Around 1881, T.J. Monarch, one of the whiskey baron brothers, established Cliff Falls, a small distillery, on the banks of the Green River in Birk City. Two years later, Russellville native John W. McCulloch, who was 23 at the time, came to Owensboro as a gauger for the Internal Revenue Service. Around 1888, McCulloch bought Cliff Falls, moved it to Owensboro and renamed it Green River Distilling.
By 1903, when the company was incorporated, it was already known as “The Whiskey Without A Headache.” A year later, Green River was producing 10,000 barrels of whiskey a year. In 1893, McCulloch won a medal for excellence for his bourbon at the Chicago Columbian Exposition. He took some of his whiskey to Europe and won a gold medal for quality at the Paris Exposition of 1900 and later the grand prize at the 1905 Exposition Universelle de Liege, Belgium. He also took the grand prize at the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland, Oregon; at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis; and the Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition in Norfolk, Virginia.
In 1916, sensing that the Prohibition movement was about to succeed, he sold the distillery to Montaigne Brothers of New York and Paris for $2.2 million – worth about $60 million today.
Two years later, the distillery burned and the owners collected about the same amount as they had paid for it. McCulloch died on Feb. 2, 1927, after suffering a stroke. After Prohibition ended, Medley Distilling Co. bought the property and reopened it in 1936 under that name
