On Avery Island, the Tabasco Factory and a Century-Old Egret Sanctuary Share the Same Hill of Salt

There are bottles of Tabasco on diner counters in Shreveport, in soldiers' rations and on restaurant tables in countries most Louisianans will never visit. Every one of them traces back to a low hill rising out of the marsh in Iberia Parish, where the McIlhenny family has been making pepper sauce for more than 150 years and where visitors can still walk through the place it is made.

Avery Island sits a few miles inland from Vermilion Bay, and it is an island mostly in the Louisiana sense, a mound of high ground surrounded by bayou and wetland. Underneath it is a salt dome, and above it are live oaks, greenhouses and a red brick factory. According to the company's own history, Edmund McIlhenny founded McIlhenny Company there in 1868 and grew his first commercial pepper crop that year. In 1869 he sent out 658 bottles of sauce, priced at a dollar apiece wholesale, to grocers along the Gulf Coast, particularly in New Orleans. He received a patent in 1870, and by the late 1870s the sauce was selling across the country and in Europe. New Orleans businessman Maunsel White was making a sauce from tabasco peppers by about 1850, and some writers have credited him as McIlhenny's inspiration, a claim the company's historian, writing for 64 Parishes, says no contemporary evidence supports.

The first bottles were small cologne-style bottles with sprinkler tops, corked and sealed in green wax, because the sauce was meant to be shaken a few drops at a time rather than poured. The wax is gone, but the shape is still recognizable on any grocery shelf. The basic recipe has not changed much either. The company says it still uses peppers, salt and vinegar, with the pepper mash now aged for up to three years in white oak barrels and finished with distilled vinegar. Today the sauce is labeled in 36 languages and dialects and sold in more than 195 countries and territories, and the company remains family-owned and run from the same island.

The best way to understand all of that is to go. The Avery Island visitor experience is a self-guided walk through the history and the working plant, open daily from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. It starts at the Tabasco museum, which covers the island and the McIlhenny family, then moves through a pepper greenhouse where plants are grown from seedlings. In the barrel warehouse, rows of white oak barrels hold the aging mash. Visitors can watch the blending room, where peppers, salt and vinegar come together, and the bottling line, where the finished sauce heads out to the rest of the world. There is a salt mine exhibit that gives a sense of what lies under the island, a country store with samples, and a restaurant named Restaurant 1868 for lunch afterward.

Admission is $15.50 for adults, $13.95 for seniors and veterans and $12.50 for children, with children 4 and under free. Reservations are recommended, cash is not accepted, and the site closes on several holidays, including Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

The ticket also covers the island's other landmark. Jungle Gardens is the work of Edward Avery McIlhenny, known as Ned, the son of the sauce's creator. Born on the island in 1872, he was an Arctic explorer and naturalist who took over McIlhenny Company in 1898 and ran it until his death 51 years later. Around 1895, when snowy egrets were being hunted for the plumes on women's hats, he started a private sanctuary on the island to protect them. He called it Bird City.

In the 1920s Ned McIlhenny began turning his estate into a garden, planting specimens from around the world, and he opened Jungle Gardens to the public in 1935. It now covers more than 170 acres and keeps its own hours, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The azaleas and camellias he brought to the island are still part of the scenery, and Bird City is still there. Egrets still nest there each year, more than a century after he began protecting them.

The pepper mash going into those barrels this fall will not reach a bottle for up to three years. The barrels sit a short drive from the rookery Ned McIlhenny started as a young man, on the same salt dome in the marsh near New Iberia.

Photo: Jan Kronsell / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.