Editor’s Note: I’m continuing with what I did last week for the podcast edition of Just One Good Idea. I tell you the story behind the story … how I stumbled up it and the juicy bits of details that made the story fun to research and read.
Scientists say it’s hard to estimate the actual number that exists because of limited global surveys and the fact that many remain underground, undiscovered or undocumented, particularly in remote or offshore regions.
What is it scientist struggle to find?
The answer is salt domes. Yes, Dear Reader those rather large mounds (and sometimes mountains) of salt that everyone can’t stop talking about … well not really. But they do matter to this story an awful lot.
Exactly what are salt domes? They are geological formations that take place over millions of years in sedimentary basins where ancient seas or lakes evaporated, leaving behind thick salt deposits.
Under pressure from the weight of overlying sediments such as sandstone or shale, the salt begins to flow upward, piercing through the denser rock layers. This creates a dome-shaped structure, often several miles wide and thousands of feet tall.
Scientists say it’s hard to estimate the actual number that exists because of limited global surveys and the fact that many remain underground, undiscovered or undocumented, particularly in remote or offshore regions.
But here’s what we do know. Salt domes exist in Northwest Europe, particularly in Germany; in the Middle East along the Iraq-Iran-Arabian Peninsula region; and in the Barents Sea (Norway), the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and parts of Africa.
You’ll also find them in the Gulf of Mexico region, particularly Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. In fact this is one of the most studied areas for salt domes. Over 600 salt domes have been identified in this region alone, with 263 known or suspected.
Some are located on islands. The domes located in the Iberia Parish, Louisiana, are some of the largest.
Native Americans first discovered the salt dome thousands of years ago, extracting the salt by boiling it in briny spring water. By 1779, French explorers noted the "so-called isle" near Bayou Petite Anse (meaning "Little Cove" in Cajun French), and named it Île Petite Anse.
John Craig Marsh knew the potential Île Petite Anse offered him for business, especially because of those salt domes. So he purchased the island in 1818 for $8,000 (based on today’s dollar rate that amount would be equal to $201,448).
At the time, the island was part of Spanish Louisiana, transitioning to American control after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. The purchase marked the beginning of the Marsh family’s significant influence on the island’s development or more precisely … mining the salt.
John Craig Marsh married Eliza Ann Baldwin, and they had one daughter, Sarah Craig Marsh, born in 1818 the year he purchased the island.
Now while the Marsh family lived in New York, they ran their salt business on the island through different agents and reps in Louisiana. And most times when you are running a business, you’re going to need some legal help.
Who better than represent you than one of Louisiana’s most prominent lawyers than Daniel Dudley Avery. Daniel was not only a Yale educated lawyer but a judge and was twice elected to the state legislature.
And with Daniel aiding John Marsh with his salt business in Louisiana, it’s also more than likely that’s how Daniel met John’s daughter Sarah, the heiress to the island.
Sarah Craig Marsh and Daniel Dudley Avery married in 1837, though the exact day and location are not well-documented in available sources. But we do know they resettled to Louisiana to focus on the salt extraction business that her father had started.
Since they were sole purveyors of mining the salt domes on the island, it was just a matter of time before the name changed from Île Petite Anse to Avery Island.
An Interruption of the War Kind
While Sarah and Daniel stayed busying growing the business, they were also growing a family of their own. Daniel Dudley Avery and Sarah Craig Marsh had a total of five children:
· Mary Eliza Avery (1838–1915).
· Sarah Marsh Avery (1840–1918).
· Dudley Avery (1842–1917).
· John Marsh Avery (1844–1891).
· Margaret Henshaw Avery (1848–1925).
You’d expect that all of their children would stay involved in the family business and most did except Sarah who after marrying Paul Leeds moved away from Avery Island. The same happened with Margaret, who after marrying William Preston Johnston, focused more on social circles outside the island’s commercial activities.
But it was Dudley Avery and Mary, who stayed involved with the family’s business … one that was about to undergo a change that would turn their company into icon and creating one of the most popular brands of sauces.
That turn around happened because of one man - Edmund McIlhenny. His father was the mayor of Hagerstown. And some records indicate they he might owned a tavern. In 1841, after the death of his father and at the age of 26, Edmund moved to New Orleans.
Edmund began his career in banking, likely starting as a clerk or junior officer in a financial institution. Sometime in 1840, he moved to New Orleans, which at the time was growing a major economic hub. His skills in finance and business acumen likely earned him a reputation, allowing him to quickly climb the ranks so to speak.
It also allowed him to acquire a small fortune of his own. That’s because New Orleans was a center for cotton, sugar, and international trade, and bankers often profited by financing plantations, merchants, and shipping ventures.
Edmund might also have invested personal funds or leveraged loans to acquire stakes in profitable enterprises, a common practice for ambitious bankers back then.
With money and a rising business reputation, you start mingling with people of higher social classes. That’s most likely how Edmund met Mary Eliza Avery. In 1859 the two married in what would have been considered a substantial social event of the year.
However just two years after their marriage, the world they knew turned upside down. That turn around happened at 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, when Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina's Charleston Harbor. Less than 34 hours later, Union forces surrendered.
That Dear Reader was the beginning of the Civil War.
Avery Island’s strategic salt deposits, vital for both civilian and military use, made it a perfect military target. As the Union Army advanced toward the island, Edmund McIlhenny with his wife, his in-laws, the rest of the Avery family, fled to Brenham, Texas, staying at the home of a McIlhenny cousin, in the spring of 1863.
Edmund took up work with the military where he served as a civilian employee of the Confederate army, first as a clerk in a commissary office, then as a financial agent for the paymaster.
The families stayed in Texas only returning to Avery Island in late 1865, after the war finally ended. But when they returned back home, they found the plantation torn apart by an 1863 Union raid, with their fields destroyed.
It wasn’t just their family that suffered from the after affects of the War. The South's economic collapse after its defeat ruined many families who had to start all over again.
The Averie’s and Edmund McIlhenny would have to do the same.
A Banker with Hot Taste Buds
As they settled in back home on their plantation, Edmund took up the hobby of gardening. Actually it wasn’t really his hobby. With the plantation’s fields largely unproductive, Edmund began cultivating a small kitchen garden to feed the families.
He grew a variety of fruits and vegetables, including tomatoes, okra, beans, and sweet potatoes. He also grew of all things - Capsicum frutescens peppers, which were native to Mexico. It’s said that he got the seeds for the peppers from a returning soldier who had been in Mexico, possibly around the late 1840s or early 1850s before the war started.
The peppers’ resilience and the island’s warm, humid conditions—mirroring their native habitat—allowed them to thrive. The plants, growing up to three feet tall, produced clusters of small, tapered pods that transitioned from pale yellow green to vibrant red. This process took about 80-90 days from germination.
By 1868, Edmund McIlhenny’s interest in the peppers evolved beyond mere cultivation. The blandness of Reconstruction-era Southern cuisine, coupled with his own taste for bold flavors, inspired him to experiment with the peppers.
One experiment that turned out highly successful was when he mashed the ripe red pods with salt, which of course was abundant on Avery Island and aged the mixture (in wooden barrels) possibly for a month, before blending it with vinegar.
The peppers’ heat (30,000-50,000 Scoville units) and smoky flavor gave his new concoction the perfect taste - with just the right amount of “hotness.”
Having produced the ideal batch of his hot sauce, Edmund bottled his first commercial batch that year, selling it in small cologne bottles with a cork-top and diamond logo labels, marking the birth of the McIlhenny Company.
Initially he preferred to call his sauce, Petite Anse Sauce (original name of Avery Island) but family members disagreed. So then he choose to call it Tabasco - the American Indian word meaning "land where soil is hot and humid.”
