Avery Island Salt Dome

People were boiling this island's brine springs for salt long before Europeans came. Thousands of pottery fragments show how widespread the work was, and Native people were living on the dome by about 2500 BC. The salt travelled in trade to nations as far off as central Texas, Arkansas and Ohio. The dome is about three miles long and two and a half wide, one of five salt domes standing above the Louisiana coast. It rises 163 feet, the highest ground on the Gulf Coast.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 0.4 mi
  A 170-acre garden and wildfowl refuge on a Gulf Coast salt dome, founded by Edward Avery McIlhenny, on an island that was a Marsh sugar plantation worked by enslaved people before Tabasco and the 1862 salt works.
• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 8.3 mi
  A National Trust site in New Iberia built 1831 to 1834 for sugar planters David and Mary Weeks, now interpreted around the 1,112 people the Weeks family enslaved, among them Charity Polk, Amos, Patty, Isaac and Louisa.
• Cypremort Point State Park — 12 mi
  A 185-acre Vermilion Bay park reached by road, with a half-mile man-made beach, a marsh boardwalk, shore fishing and a boat launch, and a Chitimacha tradition of a great cypress here.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 15 mi
  The Mother Church of the Acadians, founded in 1765 on St. Martin Square in St. Martinville, with a late 1870s Lourdes grotto and, a block away, the Evangeline Oak on Bayou Teche.

More markers nearby

• First Rock Salt Mine — steps away
• Bayou Petite Anse — 0.2 mi
• McIlhenny — 0.5 mi
• Bird City — 0.5 mi