Avery Island, Louisiana Totally Explained

Everything about Avery Island totally explained

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. A small human population also resides on the island.

Home of Tabasco 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 isn't unusual for employees' families to have worked for the company for several generations.

Geology

Avery Island is actually a huge dome of rock salt, three miles (5 km) long and two and a half miles wide. 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.
   At its highest point, the island is above mean sea level. 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.
   Avery Island was hit hard in September 2005 by Hurricane Rita. According to the Wall Street Journal, the family is spending $5 million on constructing a -high levee, pumps, and back-up generators to ensure that future hurricanes won't disrupt Tabasco sauce production.

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. (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. 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.

Trivia

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

References and notes

Further Information

Get more info on 'Avery Island'.

External Link Exchanges

Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:

<a href="http://avery_island__louisiana.totallyexplained.com">Avery Island, Louisiana Totally Explained</a>

Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned.