects in various aspects of her life for decades before becoming a temperance evangelist. If you went through what she went through, you might find yourself far more empathetic toward her story. Believe it or not, people don’t tend to become moral crusaders without a reason.
The original Carrie Nation house in Lancaster, KY, before it was moved by Garrard County Distilling to the distillery grounds.
Americans had always liked a drink since the earliest colonial days, and alcohol had been especially tied at the waist to American politics–most of the Founding Fathers were prodigious drinkers, such as James Madison, who reportedly consumed a pint of whiskey every day. But even though historic drinking rates of the 1700s were significantly higher than consumption today, the 1800s made those earlier rates look positively puritanical. There were several reasons for this, chief among them being a simple matter of increasing access: As settlers expanded west and grain was sowed across the Midwest and the Great Plains, huge amounts of corn, wheat and rye became available. And because it was more efficient to ferment and distill that grain into spirits such as whiskey rather than attempt (non-refrigerated) transportation of it to Eastern population centers, a huge boom began in distillation. Prices of hard liquor subsequently plummeted, and as has always been true throughout history, the cheaper alcohol becomes, the more voraciously we drink it. As author Daniel Okrent notes in his exceedingly thorough history of American Prohibition, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, “By the 1820s, whiskey sold for twenty-five cents a gallon, making it cheaper than beer, wine, coffee, tea, or milk.”
Quite simply, when alcohol is that freely available, people are always going to respond by getting plastered, and that’s exactly what happened. The overall amount of ethanol consumed per capita skyrocketed, peaking in the mid-1800s at a truly outrageous 7 gallons per capita, per year, of pure, 200 proof ethanol. That is roughly three times higher than modern U.S. per capita drinking rates (which are trending downward), and still 55% higher than the current overall drinking rate of Romania, which holds the title of the world’s highest consumption levels in 2025. Considering that there were still plenty of teetotalers and abstainers in 1840s America, perhaps the easiest way to imagine this level of drinking is to say the following: Imagine if every person you know who drinks alcohol, suddenly started drinking three times as much alcohol tomorrow. That’s a good starting point for imagining life in the mid-1800s United States.
In 1865, a 19-year-old Carrie Nation met Charles Gloyd, a physician and Civil War veteran who was also, perhaps unsurprisingly, a severe alcoholic. They married in late 1867 and divorced less than a year later in the fall of 1868, before the birth of their daughter Charlien–Charles Gloyd would pass away as a result of complications due to his alcoholism only a year after that, in 1869. It was a foundational event for Carrie, and a root of her personal hatred for alcohol. She would gain her more familiar surname a few years later in 1874 when she married attorney and minister David A. Nation. They remained married for the next quarter century, as Carrie Nation became more and more fervently religious, eccentric and passionate about the burgeoning American temperance movement–a natural outgrowth of the catastrophic public health crisis brought on by the level of American alcohol consumption in the mid-1800s.
And rest assured: Carrie A. Nation was an eccentric of a particularly forceful and charismatic variety, a room-filling presence with a prickly temper and documented history of mental illness in her family–both her mother and her daughter Charlien ended their lives in mental institutions. She was a religious zealot who became only more fervent as she entered middle age, once describing herself as “a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn’t like.” Her enmity was by no means reserved for alcohol alone; she also railed against topics such as corsets, revealing women’s fashion and public indecency, and campaigned for women’s suffrage, a cause closely tied to the eventual Prohibition movement. At the same time, she was deeply concerned in promoting the safety of women and children from the violence of drunken husbands–possibly pulling from personal experience–and to that end aided in the establishing of shelters for women in urban centers such as Kansas City. But it was the year 1900 that turned Nation from merely a loud temperance advocate into a nationally recognized symbol, when she first began brandishing a hatchet.
