McIlhenny

Before he ran Tabasco, Edward McIlhenny was an Arctic naturalist. In 1894 he sailed as ornithologist on a Greenland expedition whose ship wrecked, and in 1897 he led his own to Point Barrow, Alaska, where he sheltered stranded whaling crews. He replaced Tabasco's cork-topped bottles with screw tops in 1927. In 1938 he and a state official began a nutria farm on the island, and he freed the animals in 1940 and 1945. He was not the first to release nutria in Louisiana, but his promotion helped spread a species that is now an ecological problem.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — steps away
  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 — 8.8 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 — 16 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

• Bird City — steps away
• The Cleveland Oak — 0.4 mi
• Bayou Petite Anse — 0.4 mi
• Avery Island Salt Dome — 0.5 mi