Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2005 - (Page 29)

Edmund McIlhenny AVERY ISLAND MOTHER LODE Two months later Lincoln became President and the nation quickly plunged into civil war. The now intertwined Avery and McIlhenny families sought refuge from the conflict on their isolated plantation. Around this time an event occurred on the Island that forever altered its history: The discovery of solid rock salt only 16 feet beneath the Island’s surface. With its salt supply cut off by a Union blockade, the South regarded this find as a “gift from Heaven,” as Ella Lonn wrote in Salt as a Factor in the Confederacy. Unable to operate his banks because of the war, Edmund put his financial skills to work helping his inlaws run the salt works. “My duty is at the mine,” he wrote to Mary Eliza, “and I must necessarily be absent from you.” As many as 500 teams of horses from throughout the lower South descended on the Island daily to be loaded with salt. Ironically, this activity transformed the Averys’ obscure plantation retreat into a military target. In November 1962, two Union gunboats and a transport ship 38-year-old Edmund had fallen in love with 15-year-old Mary Eliza Avery, daughter of his closest friend, prominent attorney and planter Daniel Dudley Avery. B Mary Eliza Avery McIlhenny y 1853, loaded with foot soldiers moved up Bayou Petite Anse with orders to destroy the Island’s salt works. The attack failed miserably, and the Island remained beyond Union control until April 1863, when General Nathaniel P. Banks invaded south Louisiana. With Confederate troops withdrawing rapidly to the north, the McIlhennys and Averys abandoned the Island and sought selfimposed exile in Texas. They left on April 15, 1863, roughly one day before Union troops captured the salt works. In Texas, Edmund worked as a civilian employee of the Confederate military. He initially served in the commissary’s office at Galveston, overseeing supplies for the stronghold — an office of consequence given a mutiny over substandard provisions had occured there prior to his arrival. He later transferred to the paymaster’s office, traveling by rail and stagecoach across Texas to distribute funds to Southern troops. Edmund rarely saw his wife and daughter during his wartime service, even though they lodged with his Avery in-laws in Houston, Brenham, Austin, and elsewhere in central Texas. Fall 2005/LOUISIANA CULTURAL VISTAS 29

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2005

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2005 Contents Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Louisiana State Museum After Katrina and Rita Tabasco: Edmund McIlhenny and the Birth of a Louisiana Pepper Sauce Historic New Orleans Collection Louisiana Association of Museums New Orleans’ Coffee Connection No Man’s Land Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism Bookstand (Book Review by Thomas Uskali) Sound Advice (Music Review by Ben Sandmel) Forum (Commentary by Roy Blount, Jr. )

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2005

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