Hatchet Attacks and Bourbon Branding
In June of 1900, a 54-year-old Carrie Nation described herself as having received a direct call from God, telling her to take her moral war against alcohol to greater heights and physical confrontation with the demon liquor. And so, she marched into a saloon in Kiowa, Kansas and began to systematically destroy the place, shouting religious mantras and hymns all the while. It must have been quite the sight to witness, as the strapping, gray-haired matron subsequently began to attack a series of saloons with rocks and eventually her famed hatchet. Ever the eccentric, Nation coined her own terms for these things: Rocks she called “smashers,” and the eventual hatchet attacks on establishments she referred to as “hatchetations.” In her rambling autobiography The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation, she described one of these hatchetations in detail:
“I ran behind the bar, smashed the mirror and all the bottles under it; picked up the cash register, threw it down; then broke the faucets of the refrigerator, opened the door and cut the rubber tubes that conducted the beer. Of course it began to fly all over the house. I threw over the slot machine, breaking it up and I got from it a sharp piece of iron with which I opened the bungs of the beer kegs, and opened the faucets of the barrels, and then the beer flew in every direction and I was completely saturated. A policeman came in and very good-naturedly arrested me.”
The natural thing for the modern reader to wonder here is, of course, “Why did they allow Nation to do this, and was she legally punished?” And the primary reason why she got away relatively easily with much of her destructive sprees is that the saloons she was attacking were themselves illegal at the time. Kansas had adopted a constitutional amendment in 1881 prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcohol, voluntarily becoming a dry state almost half a century before national Prohibition. But despite the law, countless saloons and taverns still operated in plain sight, either paying off corrupt legislators and law enforcement entities, or simply paying the insufficient fines while still doing a tidy business. Carrie Nation saw it as her duty to put a stop to it, physically if necessary. Recruiting others to the cause, she was often flanked by compatriots during the subsequent hatchetations that happened between 1900-1910, and although she was arrested on numerous occasions, she managed to pay various fines through revenue earned as a touring lecturer, not to mention the hatchet-shaped pins she sold wherever she went.
It’s not an exaggeration, in fact, to call Nation one of the most famous women in the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century, at a time when there were far fewer women known on the national stage or in pop culture, thanks in part to a Hollywood film industry that hadn’t yet come of age. Carrie Nation effectively turned her image, frequently seen in parody and political comics, into a cottage industry to support herself. She even published a newspaper titled The Smasher’s Mail, saying in her autobiography that it was so “the public could see by my editorials that I was not insane.”
Typical political cartoon of the era featuring Carrie Nation and her hatchet.
To at least some degree, it feels fair to say that Nation was eventually possessed by some level of delusion, in addition to the undeniable religious mania that was her primary driver. She eventually legally changed her name from “Carrie” to “Carry,” seemingly wanting to take advantage of the play on words afforded by the full name “Carry A. Nation,” while her actual marriage to David A. Nation ended in divorce in 1901, with the husband citing “neglect of family duties and abandonment.” She ultimately collapsed while giving a speech in January of 1911, and passed away a few months later, being buried in Belton, Missouri, where her tombstone reads: “Faithful to the Cause of Prohibition, She Hath Done What She Could.”
Even as a notable kook and historical figure, however, it feels distinctly unfair and positively petty for a distillery like Garrard County Distilling Co. to have focused their entire image around Carrie Nation, defining themselves in opposition to a single woman who had been dead for 114 years–you might call it the ultimate straw man (woman) argument, against a target that would
A. Have absolutely hated this use of her image with every fiber of her being, and
B. Be entirely unable to fight back.
Just look at the way GCDC used its flagship All Nations bourbon as an excuse to pile on and criticize Nation in one of its press releases: “The Garrard County Distilling Co. team blended All Nations as a counter point to Carry. While she was a singular loud voice dictating her views, All Nations was crafted by multiple people with equal voices, creating a true community whiskey.”
Beyond the fact that the master distiller they fired would likely not have described All Nations as being the product of “multiple people with equal voices,” it’s inherently wrong to describe Carrie Nation as some lone crackpot, “a singular voice dictating her views.” She was merely a particularly visible member of what was a surging, passionate national temperance movement of the era, a movement that becomes far easier to understand and empathize with when you have the slightest context into the world in which she grew up. GCDC’s language characterizes Nation’s “singular, dictating” voice as unreasonable, pushy and bossy–stereotypical misogynist language for attacking practically any woman activist. Meanwhile, GCDC’s language for its own product characterizes itself as fair, democratic, egalitarian–everything it claims Carrie Nation (a suffrage advocate) was not.
