page_title: George Dickel
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: George Dickel / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Ad for George Dickel's Cascade Whisky from a 1915 issue of the Rock Island Argus
context_page_description: George Dickel is a brand of Tennessee whiskey owned by Diageo PLC produced in Cascade Hollow, Tennessee. The brand was introduced in 1964. Its distillery is part of the American Whiskey Trail and offers tours to the public. A George Dickel rye whiskey is also sold.
  The brand's labels use the traditional Scottish spelling of whisky, as opposed to whiskey, although the latter spelling is more common in American English. According to the company, this is because Dickel believed his product to be as smooth and high in quality as the best Scotch whiskies.
context_section_description: George A. Dickel was born in Germany in 1818, and immigrated to the United States in 1844. He founded a retail business in Nashville, Tennessee, in the 1850s, and began selling liquor in 1861. After the Civil War, he operated a liquor store on South College Street in Nashville. In the late 1860s, he founded George A. Dickel and Company, a wholesaling firm which bought whiskey from regional distillers and distributed it in barrels, jugs and bottles.  In 1871, Meier Saltzkotter, who had worked as a superintendent for Dickel, became a partner in the company.  Victor Emmanuel Shwab (1847–1924), a brother-in-law of Dickel who had initially worked for the company as a bookkeeper, became a partner in 1881.
  Whiskey was being produced in Cascade Hollow, near Tullahoma, Tennessee, by John F. Brown and F.E. Cunningham in the 1870s.  In 1879, Matthew Sims, a local businessman, bought Brown's share of the operation.  In 1883, another local businessman, McLin Davis (1852–1898), joined the partnership.  Davis became the operation's distiller, and is credited with the whiskey's recipe.  By the early 1890s, Cascade Whisky was one of the more popular brands in the region.  The Cascade label included the phrase, "Mellow as Moonlight", which was rooted in Davis's method of cooling mash at night.
  Following an accident in 1886, Dickel's health declined, and Shwab gradually took control of the wholesaling firm's daily operations.  In 1888, Shwab purchased Sims's share of the Cascade Distillery, whose whiskey Dickel and Company had been selling for years.  The terms of the purchase made Dickel and Company the sole distributor of Cascade.  Shwab also purchased the popular Climax Saloon in Nashville, and afterward advertised the saloon as the "headquarters" of Cascade Whisky.  After Davis's death in 1898, his son, Norman Davis, briefly ran the distillery, but was sued by Shwab and forced to sell his share in the operation.
  Following Dickel's death in 1894, his share of Dickel and Company was willed to his wife, Augusta. Though he had advised her to sell out, she retained her share of the company, but did not participate in its operations.  Upon her death in 1916, she willed her share to Shwab.
  Throughout the early 1900s, Shwab fought vehemently against the rising calls for prohibition, spending thousands of dollars on lobbying campaigns in Nashville, and thwarting legislation aimed at curtailing the sale of alcohol on at least one occasion. In spite of his efforts, Tennessee enacted prohibition in 1910, forcing the Cascade operation to relocate to the Stitzel Distillery in Louisville, Kentucky.  It was produced here until Kentucky enacted statewide prohibition in 1917.  The operation shut down altogether with the onset of nationwide prohibition in 1920.
  In 1933, national prohibition was repealed. Four years later, Shwab's heirs sold the Cascade brand to the Schenley Distilling Company. The recipe had never been written down, and had to be obtained from two former distillers at the Cascade Hollow site.  In the 1940s and 1950s, Schenley's product, produced at the OFC Distillery in Frankfort, Kentucky, was marketed as Geo. A. Dickel's Cascade Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whisky.
  In 1956, Schenley attempted to buy the Jack Daniel's brand. After its offer was refused, Schenley decided instead to return one of their own brands to its roots and compete against Jack Daniel's. In 1958, after the passage of enabling legislation making it legal to produce liquor in Coffee County, Tennessee, Schenley's Ralph Dupps reconstructed the Cascade Hollow distillery.  The new distillery is located about a mile from the old distillery site, but still utilizes the waters of Cascade Branch and the Lincoln County Process for mellowing. The first mash was produced at the new distillery on July 4, 1959, and George Dickel Tennessee Whisky was first bottled in 1964. Schenley opted to use George Dickel's name as the trademark because of Cascade's reputation as a value brand. Schenley shut down the Tennessee bottling operation in the 1980s, and the whiskey has since been hauled i
caption: Cascade Pure Whisky ad from 1915
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