Avery Island Oaks

This is an image of oaks trees in Avery Island, LA. taken in the fall. This is also available in black & white. Feel free to email with... more

by Scott Pellegrin

Title

Avery Island Oaks

Artist

Scott Pellegrin

Medium

Photograph

Description

This is an image of oaks trees in Avery Island, LA. taken in the fall. This is also available in black & white. Feel free to email with questions/comments. Thank you for looking.

Avery Island (historically French: le Petite Anse) is a salt dome best known as the source of Tabasco sauce. Located in Iberia Parish, Louisiana, United States, it is about three miles (5 km) inland from Vermilion Bay, which in turn opens onto the Gulf of Mexico. A small human population lives on the island.

The island was named after the Avery family, who settled there in the 1830s, but long before that, American Indians had found 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.

During the American Civil War, a mine of pure rock salt was founded on Avery Island in May 1862, which subsequently produced more than 22 million pounds (10,000 metric tons) of salt for the Confederacy. According to the historian John D. Winters in his The Civil War in Louisiana (1963), the rock salt mine had been well-protected until Union General Nathaniel P. Banks began a push up Bayou Teche. After an all-night march, Union Colonel W.K. Kimball, in Winters' words, "advanced to the beautiful little island and, without opposition, burned eighteen buildings, smashed the steam engines and mining equipment, scattered six hundred barrels of salt awaiting shipping, and brought away a ton of gunpowder left behind by [Confederate General] Taylor's men.

Uploaded

November 15th, 2009