Really though, it’s the relocation of Nation’s childhood home that best demonstrates the rather shocking amount of resources that Garrard County Distilling Co. for some reason dedicated to dredging up and monetizing Carrie Nation’s image and legacy. They seemed to understand at least to some degree that this particular project could be construed as petty or unnecessary, so they predictably couch the motive to do this as an issue of historical preservation, saying that the structure had been made dilapidated over the decades by “ghost hunters,” and implying that by moving it to the distillery grounds, it would be better preserved as some sort of historical curio. Note that they didn’t even claim to have preserved or transplanted the entire house, either–merely the “stone portion.” Amusingly, many of the area’s locals never seemingly figured out this plan: Look up the Google listing for the house’s former location near Lancaster, KY and you’ll find confused visitors asking where it went. One reads: “What happened to the house? I have tried to find out but have had no luck. Does anyone know?”
Listed in the National Register of Historic Place in 1977, even that dignity may now have been lost–alterations and reconstruction can strip a home of its historic status. And with Garrard County Distilling Co. having gone out of business, and its facilities and land in the hands of a receivership, what is to now become of the house? When someone else buys that land, will they simply demolish it, especially if it no longer technically possesses historic status? Despite rationalizing their actions under the guise of historical preservation, it seems more logical and likely that GCDC’s actions will ultimately result in the home’s destruction rather than its preservation … which is on brand for the way the company seemingly regarded Carrie Nation.
Try to imagine another major corporation finding a similar historical figure to impugn for marketing purposes. Say it was Coca-Cola. This would be like if Coke went out of its way to find the image, name and history of a woman who had dedicated her entire adult life to fighting what she very sincerely believed was a moral battle against sugar consumption, and then made that woman the focus of all of their marketing while highlighting that they just added 25% more sugar to every can of Coke. Just pure spite, for the sake of spite.
At the same time, the very temperance cause championed by Nation has arguably and ironically never been more culturally relevant since the end of Prohibition. Recent data from the annual Gallup poll suggests that only 54% of Americans now report that they consume alcohol in any form, which is the lowest point for this poll question in Gallup’s 90 years. It actually may not be long before a Carrie Nation-like teetotaler is more emblematic of the “average American” than the social consumer of alcohol that has long been depicted as the norm. If anything, it’s Nation’s stance that is now ascendent, the supposed kook vindicated after more than a century.
Women and the Whiskey World
It should be no surprise, and indeed is no secret, that women entering the workforce of the American whiskey industry (and this applies to most corners of the alcohol industry, such as the craft beer world’s sexist reckoning in 2022) often face an uphill battle in retaining their positions, being treated respectfully, and encountering basic lapses in professionalism or safety.
Surveys have long illustrated how rampant these issues are for many women in the industry. A study released in 2023, for instance, found that more than 80% of female respondents employed in making, selling and promoting whiskey reported being asked by colleagues and consumers “if they even like the spirit,” the default assumption being that even a woman who has chosen to be employed in the whiskey industry probably doesn’t genuinely enjoy whiskey. Roughly 70% of respondents, meanwhile, said that they had experienced inappropriate or sexual remarks in the course of doing their job, while more than a third of all respondents reported having been inappropriately touched while working. Which is to say: If you think of any woman you know in the whiskey industry, the odds are apparently much better that she has experienced some of these things than the likelihood that she has managed to avoid them.
That brings us to Lisa Wicker, currently employed as the Director of Distilling at Frankfort, Kentucky’s Whiskey Thief Distilling. A decorated distiller who has worked for numerous companies (Starlight Distillery, Preservation Distillery, Widow Jane) over the course of 15 years of distilling, and 25 years of professionally making beverage alcohol, Wicker was hired by Garrard County Distilling Co., starting as a consultant and beginning full time in early 2024 as the brand’s Master Distiller. Only 11 days after the company sent out press releases trumpeting that they had hired Wicker as Master Distiller, however, she was unceremoniously fired. The company seemingly never hired another Master Distiller during its time in operation.
