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Preserving History: Authentic Objects Across Eras
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Tabasco comes from Avery Island, Louisiana, which is not really an island at all. It is a salt dome rising 163 feet out of the marshes of Iberia Parish, and in May 1862 workmen digging out brine hit solid rock salt 16 feet down, opening the first rock salt mine of its kind in North America. The Union Army came for that salt in 1863. The family who owned the island went on to bottle a pepper sauce in unused cologne bottles, help save the snowy egret, get blamed for the nutria, and send Tabasco to soldiers in Vietnam wrapped in a cookbook. This sticker puts the flavor of that whole story into one circle: a Tabasco bottle tipping its sauce over a Louisiana crawfish, set in the middle of a blue "leaded glass" window made of Tabasco's own diamond labels.
A round Tabasco Brand Pepper Sauce sticker, new old stock, never applied and still on its square cream paper backing. The back of the backing is plain, with the die-cut circle faintly showing. It is photographed beside a U.S. quarter so you can judge the size for yourself.
The design is built like a church window. A dark outer ring frames an orange-red border set with small gold diamonds and green rondels. Inside, deep blue panes form a diamond lattice, and each white pane is a miniature Tabasco label reading "McIlhenny Co., Avery Island, La., Tabasco Brand Pepper Sauce," several of them topped with "Made in U.S.A." The large center diamond carries the full label, "Made in U.S.A. / McIlhenny Co. / Tabasco® / Pepper Sauce," with a Tabasco bottle tilted across it, pouring red sauce onto an orange crawfish with its claws spread wide.
The diamond is the same label shape that sits on every bottle of Tabasco, and the crawfish is Louisiana's official state crustacean, named in 1983. Together they make a small love letter to south Louisiana cooking.
Avery Island covers about 2,200 acres and measures roughly 2.5 miles across at its widest, one of five salt dome islands that rise above the flat Gulf coast of Louisiana. Beneath it lies a dome of rock salt about three miles long and two and a half miles wide. It was once called Petite Anse Island, "little cove," and took its present name from Daniel Dudley Avery, who married into the Marsh family, the island's owners, in 1837.
When salt became a strategic prize in the Civil War, the island's brine springs were worked for the Confederacy. On May 4, 1862, workmen enlarging those springs struck solid salt at 16 feet, and mining began. Confederate troops under General Richard Taylor defended the works, which supplied salt to several states of the lower South. A Union attack by water with two gunboats and a transport failed in November 1862; Federal troops finally took the island by land and destroyed the salt works on April 17, 1863. Avery Island has been a salt-mining island since 1862, and oil was discovered there in 1942.
Founder Edmund McIlhenny was born in Hagerstown, Maryland, in 1815, moved to New Orleans around 1840 and made his living in banking, eventually owning his own bank. On June 30, 1859, he married Mary Eliza Avery, and when the war reached south Louisiana he fled with the Avery family to Texas, where he worked as a civilian employee of the Confederate army. Back on the island, he grew his first commercial pepper crop in 1868 and sold the first bottles the following year, using unused cologne bottles from a New Orleans glass supplier. In 1870 he obtained letters patent for the sauce, sold in cork-topped two-ounce bottles. He died on November 25, 1890.
Pickers still hold ripe peppers up to le petit bâton rouge, a little red stick, to check the color before harvest. The peppers are ground into mash the day they are picked, packed with salt into white oak barrels that once held whiskey, and aged for up to three years before being finished with vinegar.
The business stayed in the family. Edmund's eldest son, John Avery McIlhenny, expanded and modernized it, then resigned to ride with Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders. His brother Edward Avery McIlhenny, a self-taught naturalist fresh from the Arctic, ran it from 1898 until his death in 1949, renamed it McIlhenny Company, standardized production, and in 1927 replaced the cork-topped bottles with the screw-top bottle everyone knows. Walter S. McIlhenny, a World War II Marine, succeeded his uncle and was president from 1949 until 1985. In June 2019 a McIlhenny cousin, Harold Osborn, became president and CEO.
