Sixth Grade
Worksheets
Avery Island, Louisiana, Also Known As Bird City
Lying underneath the lush green plants of Avery Island, Louisiana, is a precious natural resource: a massive salt dome. Native Americans discovered it. They boiled the salty spring water they found there to get salt. They traded the salt with other native tribes to get other things they needed.
Avery Island sits about 140 miles west of New Orleans, Louisiana. It is surrounded on all sides by bayous, salt marsh, and swampland. Ancient salt deposits created the salt dome. There are five of these salt dome islands along the Louisiana Gulf coast. Avery Island was once a sugar plantation. At that time it was known as Petite Anse Island. Petite Anse means "Little Cove" in Cajun French.
A man from New Jersey named John Craig Marsh purchased the island in 1818. Marsh operated a sugar plantation in addition to mining the salt. Daniel D. Avery became a co-owner of the plantation in 1837, after he married John Marsh's daughter, Sarah. He became the sole owner in 1855. Daniel and Sarah's daughter, Mary, married Edmund McIlhenny just before the Civil War. After the war was over, McIlhenny founded his own company on the island and began manufacturing Tabasco brand pepper sauce. He received patents for his sauce processing formula, which is still used today.
