page_title: Avery Island, Louisiana
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Avery Island, Louisiana / History
caption_attribution_description: " Salt mining, Avery Island, Louisiana".
context_page_description: Avery Island is a salt dome best known as the source of Tabasco sauce. Located in Iberia Parish, Louisiana, United States, it is approximately three miles inland from Vermilion Bay, which in turn opens onto the Gulf of Mexico. A small human population lives on the island. The island is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
context_section_description: The island was named after the Avery family, who settled there in the 1830s, but long before that, Native Americans had found that Avery Island's verdant flora covered a precious natural resource—a massive salt dome. There, Native Americans boiled the Island's briny spring water to extract salt, which they traded to other tribes as far away as central Texas, Arkansas, and Ohio.
  According to records maintained prior to 1999 in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Petite Anse Island, renamed Avery Island in the late 19th century, was purchased by John Craig Marsh of New Jersey in 1818. Marsh operated a sugar plantation on the island's fertile soil. His daughter, Sarah Craig Marsh, married Daniel Dudley Avery in 1837, thus uniting the Marsh and Avery families. Daniel Dudley Avery hailed from Baton Rouge, and was a jurist. In 1849, Daniel became co-owner of his in-law's sugar plantation, and in 1855 he became sole owner.
  During the American Civil War, a mine of pure rock salt was founded on Avery Island in May 1861, which subsequently produced more than 22 million pounds (10,000 metric tons) of salt for the Confederacy. According to the historian John D. Winters in his The Civil War in Louisiana (1963), the rock salt mine had been well-protected, until Union General Nathaniel P. Banks began a push up Bayou Teche. After an all-night march, Union Colonel W.K. Kimball, in Winters' words, "advanced to the beautiful little island and, without opposition, burned eighteen buildings, smashed the steam engines and mining equipment, scattered six hundred barrels of salt awaiting shipping, and brought away a ton of gunpowder left behind by [Confederate General] Taylor's men."
  Before the Civil War, Edmund McIlhenny joined the Avery family, by marrying Mary Eliza Avery, daughter of Daniel Dudley Avery and Sarah Marsh Avery.
  In 1868, McIlhenny founded McIlhenny Company, and began manufacturing Tabasco brand pepper sauce. In 1870, he received letters patent for his sauce processing formula. That same basic process is still used today.
  In 1938, E.A. McIlhenny established a nutria farm on Avery Island, Louisiana, within shouting distance of the factory where the company that bears his family name makes Tabasco sauce. According to company history, McIlhenny bought his stock of nutrias from a farm in New Orleans, so he was not the first to introduce the creature, a native of southern Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, to North America. That dubious honor belongs to another. What is certain, though, is that McIlhenny, for reasons unknown, released an unknown but probably large number of nutrias into the wild from the confines of Avery Island, and from there they fanned out and proliferated.
  Avery Island was hit hard in September 2005 by Hurricane Rita. According to The New York Times, the family spent $5 million on constructing a 17-foot (5.2 m)-high levee, pumps, and back-up generators to ensure that future hurricanes will not disrupt Tabasco sauce production.
caption: Salt mining, Avery Island, Louisiana
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