Abram Smith Bowman descended from a long line of Bowmans who had been distillers, soldiers, and farmers in Virginia and Kentucky since the eighteenth century. Colonel Abraham Bowman, who lived from 1749 to 1837, had commanded the 8th Virginia Regiment during the Revolutionary War and was Kentucky's first state militia colonel. The family had been making whiskey in some form for generations. When Prohibition was repealed by the 21st Amendment in December 1933, Abram Smith Bowman and his sons - Abram Smith Bowman Jr. and DeLong Bowman - moved to start a legal operation immediately. The family's Sunset Hills Farm in northern Fairfax County, about twenty miles west of Washington, provided water, grain, and space. The first whiskey came off the still in early 1934. Within months Virginia Gentleman was on the shelves of legal liquor stores across the Commonwealth.

From 1934 until the late 1950s, A. Smith Bowman was the only legal whiskey distillery in Virginia. The Commonwealth was a control state for liquor sales - the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Board ran every liquor store in the state - but the Bowmans had a license to manufacture. They produced two main brands: Virginia Gentleman bourbon, which became the flagship and is still sold today, and Fairfax County bourbon. Virginia Gentleman was aged on the Sunset Hills Farm in charred new American oak barrels, the same way Kentucky bourbon was aged, but with the distinction of being a Virginia product. The distillery sat on the farm property with the family's working cattle operation around it. From the air in the 1940s, the operation looked like a working agricultural complex with industrial buildings clustered near the stream that fed the still.

By the early 1960s the Bowmans were being approached about selling their Fairfax County farm. The post-war suburbanization of Northern Virginia had reached them - Dulles Airport had opened on land just to the west in November 1962, and developers were buying up large tracts. The visionary planner Robert E. Simon bought 6,750 acres of the Bowman farm in 1961 to build what became Reston, the influential planned community whose name came from Simon's initials, R.E.S. The distillery kept operating on a smaller piece of the original property for another generation. As Reston grew up around it - the town center, the lakes, the office parks - the distillery became a strange survivor, a working factory in the middle of a planned suburb. By the late 1980s it had been pushed off the original site. The family moved the operation to Fredericksburg, Virginia, about an hour south, where the distillery still operates today.

In 2003 the A. Smith Bowman distillery was bought by the Sazerac Company, the privately held New Orleans-based liquor giant that owns Buffalo Trace, Pappy Van Winkle, Eagle Rare, and dozens of other brands. The Sazerac purchase brought new investment to the Fredericksburg facility, which now operates as a craft distillery within the Sazerac portfolio. Production includes the original Virginia Gentleman bourbon, several premium small-batch labels, the Deep Run vodka, a gin called Sunset Hills after the original farm, and a line of bourbons named for the historical Bowman family - including the Abraham Bowman bourbon honoring the Revolutionary War colonel. Bowman bourbons have won awards at international spirits competitions in the past decade. The original distillery buildings on the Reston property, however, were sold for development. A 2007 rezoning approved condominiums on the site - eight new units plus three within the historic structure, replacing an earlier plan to convert the buildings to a Greater Reston Arts Center.

The original A. Smith Bowman distillery site sits at 38.957 N, 77.351 W, in the middle of what is now Reston, Virginia - inside the loop formed by Sunset Hills Road and the modern office park development around the Reston town center. From the air the original buildings, where they survive, are difficult to pick out from the surrounding commercial architecture. The land that was 7,200 acres of farm in 1933 is now the densest planned community in Fairfax County, home to about 65,000 people. The Bowman family's whiskey moved to Fredericksburg. Their farm became Robert Simon's experiment in mixing residential, commercial, and recreational uses, an experiment that influenced planned-community design across the country. Virginia Gentleman is still on Virginia shelves. The bottle still carries the silhouette of an eighteenth-century gentleman in profile - the same image the Bowmans put on their first 1934 label.