At first Edmund sold the product mainly along the Gulf Coast in places like New Orleans, New Iberia, Louisiana, and Galveston. Yet it didn’t take long for Edmund McIlhenny’s sauce to gain in popularity. By 1869, he had sold 658 bottles for $1 each. By 1870, he patented the recipe and began distributing it widely.
Sometime in 1870, Edmund passed some of the sauce on to General Hazzard, the former federal administrator for the region, whose distant cousin E.C. Hazzard in New York City, was at the time the largest wholesale grocer in the United States.
That connection helped Edmund’s Tabasco Sauce be distributed through E.C. Hazzards wholesale business. Described as a sauce from a new type of chili pepper and based on the number of new purchase orders that followed, his sauce was now in larger markets such as New York City, Philadelphia, and Boston.
They even sent the sauce to London, where demand skyrocketed. In 1872, McIlhenny established a London office to meet the heavy demands of the European market for Tabasco sauce.
A Family Business We Will Be
By 1879, Edmund’s son Edward stepped in to run the business, which operated under the name E. McIlhenny & Sons. Edward renamed the firm McIlhenny Company and began to expand, modernize, and standardized sauce production.
He also experimented with new ways of promoting the world-famous product, such as advertising on radio and in newspapers.
Edmund McIlhenny’s grandson Walter Stauffer McIlhenny also joined in on the family business. He was a decorated marine during World War II and remembered the bland rations that he and his fellow soldiers had lived on. So he began marketing the sauce directly to the military.
He did that in 1966 by publishing The Charlie Ration Cookbook; or, No Food Is Too Good for the Man Up Front, a pocket-sized guidebook for soldiers wanting to spice up their rations that came with a two-ounce bottle of Tabasco sauce in a camouflaged waterproof canister.
Beginning in 1990 a one-eighth-ounce bottle of Tabasco sauce was packaged with every third U.S. military MRE (Meal, Ready-to-Eat). “Your product has always been in demand by troops in the field,” wrote General Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of the coalition forces in the Persian Gulf War (1990–91), in a 1991 letter to McIlhenny Company.
Today Tabasco sauce remains a staple condiment around the world, labeled in more than 35 languages and dialects. It is especially popular in Japan, which is the largest market for the sauce after the United States.
The company sells approximately 700,000 bottles of hot sauce every day, which translates to about 255 million bottles per year. The company also reported about $200 million in revenue from sales of the sauce.
A Billion Dollar Sauce Legacy
The McIlhenny Company is currently valued between $2 and $3 billion. And it is still family owned and operated.
Edmund McIlhenny died in 1890, and apparently did not consider his creation of Tabasco sauce to have been a particularly notable accomplishment. He made no mention of Tabasco sauce in an autobiographical sketch composed toward the end of his life, nor was it mentioned in his obituaries.
Know one quite knows why he never saw the creation of his sauce as a major endeavor. At least I couldn’t find any documents or articles that stated why he chose to not to talk about his famous sauce.
Regardless, his successors, sons John Avery McIlhenny and Edward Avery McIlhenny, realized that their father had created a foundation on which they could build a larger family business, and they shortly expanded and modernized the manufacturing process.
By the turn of the twentieth century, McIlhenny's invention could be found on tables worldwide, and it has since become a culinary favorite. Today each carton of Tabasco sauce bears a facsimile of McIlhenny's signature.
Edmund’s vision was simple yet revolutionary: to craft a fiery sauce that would awaken the senses. By 1868, he perfected a recipe using just three ingredients—tabasco peppers, salt, and vinegar—aging the mash in oak barrels to create a pungent, vibrant condiment.
Edmund McIlhenny’s grit and ingenuity laid the foundation for an enduring legacy and is a testament to his unwavering resolve to turn adversity into a fiery triumph that continues to inspire bold dreamers.
Amazing Quotes by Amazing People
"Tabasco sauce is to bachelor cooking what forgiveness is to sin." - P.J. O'Rourke
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