Where the peppers came from is Tabasco's great argument. Company tradition says Edmund McIlhenny created the sauce between 1866 and 1868, and one popular telling has a passing Confederate soldier handing him the seeds of a Mexican pepper. A rival account, resting on court testimony given in 1922, says a New Orleans planter gave McIlhenny pepper pods and a recipe. Maunsel White was that planter, and he was no invention: a letter dated January 26, 1850 credits him with introducing "Tobasco red pepper" to the southern United States, nearly two decades before McIlhenny's first crop, and White was advertising a pepper sauce of his own in 1859.
The family naturalist left legends of his own. Edward Avery McIlhenny had sailed as ornithologist on Frederick Cook's 1894 Arctic expedition, whose ship wrecked off Greenland. Around 1895, with plume hunters killing off Louisiana's egrets, he founded a bird colony on the island that became Bird City, a refuge credited with helping save the snowy egret from extinction. He is also the man Louisiana lore loves to blame for the nutria, the big invasive rodent of the coastal marsh. The rumor outgrew the record: he was neither the first to farm nutria in the area nor the first to release them, though he did free about 20 of them on June 1, 1940, and let the rest go in 1945.
The war story is no legend at all. In 1966, with letters arriving from GIs in Vietnam asking for recipes to make C-rations taste like something, Brigadier General Walter S. McIlhenny issued The Charlie Ration Cookbook, subtitled "No Food Is Too Good for the Man Up Front." Illustrated by cartoonist Fred Rhoads, it was wrapped around two-ounce bottles of Tabasco with P-38 can openers in a waterproof canister. McIlhenny is credited with putting Tabasco into C-rations and, later, MREs.
Avery Island lies in Iberia Parish, whose seat, New Iberia, was founded in the spring of 1779 when some 500 Malagueño colonists from Spain, led by Lieutenant Colonel Francisco Bouligny, came up Bayou Teche and settled around Spanish Lake. They named it Nueva Iberia in honor of the Iberian Peninsula. New Iberia is also the birthplace of Trappey's Hot Sauce, sugar cane is still its principal crop with a festival all its own, and novelist James Lee Burke set the home of his detective Dave Robicheaux there.
The crawfish on this sticker belongs to the same country. Louisiana named the crawfish its official state crustacean in 1983, the first state to do so, and in 1959 the Louisiana Legislature declared Breaux Bridge the "Crawfish Capital of the World." The Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival began the next year and still fills Parc Hardy each May with crawfish races, a cook-off, Cajun and zydeco music and a parade for the Crawfish Queen.
A sauce first sold in cologne bottles now comes off the line at as many as 720,000 two-ounce bottles a day, sold in more than 195 countries and territories and labeled in 36 languages and dialects. It has flown on Skylab and the International Space Station and appeared on the Space Shuttle menu. It rides in military rations. In 2009 the company received a royal warrant as supplier of Tabasco to Queen Elizabeth II. After Hurricane Rita in 2005 the family built a 17-foot-high levee around the low side of the factory and invested in backup generators. And the family's naturalist left a double legacy on the Louisiana landscape: the snowy egrets of Bird City, and the nutria argument that still follows his name.
On a kitchen cabinet or a bar fridge, on the cooler that goes to the crawfish boil, in a shadow box beside a Tabasco bottle, or framed on a hot sauce collector's wall. It is an easy gift for anyone with Louisiana roots or a shelf full of pepper sauces.
Is this Tabasco sticker unused?
Yes. It is new old stock, never applied, still on its original paper backing.
What is pictured in the center?
Tabasco's big diamond label, with a bottle of the sauce tipped over a crawfish.
Is that a shrimp or a crawfish?
A crawfish, claws and all, which is fitting for a Louisiana brand.
How big is it?
The photos show it next to a U.S. quarter for scale.
Where is Tabasco made?
On Avery Island in Iberia Parish, Louisiana, the salt dome the McIlhenny family came home to after the Civil War.
Who invented Tabasco sauce?
Edmund McIlhenny sold the first bottles in 1869 and patented the sauce in 1870. Historians also point to Maunsel White, who was growing tabasco peppers and selling a pepper sauce years earlier, and his part in the story is still debated.
What is "le petit bâton rouge"?
The little red stick Tabasco pickers use as a color guide, so only fully ripe peppers go into the mash.
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