Boone County Distilling: The Kentucky Bourbon Story That Sat Silent for 105 Years

1. The history — from the largest distillery in Kentucky to 105 years of silence
2. The revival — Made by Ghosts
3. The spirits — Tanner’s Curse, Eighteen 33, and the Bear
4. The legend of Tanner’s Curse
5. Visiting Boone County Distilling

The History — From the Largest Distillery in Kentucky to 105 Years of Silence

The story of Boone County Distilling begins not in 2015 but in 1833, when Virginia brothers John and William Snyder purchased a steam mill in Petersburg, Kentucky — a small town on the Ohio River just outside Cincinnati — and converted it into a distillery. Petersburg sits at a bend in the Ohio where river traffic made whiskey distribution efficient and natural spring water made whiskey production excellent. The Snyders understood both advantages.

By 1860 the Petersburg Distillery was producing one million gallons of whiskey a year. By 1880 it had grown to become the largest distillery in the state of Kentucky — the flagship of a county that was booming with distillers, blacksmiths, lumbermen, and farmers who built community one glass at a time. The distillery was designated Registered Distillery #8 by the federal government — an official designation that Boone County Distilling honors today with the “8” in its logo.

William Snyder, who ran the distillery through its most productive decades, was a figure of local legend. He kept a pet bear. The bear became part of the distillery’s mythology in ways that outlasted both the man and the animal — the 500-gallon copper pot still at the heart of Boone County Distilling’s modern operation is named The Bear in his honor.

The closure in 1910 was not Prohibition — it was economics. River traffic to Petersburg had declined as railroads reshaped transportation patterns, and without the river the distillery’s distribution advantage disappeared. The site sat empty through Prohibition, through the Depression, through the bourbon bust of the 1970s and 1980s, and through the beginning of the craft spirits revival. For 105 years Boone County made no whiskey.

The Revival — Made by Ghosts

Jack Wells began developing the distillery in 2011. Production started in October 2015 — marking the first legal distillation in Boone County in more than a century. The distillery joined the Kentucky Distillers’ Association in December 2015 and was subsequently added to the official Kentucky Bourbon Trail, placing it alongside the state’s heritage and craft distillers as a destination worth the drive.

The location is Independence, Kentucky — a mile off I-75 in a 5,000 square foot facility on 2.5 acres, with a 500-gallon Vendome copper pot still, four fermenters, a small bottling line, and a barrel warehouse behind the building. Not the 1,000-acre Petersburg operation. But the same county, the same water, and the same conviction that Boone County bourbon deserves to exist again.

Every product name, every logo element, every detail of the brand connects back to the original Petersburg Distillery. The flagship bourbon is Eighteen 33 — named for the year John and William Snyder converted the steam mill into a distillery. The “8” in the logo honors Registered Distillery #8. The tagline “Made by Ghosts” acknowledges that the spirits being made today are the inheritors of a tradition that was interrupted but never fully extinguished. The bourbon cream recreates Lewis Loder’s White Hall Tavern tradition — Loder, a bookkeeper who ran the tavern at Tanner and Front Streets in 19th-century Petersburg, was famous for serving bourbon over ice cream to the distillery’s workers at the end of a hard day. Boone County Distilling named a spirit after that habit. In every detail, the ghosts are present.

The Spirits — Tanner’s Curse, Eighteen 33, and The Bear

The Legend of Tanner’s Curse

The white whiskey is named for a legend, and the legend deserves telling. John Tanner was a Baptist minister who settled Tanner’s Station — which later became Petersburg, Kentucky — in the late 1700s. He built a community in what was then genuinely wild country, on the Ohio River at a bend that would later make Petersburg the most productive whiskey shipping point in the state.

He also, unknowingly, built that community on top of a prehistoric Native American burial ground of the Fort Ancient people. This was a mistake he paid for in the currency of tragedy.

The legend holds that on a chilly October dawn, Tanner’s two eldest sons set out by canoe on a hunting trip down the Ohio River. They were ambushed and taken captive at a point in the river called Split Rock. The eldest son, Ezra, made a deal with the chief to fight a tomahawk duel to the death — winner takes freedom. After an hour of fighting, Ezra won. The Indians reneged on the deal and attacked immediately, killing both boys.

The story of those early settlers — who fought for their place in a raw, dangerous landscape and paid for it in ways that most Americans today cannot imagine — is what the white whiskey honors. “These early Americans fought for their place in history,” says the Boone County Distilling team, “and their influence runs as clear as the whiskey in this vessel.” The whiskey is clear. The history it carries is anything but.

Visiting Boone County Distilling

Boone County Distilling is an easy stop on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail for anyone driving I-75 through Northern Kentucky — about a mile off the interstate, between Cincinnati and Lexington. The one-hour tour at $8 per person covers the full history of the original Petersburg Distillery and the modern revival, takes visitors behind the scenes through the production facility, and ends with a tasting. TripAdvisor reviewers as recent as March 2026 call it one of the highlights of Boone County and note that the history section of the tour is the best part — which is high praise for a distillery whose history spans nearly two centuries.