I'm writing this for the benefit of any BE participants who are scratching their heads about this E. H. Taylor guy. You've probably figured out that he's the Taylor in Old Taylor and that he once owned the distillery now known as Buffalo Trace, but the rest may be hazy.
Here's my capsule biography.
E. H. Taylor Jr. was a self-made man in the great 19th century American tradition. He was a Taylor alright, related to President Zachary Taylor, but he was from one of the poorer branches. Taylor's father was John Easton Taylor, who named his son Edmund Haynes after his much wealthier brother. Our Edmund, at 19, went to work for Uncle Edmund's bank in Frankfort. Later, to avoid confusion with his uncle (and perhaps in a deliberate effort to cover his true lineage), he added the Junior to his name.
As a young banker in Frankfort, Kentucky, Edmund naturally became interested in the whiskey-making business. Kentucky's distilleries did well during the Civil War and even better right after it. There was plenty of demand and not enough supply. Then as now, whiskey-making took a lot of sophisticated financing.
Typically, Taylor would put a group of investors together, kick in some of his own money, and get the rest through one or several of his banking connections. He would often sell out or reduce his personal interest as the enterprise became established and use that capital for the next project. That's why he was able to have a hand in so many distilleries. He was like Donald Trump in that although his personal stake was often quite small, he was always the "front."
By "sophisticated" I mean what we would today refer to as "leveraged to the hilt," which is how he eventually got into trouble with Stagg.
In later years he financed his sons in some distilleries and what eventually became Old Taylor started out as one of those.
The alternative to financing aged whiskey was compound whiskey, a product based on neutral spirits or un-aged whiskey that was flavored and colored artificially. Taylor's defense of "real" whiskey led to the Bottled in Bond and Pure Food and Drug Acts. Taylor was also personally active in politics as mayor of Frankfort and, later, a state senator.
Toward the end of his life he became renowned again, for raising and breeding prize Hereford cattle, introducing that industry to Kentucky. One of his famous bulls won three first prizes at the 1914 Blue Grass Fair at Lexington. He enjoyed entertaining at his lavish Frankfort estate, Thistleton.