First Rock Salt Mine

The mine began as a wartime supply line. Salt mining started on the island in 1862 and supplied several states of the Lower South, with Confederate troops under General Richard Taylor defending the works. The plaque no longer stands at its first outdoor spot. It is kept indoors at the Salt Mine Experience, the sixth stop on the island's tour. Taylor himself fell back from Fort Bisland on the Teche in 1863, the spring Union troops took the island.

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

• Avery Island Salt Dome — steps away
• Bayou Petite Anse — 0.2 mi
• McIlhenny — 0.5 mi
• Bird City — 0.5 mi