UA Archaeologists to Continue Unearthing Tabasco Birthplace

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – A University of Alabama-led archaeological team has begun its second phase of an excavation of the original factory where Tabasco brand pepper sauce was first produced in the mid- to late 1860s.

And a little more than one week into the six-week dig, the crew has unearthed what may be the earliest known Tabasco bottles.

McIlhenny Company, makers of Tabasco sauce, is sponsoring the excavation at Avery Island, La., led by the Gulf Coast Survey of the Alabama Museum of Natural History at The University of Alabama. Ashley Dumas, a UA graduate student, is the project’s field director while Dr. Ian Brown, a UA professor of anthropology, is the principal investigator.

Dumas said the product – and the site that once produced it – could model other products and businesses that blossomed during the Industrial Age.

“It’s of national significance because it’s the original production site of a product that was really important in the history of the American rural cottage industry,” she said.

The zingy pepper sauce rapidly grew from cottage industry status, and it is now sold in more than 100 countries around the world. Everyone from astronauts in space, to excavators of King Tut’s tomb, to Army generals has said they regularly dribble the condiment on various foods.

While the sauce’s distribution has skyrocketed, numerous ties to its beginnings remain. Paul C. P. McIlhenny, president of McIlhenny Company, is the great-grandson of the sauce’s inventor, Edmund McIlhenny, who began producing the sauce commercially in 1868 at the site of this summer’s excavation.

The project’s first phase began last summer. That project, led by Brown, identified the exact site of the historic building, known as the Laboratory, which was torn down in the 1920s.

In addition to locating underground ruins from the building’s brick foundation and inner walls, last summer the scientists also recovered an original Tabasco sauce bottle – the type used from 1868 through the first few decades of the 1900s – a ceramic doorknob from the back door of the factory, and numerous additional artifacts.

This summer the group is searching for trash heaps associated with the sauce’s production and is digging within the site’s rediscovered walls, Dumas said. This summer’s excavation objectives also include dating the building’s original construction and learning more about the production process and how it evolved, she said.

Excavators are examining not only the Laboratory itself, exposing, for example, the entire foundation of its massive three- story brick tower, but will survey a thick oak and bamboo grove surrounding the ruined Laboratory, where a building complex related to Tabasco production once stood, said Dr. Shane K. Bernard, historian and curator for McIlhenny Company and Avery Island Inc. Bernard conceived the excavations and serves as the official liaison between the sponsoring corporations and the UA-led team.

McIlhenny Company and its sister company, Avery Island Inc., provided funding to UA for both this summer’s and last summer’s projects. This summer’s dig will continue through the end of June. Although the excavation has just started, the crew has already made several interesting finds, Bernard said. It has located additional structural evidence that an earlier building stood on or near the Laboratory’s site, which would confirm a generations-old Avery and McIlhenny family tradition.

The crew, using archival photographs, has also identified three complete six- and eight-gallon stoneware jars used in early Tabasco production, as well as a large, intact glass container known as a demijohn. This container once held vinegar used in early sauce production, Bernard said. Other artifacts uncovered during the past week, he said, include fossils from giant extinct mammals, presumably from the natural history collection that Tabasco inventor E. McIlhenny kept in the factory.

Several intact cork-top Tabasco bottles have also been found buried on the archaeological site, Bernard said, including a few of unusual design that may be the earliest known Tabasco bottles.

UA students Wes Shaw, Miranda Moore, and Duane Strelow are working with Dumas. Three students from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and one student from Northwestern State University of Louisiana are also participating.