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'Avery Island' is a salt dome located in Iberia Parish, Louisiana, United States, about three miles (5 km) inland from Vermilion Bay, which in turn opens onto the Gulf of Mexico.
Avery Island is famous as the home of Tabasco sauce, which has been manufactured on the island by McIlhenny Company since 1868. Avery Island is also home to Jungle Gardens and a well-known bird sanctuary called Bird City, where each spring thousands of snowy white egrets and other migratory water birds return to nest.

Contents

Home of Tabasco™ Sauce

Geology

History

Geography

Salt mine

Bird sanctuary

Exotic plants

References and notes

See also

Home of Tabasco™ Sauce

In every way Avery Island has been and continues to be the home of Tabasco™ sauce. Some of the peppers are grown there, and the peppers that are grown elsewhere are from seeds grown on the island. The salt used in the sauce is mined there. Many of the factory and field workers dwell in cottages there. And the McIlhenny family, creators of the hot sauce, still lives there. Many workers grew up on Avery Island, with one or both parents working in the fields or the factory. Offspring of today's workers often choose to stay and work there, too.http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=861201 NPR Morning Edition, November 29, 2002

Geology

Avery Island is actually a huge dome of rock salt, three miles long and two and a half miles wide.http://whatscookingamerica.net/History/Tabasco.htm It was created by the upwelling of ancient evaporite (salt) deposits that exist beneath the Mississippi River Delta region. These upwellings are known as "salt domes." Avery island is one of five salt dome islands that rise above the flat Louisiana Gulf coast.http://www.tabasco.com/tabasco_history/avery_island.cfm
At its highest point, the island is 163 feet above mean sea level. It covers about 2,200 acres (9 km²) and is about 2.5 miles (4 km) across at its widest point.

History

Long before its namesake Avery family settled there in the 1830s, American Indians discovered that Avery Island’s verdant flora covered a precious natural resource—a massive salt dome. There the Indians 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 in the Manuscripts Department, Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,^[1] Petite Anse Island, renamed Avery Island in the late 1860s, was purchased by John Craig Marsh of New Jersey in about 1818. Besides mining salt, Marsh operated a sugar plantation on the island's fertile soil. A daughter, Sarah Craig Marsh, married Daniel Dudley Avery in 1837, thus uniting the Marsh family and the Avery families by marriage. Daniel Avery was from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and was a lawyer, state senator, judge, and sugar planter. In 1849, Daniel Avery (Sarah's husband) became co-owner of the Petite Anse Island sugar plantation and salt mines, and in 1855 became sole owner.
After the Civil War, the Avery and McIlhenny families were joined by the marriage of Mary Eliza Avery, a daughter of Daniel Dudley and Sarah Marsh Avery, to Edmund McIlhenny, who in 1868 founded the McIlhenny Company and began making pepper sauce. In 1870, Edmund McIlhenny received letters patent for his unique formula for processing peppers into a fiery red sauce. That same process is still in use today.^[2]
Avery Island was hit hard by tropical storms in 2005, especially Hurricane Rita.Shevory, Kristina. "The Fiery Family: The McIlhennys Make Tabasco Come What May," ''Wall Street Journal,'' March 31, 2007, pp. B1 and B4. According to the ''Wall Street Journal,'' the family plans to spend $5 million on constructing a 17-foot levee and a back-up generator.

Geography

It is surrounded on all sides by bayous (narrow, slow-moving muddy rivers), salt marsh, and swampland; it sits about 140 miles (225 km) west of New Orleans. The island was formerly known as ''Petite Anse Island Plantation''.^[1] (''Petite Anse'' means "Little Cove" in Cajun French.) Access to the island is via toll road.

Salt mine

The island is also the site of one of the world's largest salt mines, currently operated by the Cargill corporation. Salt extraction has occurred on the island for at least several hundred years, the first benefactors of its salt deposit being American Indians who boiled briny spring water to extract the mineral. In 1862, during the Civil War, the Avery family discovered extremely pure solid rock salt only a short depth below the island's surface. Because of a Union blockade, the South had no reliable source for this valuable commodity. As a result, the Averys quickly mined the deposit in order to supply much of the lower South with salt.
In November 1862, two Union gunboats and a transport ship attacked the island in an attempt to capture the salt works, but they were repelled by Confederate forces under General Richard Taylor. The mines were finally captured by Union Army forces in 1863.

Bird sanctuary

Under the Avery/McIlhenny family's management, Avery Island has remained a natural paradise, inhabited by exotic plant and animal species from throughout the world.
E.A. McIlhenny, or "Mr. Ned" as he was affectionately known, founded this bird colony—later called Bird City—in 1892 after plume hunters had slaughtered egrets by the thousands to provide feathers for fashionable ladies' hats. Mr. Ned gathered up eight young egrets, raised them in captivity on the Island, and released them in the fall to migrate across the Gulf of Mexico. The following spring the birds returned to the Island with others of their species, a migration that continues today.

Exotic plants

Mr. Ned also prized rare plants, and he enhanced the Island's natural landscape with numerous varieties of azaleas, Japanese camellias, Egyptian papyrus and other botanical treasures. When oil was discovered on the Island in 1942, he saw to it that production crews bypassed live oak trees, buried pipelines (or painted them green) and took whatever additional steps were necessary to preserve the Island's pristine beauty as much as possible and ensure its continued role as a wildlife refuge.
Today the famed Jungle Gardens with its Bird City still hosts visitors from all over the world. E.A. McIlhenny's many drawings and writings about the plant and animal life of Avery Island attract many researchers to the significant McIlhenny Collection at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

References and notes

1. http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/htm/03289.html
2. http://www.tabasco.com/tabasco_history/mcilhenny.cfm
3. http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/htm/03289.html

See also

★ Jungle Gardens

★ Tabasco sauce