Avery Island, Louisiana

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. A small human population also resides on the island.

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 prior to 1999 in the Southern Historical Collection at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, [ [http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/a/Avery_Family_of_Louisiana.html Inventory of the Avery Family of Louisiana, 1796-1951 ] ] Petite Anse Island, renamed Avery Island in the late 19th century, was purchased by John Craig Marsh of New Jersey in 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 and Avery families. Daniel Dudley Avery hailed from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and was a jurist. In 1849, Daniel became co-owner of his inlaw's sugar plantation and salt mines, and in 1855 he became sole owner.

Just prior to the Civil War, Edmund McIlhenny joined the Avery family by wedding 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. [ [http://www.tabasco.com/tabasco_history/mcilhenny.cfm History of McIlhenny Company and Tabasco sauce ] ]

Avery Island was hit hard in September 2005 by 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 is spending $5 million on constructing a convert|17|ft|m|sing=on-high levee, pumps, and back-up generators to ensure that future hurricanes will not disrupt Tabasco sauce production.

alt 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.

Hot sauce

Avery Island is known as the home of Tabasco brand pepper sauce, which has been manufactured on the Island by McIlhenny Company since 1868. Some of the peppers used in Tabasco sauce production are grown on the Island, and those grown elsewhere derive from seed stock created on the Island. Furthermore, salt used in Tabasco sauce production is mined on the Island.

Some members of the McIlhenny family still reside on the Island with their Avery cousins, and many McIlhenny Company employees also live there in worker cottages, with one or both wage earners working in the fields, the factory, or the company's business office. It is not unusual for employees' families to have worked for the company for several generations.http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=861201 NPR Morning Edition, November 29, 2002]

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.
Edward Avery McIlhenny, or "Mr. Ned" as he was affectionately known, founded this bird colony—later called Bird City—around 1895 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.

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 a sugar plantation formerly known as "Petite Anse Island". [ [http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/a/Avery_Family_of_Louisiana.html Inventory of the Avery Family of Louisiana, 1796-1951 ] ] ("Petite Anse" means "Little Cove" in Cajun French.) Access to the island is via toll road.

Geology

Avery Island is actually a huge dome of rock salt, three miles (5 km) long and two and a half miles wide. [http://whatscookingamerica.net/History/Tabasco.htm Tabasco, History of Tabasco Pepper Sauce ] ] 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 History of Avery Island where Hot and Legendary TABASCO Sauce is Made! ] ]

At its highest point, the island is convert|163|ft|m 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.

Culture

On Avery Island, the name of a Neutral Milk Hotel album, is named after this location.

References and notes

ee also

*Jungle Gardens
*Tabasco sauce

External links

* [http://www.tabasco.com/tabasco_history/avery_island.cfm www.TABASCO.com]
* [http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/a/Avery_Family_of_Louisiana.html Inventory of the Avery Family of Louisiana, 1796-1951] , in the Southern Historical Collection, UNC-Chapel Hill.