Speaking with Paste, the now happily employed Wicker stressed that she has had a career of extremely positive whiskey world interactions, typically free from overt sexism.
“Overall, I have been so well treated in this industry by men,” Wicker said. “That’s why when I got in there at Garrard, I didn’t expect anything different. The men who worked with me and for me, they were the best. It was the ownership hierarchy that was the problem.”
Immediately upon arriving, it was clear to Wicker that GCDC’s distilling operations seemed arbitrary and unprofessional, overseen by men who were mostly ex-beer industry executives with no particular spirits or distillation experience. And the more questions she asked, the worse she felt about the state of affairs.
“I was told when I started that they were sold out for four and a half years with clients, and that was not the case,” she said. “So I started asking a lot of questions, and I could count every nail that went into my coffin at Garrard with every question I asked. There were so many inconsistencies there. It became very clear that things were amiss.”
Nor could she very well overlook the fact that she was surrounded overwhelmingly by men, increasingly feeling like she was being used as a token piece of representation for the sake of the company’s public relations–something she says was ultimately confirmed directly to her face when she was fired.
“When I started at Garrard County there were 63 employees, and three of us were women,” Wicker said. “One was in a traditional HR role, one was in a traditional secretarial type job, and then there was me. So I get there, and the disrespect for women in general was just enormous; it was insane how disrespectful they were. I was actually told when I was fired that they had only hired me to be able to say that they were a woman-led business. I was supposed to just stay in my lane. So they just generally didn’t have a lot of esteem for women whether they were historical figures, or their own employees.”
This attitude unfortunately makes all too much sense, given the choices Garrard County Distilling Co. made when it came to their appropriation of the face, name and history of Carrie Nation–would you really expect a company that bases its marketing around petty mockery of a female historic figure to see its own contemporary women employees in a more sensitive way? In fact, her own treatment increasingly led Wicker to also question the distillery’s use of Nation as a symbol. Wicker knew little of Nation before arriving at the GCDC job, “just the superficial stuff that we all know in Kentucky,” saying that she knew people often portrayed Carrie Nation as “crazed, passionate, maybe strange.” But after seeing the company transplant her childhood home to the site, she began to wonder.
“When you start digging into her story, you can understand why she had a reason to be angry,” Wicker said. “Even if we don’t necessarily agree with her crusade, she had a point in it. When they moved the house and rebuilt it there, I don’t know that they 100% knew what they were going to do with it; it was going to be some kind of visitors’ attraction. When I was first told about it, what they were saying about the house seemed respectful to me. But then the more I was there, the less it felt that way. Eventually I felt the house was being disrespected, that her story was as well.”
In July, it was reported that the shuttered Garrard County Distilling Co. assets and property could soon be sold, but there’s been seemingly no news in the interim–we’re left still waiting to see what will happen to a former quarter billion dollar project. On their sprawling 210 acres just north of Lancaster, KY, the facility is presumably sitting in stasis, the stern face of Carrie Nation’s bronze statue still holding its hatchet aloft next to the shuttered gift shop and visitor’s center. Perhaps the ambitious, vandalizing “ghost hunters” have more recently been returning to the property to investigate Nation’s rebuilt childhood home, although one wonders whether ghosts tend to come along for the ride when an 1800s domicile is crudely disassembled and then reconstructed 12 miles away. Perhaps Carrie Nation, or any other concerned specter, is still stalking the original site, wondering where the house went, or perhaps the disrespect was striking enough to lure her all the way to GCDC to put a hex on their business ventures. If it’s the latter, you have to admit that it was apparently pretty damn effective, as hexes go.
Whenever the sale does presumably come, it will be an ignominious end for a company that should probably be defined as much by its casual lack of respect for women as it was by the way its business ultimately imploded. Perhaps the home that was once the birthplace of Carrie Nation will then be bulldozed, or perhaps it will live on even when any other trace of Garrard County Distilling Co. is gone, a strange relic of whiskey industry sexism that outlives the company that erected it in mockery. Having had the last laugh, maybe Carrie Nation can now lay down the hatchet and be at peace.
Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek, who has also spent years writing on alcohol, spirits and cocktails. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film and occasional drink writing.
