Driving through the fog outside of Frankfort on a tiny back road, Nicolas Laracuente suddenly saw something rise up in front of him as he rounded a bend. It was a limestone castle, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, crumbling and neglected. On the front of the castle, the words “The Old Taylor Distilling Company” were emblazoned on a faded sign, though there was no sign any distilling had taken place there for quite some time. As he studied the structure from the side of the road, Laracuente had an “aha!” moment: There must be abandoned distilleries throughout the state of Kentucky in need of archaeological study and preservation.
From Army Kid to Archaeologist
Laracuente was born on a United States Army base in Wurzburg, Germany. Constant moves were a common theme. He estimates the family moved 10 times before his father finally retired from the Army. Kentucky always felt like home, though, because his grandparents lived in Buckhorn (Perry County), and their home served as the family’s home base.
He attended Tulane University in New Orleans as an undergraduate with plans to major in pre-med. Sitting in an archaeology elective class one day, he had a realization: Not everything had been discovered yet. Laracuente switched majors and studied archaeology, receiving a bachelor’s degree, and then moved on to the University of West Florida for his master’s degree in anthropology. There, he met a girl named Tiffany, married her and decided he wanted to put down roots. Kentucky was calling him, and fortunately, she heard the call, too.
The Birth of the Bourbon Archaeologist
“Old Taylor was the first distillery that I ever noticed,” Laracuente said. “I had driven by them before, but that moment was what I think of as the first distillery that I ever saw.”
After settling in Kentucky, Laracuente quickly got to work furthering his studies at the University of Kentucky and securing a job with the Kentucky Heritage Council. He began researching distilling history and started running a volunteer archaeology program at the Jack Jouett House Historic Site in Woodford County. He read through the papers in the collection and realized there had been a distillery associated with the site. It had been referenced both in a lawsuit and in an advertisement for the rental of the farm, complete with the distillery and its enslaved distiller, who the ad boasted was the “best distiller in all the land.”
The lawsuit gave Laracuente the best starting point for the distillery’s location, as it referenced bodies of water that still have the same names today. He hiked up and down the creek bed until he found the site, with its limestone block foundations and fences as well as an apparent millrace that was still fairly intact, though overgrown.
“Looking back on it now, that was a big test run, because up until then, it was just a theory that you could actually find those old distilleries,” he said. “It wasn’t until that summer we spent out there that we figured out that, yes, you can find out what those early Kentucky distilleries were like. It was a big gamble. Now we know that this is something we can look for and verify.”
Not only was this first discovery important because it proved old distillery sites could be found, but it also was significant since it set the framework for Laracuente’s later discoveries and helped him solidify a process he could then refine. Often, he starts with local oral history and then looks for evidence to support it in the field. With every new discovery, he has to refine his process based on his previous work and the condition of the new site.
Bourbon Archaeology in the Field
“A lot of the earlier distilleries used gravity to help them, so they were all built on the side of the hill,” Laracuente said.
Archaeologists rarely look on slopes, he said, because of the sliding of the hill caused by gravity over time. But that’s exactly where these old farm distilleries are located, since they needed the flowing water for the mashing and distillation process, and they needed the bodies of water below to help transport the goods to market. They often are in places where development hasn’t destroyed them yet, thanks in part to their remote locations with steep grades and limited access.
“It wasn’t until about the third one that the pattern really started to form,” Laracuente explained.
With his team of volunteer archaeologists, he started the exploration and survey of the Jouett distillery, where the crew uncovered evidence—in the form of a garbage dump—that people had lived at the distillery site when it was in operation. Next, they moved to another nearby farm distillery called Epler, one of the hundreds of farm distilleries that once dotted the Kentucky countryside.
Laracuente then got a call from Buffalo Trace Distillery. When workers at the historic distillery were trying to shore up the foundation of a storage building, they found something under the floor.
The discovery has since been nicknamed “Bourbon Pompeii,” and it is one of the largest and best-preserved examples of 19th-century distilling operations in the world. The discovery yielded foundation elements from 1869, stone walls from 1873 and fermenting tanks from 1882, all of which were part of Col. E.H. Taylor’s modern distilling operation that had to be rebuilt twice due to fire and flood. Rather than fill in the ruins and continue with plans to build an event space, Buffalo Trace opted to call in Laracuente to guide its preservation and the creation of a visitors’ experience.
During the year he spent going to the site nearly every day, Laracuente learned several valuable lessons: how to tailor archaeological discoveries to the needs of the bourbon industry, what could be learned from people with different areas of expertise in these discoveries, and how to frame the discoveries in a way that tells a compelling story. Now, Buffalo Trace has plans to use Taylor’s preserved mash tubs to make whiskey mash, and visitors flock from all over the world to see the discovery.
These days, Laracuente is working on the archaeological survey of The T.J. Frazier distillery, which he says is a good example of a modernizing distillery that wasn’t quite modern yet—it didn’t yet use column stills, for example. This period in Kentucky distilling history was the stepping-stone between the farm distilleries of the frontier days and the modern distilleries we know now, which came into existence as consumer protection laws regulating the industry began to be passed.
“The T.J. Frazier distillery was more of an industrial distillery,” Laracuente explained. “It’s different than the other two farm distilleries. They started right at the end of the 1800s, and it burned down right at the start of the 1900s, and right as they rebuilt, Prohibition shut them down. They had really great river access on the Kentucky River. It was a classic case of wrong place, wrong time.”
Why Does Bourbon Archaeology Matter?
“The biggest misunderstanding is that we’re going to find full jugs of whiskey,” Laracuente said with a laugh. “These places are such that, if you didn’t have full maps and oral history, you wouldn’t know what you were looking at.”
Preserving, documenting, and proving or disproving oral history are noble pursuits, but bourbon archaeology is about much more than that. Kentucky’s distilling history is a part of every facet of Kentucky history. You can’t tell the story of Kentucky without distilling. What’s more, these discoveries illustrate what tied Kentucky to the rest of the world during the early days of the frontier and of early industrialization.
“Even though we are out in the middle of nowhere in Kentucky, the things we are finding are connected to a global story,” Laracuente said. “They were making things there that were being shipped to far-off places like New Orleans. The industry is right in the middle of economy, politics, religion and more, so you can trace these histories to all facets of human life.”
The distilling industry today continues to be connected, and understanding this history more fully creates a bridge between the past and the present. Bourbon could not have made it to its current elevated spot on the world stage without its history, and that history is not so different from what we might have expected had these discoveries not been made.