Appalachian Figures
In the bourbon world the Van Winkle name usually calls up images of velvet bags, waiting lists, and impossible prices. Pappy Van Winkle has become a legend, and his face on a label now stands in for a whole story about Kentucky whiskey and American nostalgia. Yet before there was Pappy there was a Wayne County farm boy who read law in Monticello, rode the rough roads of a divided border county, sat in the Kentucky House during the Civil War, and spent a brief but important season as secretary of state.
That boy was John Sallee Van Winkle. He grew up in the Appalachian foothills along the Cumberland River, carried his Wayne County politics into the halls of Frankfort, then built a legal and business career from Danville that would shape the world his son Julian Proctor “Pappy” Van Winkle Sr. inherited.
This is his story, told from census lines, county histories, government papers, and a few surviving letters that still carry the dust of Wayne County and the Commonwealth’s war years.
A Wayne County farm boy
A turn of the century county history, A Century of Wayne County, Kentucky, begins its sketch of the family with a simple sentence. John S. Van Winkle, it says, was born on 8 March 1829 in Wayne County and was the youngest of ten children in the household of Micajah Van Winkle and Mary Phillips.
The Van Winkles had Dutch origins that traced back to New York, but by the early nineteenth century they were firmly rooted along the Kentucky Tennessee line. Wayne County was still a relatively young county in John’s childhood, a landscape of small farms and timbered hills around Monticello and the Cumberland River.
The same county history notes that John was raised on a farm “near Monticello” and received his early schooling there. By the time the 1860 United States census taker walked through Monticello, he recorded John S. Van Winkle as a young attorney in town, confirmation that the farm boy had already shifted his footing from plow to law book. The Civil War Governors of Kentucky project, which compiles biographical data for state level figures, uses that census entry and other records to place him in Monticello as a practicing lawyer by the late 1850s.
Getting there required preparation. According to the same Wayne County history, John received an “academic education” in Monticello and then, in 1852, read law under his older brother Ephraim L. Van Winkle before attending the University of Louisville. The Civil War Governors biography adds that he was admitted to the bar in 1854 and began practice in Wayne County that same year.
In January 1858 he married Mary Buster, a young woman from a family that also appears in Wayne County records. She died not long afterward, leaving John a widower just as the political crisis over slavery and secession began to grip Kentucky.
Unionism and emancipation in a border county
Wayne County sat on a fault line in the early 1860s. It was a slaveholding county in a slaveholding state, yet it bordered Unionist East Tennessee and included a significant population that leaned toward the Union. The Van Winkles were among the county’s most outspoken Union men.
The county history preserves one vivid scene from the summer of 1861. A recruiting rally drew residents of the Mill Springs area to the farm of Colonel William H. Buster. Captain Harrison W. Tuttle of the Union army later wrote that John S. Van Winkle “made a short but stirring address,” urging his neighbors to support the Union cause. It is a small glimpse, but it places John quite literally on a hillside platform, speaking into the anxiety of a community that had not yet seen the full violence that would soon come to Mill Springs and the Cumberland plateau.
If John was the rising young orator, his older brother Ephraim was the family’s most quoted thinker. In a letter later reproduced in A Century of Wayne County, Ephraim wrote that slavery was a blot on the nation and argued for emancipation on both moral and practical grounds, even as he acknowledged that such a stance cost him clients and votes. That letter, written before the formal end of slavery, helps explain why the Van Winkles appear in the historical record as Unionists who also had emancipationist sympathies in a slaveholding county.
The Civil War Governors project confirms that John carried those views into elected office. In August 1861 he won a seat in the Kentucky House of Representatives from Wayne County, serving through the 1863 session. The project’s social network indexing shows his name linked with other Unionist legislators and state officials, including Treasurer James H. Garrard, Attorney General James Speed, and future governor John W. Stevenson.
Wayne County was hardly unanimous. Confederate cavalry moved through, and neighbors found themselves on opposite sides of the war. John’s presence in the House at Frankfort as a Unionist representative from such a county says a great deal about both his own convictions and the complicated loyalties of the upper Cumberland region.
In the halls of state government
John’s legislative service coincided with a broader rise in the family’s political fortunes. While John fought his political battles in the House, his brother Ephraim moved into statewide office. Governor Thomas E. Bramlette appointed Ephraim L. Van Winkle secretary of state in 1863, placing a Wayne County lawyer at the center of Kentucky’s wartime administration.
The relationship between the brothers appears in both county history and official rosters. A later nineteenth century history of Kentucky government lists officers for Bramlette’s administration and notes that Ephraim served as secretary of state until his death in May 1866. It also records that he was succeeded in that office by his brother John S. Van Winkle, who completed the term.
In other words, John stepped from the House into the secretary’s office at a crucial moment. He was appointed on 24 May 1866 to fill the unexpired term and served until September 1867, when Samuel B. Churchill took over under the next governor.
Primary sources from that period help put him in the room. A broadsheet printed in Frankfort in February 1863 advertised a reception “Complimentary to the Union Ladies of Kentucky” at the Capital Hotel. It invited Union women to an evening hosted by “The Governor, Heads of Departments, and General Assembly of Kentucky,” and then ran a long list of managers. Among them appears “John S. Van Winkle,” alongside many of the other Unionist politicians that the Civil War Governors project connects to his social network.
