James Ripy
“Original Founder of Wild Turkey”
James Rippey was born in County Tyrone in Northern Ireland in March 1811. James and his two siblings emigrated to America, entering the country along the Delaware River at the Port of Philadelphia. An immigration worker who filled out the paperwork for the three children misspelled their last name as “Ripy”. The trio discovered that the legal process to get their name changed back after the misspelling was too lengthy and far too expensive, so they decided to keep it as it was. Within a very short time, the siblings moved to a small Kentucky town called Lawrenceburg around 1830. All three of the Ripy children lived in a single small log cabin along the Kentucky River in what was then Bourbon County but is now Anderson County.
In his 20s, James became a clerk in a dry goods store. In 1839, James renounced his British Citizenship and became an American Citizen. In 1840, Ripy married a local Bourbon County girl from a very wealthy family, whose name was Artemesia Walker. Artemesia was just a year younger than her husband. Ripy later became a successful merchant and distributor of household goods, including whiskey, in the mid-1840s and 1850s. With his success, James began buying up a number of small distilleries in and around Anderson County. James and Artemesia had three children; however, one died as an infant. The two sons who lived to adulthood were James P. Ripy (born in 1844) and Thomas Beebe Ripy (born in 1847).
The younger James served as a junior officer in the Confederate Cavalry Corps during the US Civil War. After the war, he married into the family that produced Bond & Lilliard Whiskey. Like his father and in-laws, James went on to become a distiller. James’ brother, Thomas Beebe Ripy, or TB, was three years younger and was sent off to school to obtain an education, first at prep school in Louisville, and then to university in Frankfort.
In 1853, the father James, Sr., now in his 50s, along with two partners, bought a large distillery a few miles east of Lawrenceburg. Within a year, he had the plant churning out over 120 barrels of mash a day. One year later, at the peak of their production, James’ partners secretly financed the sale of the distillery to a prominent local magistrate named Judge McBrayer and his partner, who was none other than James’ son, TB. The following year, McBrayer left, and TB became a sole proprietor of what was then renamed “TB Ripy Cliff Springs Distilling Company.”
In 1869, James and his two sons built their own larger distillery on the Kentucky River in the town of Steamville, which James later renamed Tyrone after the County in Ireland where he was born. The distillery was called the Ripy Brothers Distillery, after the two sons whom he had hired to run the plant. TB Ripy would later go on to become the largest distiller in the world over the next two-and-a-half decades between 1880 and 1905.
In 1872, James Ripy began having health problems, and his wife, Artemesia, was not physically able to take care of her husband, so both sons worked to help care for their parents. Unfortunately, in June 1872, James Ripy, at only 61 years of age, passed away. A few years later, Artemisia also died, and both were buried in the Walker Cemetery near Lawrenceburg.
Some time later, TB Ripy paid homage to his father James by putting the slogan on every bottle of bourbon, “From Father to Son Since 1831."
When Campari America (Wild Turkey’s parent Company) introduced the Whiskey Baron’s Collection its first brand was named after T. B. Ripy’s famous World’s Fair Gold Medal Winning Bourbon in “Old Ripy Bourbon.” The second was named after the partnership that the younger James P. Ripy went to work for in Anderson County as well. It is called “Bond & Lillard Bourbon.”
Submitted by Colonel Craig Duncan, Columbia, Tennessee