Other documents in the Civil War Governors collection index him in less festive contexts. A pre war letter from Wayne County circuit judge G. W. Mills to Governor Beriah Magoffin, for example, includes Mills’s worry that war is probably inevitable and mentions John among the county’s ambitious young men. A wartime report by J. M. Hewett on military administration likewise refers to “John Vanwinkle” in the context of state business, underscoring that he was not simply a local lawyer but part of the machinery that kept Kentucky’s Unionist government functioning.
One of the more vivid documents that bears his signature comes from just after the war. A late nineteenth century newspaper item, reproduced on the “Paper Shake” blog, describes a pardon for Jim Loge Lair, a Pulaski County man convicted in a homicide case. The piece notes that the pardon, found in the clerk’s office and dated 22 January 1867, was signed by Governor Thomas E. Bramlette and “John S. VanWinkle, Secretary of State.” It is a small case, but it shows how the secretary’s formal signature could have very immediate consequences for people in the counties along the Wilderness Road.
Taken together, these sources place John in the crowded chandeliers of Frankfort’s hotel ballrooms, in the routine but consequential paperwork of pardons, and in the web of correspondence that bound a war governor, his cabinet, and the legislature to counties like Wayne, Pulaski, and Laurel.
From Monticello to Danville
Even before he became secretary of state, John had already begun to shift his base from Wayne County to the Bluegrass. The Civil War Governors biography notes that he moved his law practice from Monticello to Danville in 1863, a relocation that matched a broader pattern of ambitious professionals moving from highland counties to regional centers in the interior.
Danville offered more clients, a different political world, and access to the institutions clustered there, including Centre College. It also connected him to a growing network of rail and road links that tied the interior counties westward toward Louisville and northward toward Lexington.
Census and family history sources allow us to see his household in that new setting. The 1870 census finds his future wife, Louisa or Louise Dillon, in Danville. Genealogical summaries agree that John married her in 1867, soon after he left the secretary’s office, and that the couple eventually had seven children.
By the time of the 1880 census, transcribed on WikiTree and other family history websites, John S. Van Winkle appears in Danville as a lawyer living with Louise and their children along Harrodsburg Street. One of those children was Julian Proctor Van Winkle, born in 1874. Genealogical and whiskey history sources agree that this boy would later become “Pappy” Van Winkle, the Louisville whiskey salesman turned distillery owner whose name has become a byword for rare bourbon.
A twentieth century profile of the family, quoted in a WCPO home feature about one of Pappy’s descendants, describes John as a lawyer, state legislator, Kentucky secretary of state, and businessman in the coal mining industry, and notes that twenty three Van Winkles are buried at Bellevue Cemetery in Danville. That last detail reminds us that although the bourbon brand would later carry just one family member’s nickname, the dynasty had roots in a broader mix of law, politics, land, and resource extraction that stretched from Wayne County farms to Bluegrass coal operations.
John’s later legal work also reached beyond Kentucky’s borders. The University of Tennessee’s digital collections include a late nineteenth century letter from “John S. Van Winkle in Danville, Kentucky to O. P. Temple in Knoxville, Tennessee,” cataloged as a letter about squatter’s rights in Tennessee. Temple was a prominent East Tennessee Unionist lawyer and historian. The letter suggests that decades after his Monticello speeches John was still engaged with questions of land, law, and contested rights across the Appalachian borderlands.
Death, obituary, and Bellevue Cemetery
John’s public career was relatively short, but his reputation endured. He died at his home in Danville on 28 October 1888. The Semi Weekly Interior Journal of nearby Stanford carried a notice two days later. The obituary, later transcribed on his Find a Grave memorial, begins by announcing “the news of the death of Hon. John S. Van Winkle” at Danville and then traces his path from Wayne County representative to secretary of state and respected Boyle County lawyer. It praises him as an accomplished man and notes that Louise and their seven children survived him.
John was buried in Bellevue Cemetery in Danville, the city’s nineteenth century garden style cemetery that also encompasses Danville National Cemetery. A modern history of the cemetery notes that it was founded in 1849 and became the resting place for many of Danville’s leading families as well as Union and Confederate soldiers.
The cemetery’s interment records and later summaries list “John S. Van Winkle (1829–1888), Secretary of State of Kentucky and member of the Kentucky General Assembly” among its notable burials. Find a Grave memorials for John, Louise, and several of their children show matching stones and inscriptions and link to a larger cluster of Van Winkle graves, including that of Julian Proctor “Pappy” Van Winkle Sr.
Standing in Bellevue today, at the northern edge of the Bluegrass, one can trace a line of names across those stones that begins on Wayne County hillsides and runs into the heart of twentieth century bourbon culture.
From Pappy’s Pappy to Appalachian memory
Modern bourbon writing often begins the Van Winkle story with Julian Proctor Sr. waiting on Derby Day at the Stitzel Weller distillery or riding the roads as a salesman for W. L. Weller and Sons. A thoughtful essay by Matthew C. Hulbert on the Civil War Governors blog, titled “Pappy’s Pappy: Liquor, Law, and the Origins of a Legend in Civil War Era Kentucky,” pushes the story backward into the nineteenth century. It traces a November 1865 petition involving Wayne County men Granville and Levi Ingram, local liquor regulation, and the Van Winkle brothers’ roles in the state’s legal framework.
Hulbert’s argument is not simply that Pappy’s grandfather and great uncle were interesting figures. It is that the legal fights over whiskey, tax, and authority in Civil War era Kentucky shaped the rules under which later bourbon ventures operated. Those fights ran through offices like the secretary of state, through petitions and pardons, and through the careers of lawyers like John S. Van Winkle who bridged local disputes and statewide policy.
For Appalachian history, John matters in another way as well. He represents a familiar but often underappreciated pattern in the region. A bright child grows up on a hill farm in a county like Wayne, gets enough schooling to read law or medicine, and then carries that mountain or foothill perspective into the politics and economies of the Bluegrass and beyond. In John’s case that migration carried him from Mill Springs speeches to the capital hotel in Frankfort, and then to Harrodsburg Street in Danville, where his household appears on the 1880 census and where his young son Julian grew up in a lawyer’s home surrounded by talk of courts, contracts, and coal.
The legends that grow up around bourbon brands tend to flatten these regional stories into a single image of Kentucky. Recovering the biography of John S. Van Winkle, with all its ties to Wayne County rallies, emancipationist county letters, Unionist hotel balls, and cross border legal correspondence, reminds us that the Van Winkle name is rooted in the ridges and river valleys of the upper Cumberland as much as in the warehouses of Louisville.
For readers in Wayne and Boyle Counties, it also offers a way to claim an ancestor who stood at the crossroads of Appalachian and Bluegrass history long before Pappy’s silhouette appeared on a bottle.
Sources and further reading
For primary and near primary sources, the Civil War Governors of Kentucky project provides the best entry point. Its person page for “John S. Van Winkle (Wayne Co state rep)” links to the 1860 census entry that places him in Monticello as a young attorney, to the 1861–63 legislative roster that lists him as Wayne County’s representative, and to indexed documents such as G. W. Mills’s letter to Governor Beriah Magoffin, J. M. Hewett’s wartime report, and the broadside “Complimentary to the Union Ladies of Kentucky” that names him among the managers of a Unionist reception at the Capital Hotel in Frankfort.From The Page+3From the Page+3From the Page+3 The University of Tennessee’s O. P. Temple Papers include a letter from John in Danville to Temple in Knoxville about squatter’s rights in Tennessee, offering a late career glimpse of his legal interests across the Appalachian border.Digital Collections+2SCOUT+2
For Wayne County context, A Century of Wayne County, Kentucky remains essential. Chapter seven preserves Ephraim L. Van Winkle’s emancipation letter, Captain H. W. Tuttle’s recollections of the Mill Springs rally where John spoke, and the summary of the brothers’ political careers, including the note that John was appointed to finish Ephraim’s term as secretary of state.Genealogy Trails+1 The nineteenth century History of Daviess County, Kentucky includes a useful roster of Kentucky governors and state officers that confirms the succession from Ephraim to John in the secretary’s office.Internet Archive
For the end of John’s life and his resting place, the Semi Weekly Interior Journal obituary of 30 October 1888, preserved in transcription on his Find a Grave memorial, gives a narrative of his career and praises his legal ability.Find a Grave+1Bellevue Cemetery’s history and interment lists, along with the cemetery’s Wikipedia entry, document his burial in Danville and place him among other notable figures buried there, while genealogical memorials for Louise Dillon VanWinkle and their children underline the family’s strong presence in the cemetery.Find a Grave+3Wikipedia+3Danville KY+3
For secondary and genealogical context, the Civil War Governors biography and the Wikipedia entry for “John S. Van Winkle” synthesize his birth, education at the University of Louisville, admission to the bar, legislative service, tenure as secretary of state, and death in 1888, with references to census and cemetery records.From the Page+1 WikiTree profiles for Louise (Dillon) Van Winkle and their children, along with Van Winkle family entries in compiled indexes, provide transcriptions of the 1870 and 1880 Danville censuses and tie the family to Bellevue Cemetery.WikiTree+2WikiTree+2
For readers who want to connect this Wayne and Boyle County story to the larger bourbon legend, Matthew C. Hulbert’s essay “Pappy’s Pappy: Liquor, Law, and the Origins of a Legend in Civil War Era Kentucky” on the Civil War Governors blog is the best starting point.Civil War Governors It can then be paired with modern bourbon histories such as the Sipping History article on the Stitzel Weller distillery, Buffalo Trace’s official biography of Pappy, and whiskey trade pieces that sketch Julian Proctor Van Winkle’s rise from Danville born salesman to distillery owner.Sipping History+2Buffalo Trace Distillery+2 Together they reveal how a Wayne County lawyer’s signature in the 1860s sits at the headwaters of a story that now runs through some of the most sought after bottles in the world.