A prominent family of Louisiana sugar planters who lived at Avery Island and were also Refugees to Texas. See also Avery Slaves.

Introduction

In 1837, Daniel Dudley Avery married Sarah Marsh Avery, the daughter of the prominent sugar planter John Craig Marsh, originally from New Jersey. Marsh was, from around 1818, the owner of Avery Island, which was referred to by contemporaries as Petit Anse Island. But in 1849, Marsh sold and divided the plantation between Daniel D. Avery and his other son-in-law Ashbel Burnham Henshaw, but in 1854, Avery bought Henshaw’s share of the plantation and acquired full ownership. Prior to his death in 1859, George Marsh (the second son of John Craig Marsh) was also a primary manager and joint owner of the plantation.¹

Daniel D. Avery was a Louisiana native who was educated at Yale and became a lawyer and politician in Baton Rouge a few years before his marriage. After being elected as a circuit judge in 1860, he was often referred to as “Judge Avery.” With Sarah Marsh Avery, he fathered six children:

• Mary Eliza Avery McIlhenny (who married Edmund McIlhenny, founder of the Tabasco company, in 1859)
• Sarah Marsh Avery (who later married Paul B. Leeds)
• Dudley Avery (who was educated at Princeton)
• John Marsh Avery (sometimes referred to as Jack)
• George Marsh
• Margaret (who may be referred to sometimes as Minnie).²

When the Civil War began, Avery moved his family to the plantation at Petit Anse, where the massive salt dome for which the Island was famous was soon discovered. Avery, his wife, and his daughters later refugeed to Houston, returning to Avery Island in 1865. Dudley Avery, meanwhile, enlisted but was wounded at Shiloh. After recovery, he joined the army formed by General Richard Taylor in West Louisiana, marrying Mary Louise Richardson in 1865.³

As prominent New Iberia planters, the family was also acquainted with the Weeks Family.

Before the War

The Avery plantations primarily produced sugar and molasses for shipment to and sale in New Orleans, and continued such shipments in the beginning of 1861.⁴

During the War

Beginnings of Salt Production

After moving to the plantation at the beginning of the war, John Marsh Avery began producing and selling salt by evaporation, but in early 1862, the discovery of rock salt on the island significantly expanded salt production. See the Avery Island entry for more information. Because the island began to provide salt for both civilians and the military, on September 10, 1862, John Marsh. Avery received an exemption from military service to superintend the salt mines on the island.⁵

Flight to Texas

In the spring of 1863, with Petit Anse threatened by the approach of Union troops, Daniel D. Avery fled with his wife, daughters, and son-in-law Edmund McIlhenny to Texas. According to rothfeder2007, they relocated to a McIlhenny cousin’s house in Brenham, “accompanied by dozens of their slaves” (32).

But there is also evidence that the family spent at least part of its Texas sojourn in Houston, where they were befriended by Houston merchant C. S. Longcope.⁶ In a letter to Miss Sarah Avery (likely Danie’s daughter) also written after the war, Houstonian Cara Taylor Evans referred to “your old house on Main street,” which had been converted since into a federal headquarters.⁷

More research is needed to determine the family’s precise whereabouts, and how long they remained in Texas itself. There is also some indication that Sarah Avery, at least, spent some time in Havana, perhaps while en route back to Louisiana in 1865.⁸ Several Texans—both from Houston and Brenham—are also included in a list of people to whom invitations were sent for the April 1866 marriage of Sarah Marsh Avery to Paul Leeds.⁹

After the War

Family memories and secondary sources suggest that when the Averys and McIlhennys returned to Petit Anse Island in 1865, they found the plantation destroyed thanks to the Union raid on the Island in 1863.¹⁰ As they unpacked their luggage in late 1865, the family did write letters discussing damage to goods, missing furniture, the repair and reconstruction of the house, and efforts to hire servants after the dispersal of many of the planation’s enslaved people.¹¹

But initial reports from the island were not always dire. In May 1865, a letter from Dudley to his father indicates that the latter was still in Houston, and had sent some letters back to Petit Anse Island via a member of the Weeks Family. Dudley was superintending the island plantations and reported that “everything here is progressing as well under the circumstances as you could wish.” Dudley was especially encouraged by the prospect of building on the Island’s wartime experiment in salt production. But he urged his father “to get that powder here [because] there will be great demand for salt this summer. It is now selling for six dollars a sack in New Orleans.”¹²

Many others were also apparently impressed by the potential of salt production, judging by the many letters Judge Avery received from friends and associates urging him to seize the opportunity. News of the discoveries of salt on the Island apparently spread rapidly and widely through the press. A June 1865 letter from a family friend in New York (Hugh Auchincloss), wished to “congratulate” Daniel D. Avery “on your famous salt Island, & trust that it will prove to you all that we hear of it here,” and also asked for a sample of the salt to display in his cabinet at home.¹³ And another letter in August indicated that someone in the West Indies had learned about the rock salt and was interested in seeing whether Avery was willing to sell the property.¹⁴

It is difficult to tell, however, how quickly Avery actually began manufacturing salt. Lots of correspondents in this immediate postwar period urged him to, but I’m not sure yet whether he did. The family may have been concerned about starting manufacture before definitely securing amnesty and clear title to the works.¹⁵ At any rate, a New Orleans writer urged Avery in September to begin manufacturing salt right away and argued that it could easily compete with salt from Liverpool and New York.¹⁶ A friend told Avery that “salt will probably save you.”¹⁷ And another offered to provide the capital needed to begin bringing salt to market immediately, noting that the steamers would be able to provide transport “as of old.”¹⁸

At some point, a company seems to have formed to lease the salt works, but Avery’s sons were concerned that the company was made of speculators less interested in developing the mines than in ensuring that its products would be kept off the market temporarily.¹⁹ On November 21, 1865, Mary McIlhenny mentioned to her mother that “Mr. Hodges, Dr. Mullet’s engineer, is still here. He said this evening that the bed of the salt, was on a level with the bayou.” At that date she was still unpacking trunks from the relocation back home.²⁰

Adjustment to Emancipation

While exploring salt production, the family also attempted to quickly return to sugar production. But this required making arrangements for labor under the changed circumstances wrought by wartime emancipation.

As of November 21, 1865, the Avery sons apparently expected that most of the freedpeople on the Island would make arrangements to work:

Mr. Hayes only wishes to hire three of his hands and says that we are at liberty to make arrangements with the others for their labor. I think all of our negroes will stay. They all talk so. I will know by Monday & left you know. Sam & [illegible] desire to return here to work.²¹

A letter from Sarah Avery to her husband around the same time also discussed potential hire arrangements with former slaves and shared information that one had given about who occupied the house “with the Yankees” and where they may have taken the family’s furniture. In the same letter she expressed concern about the need to hire new dependable servants as it would be “miserable” to get along with the “stupid children” currently around the plantation.²²

It is unclear whom Avery was referring to in this letter, but later documents kept by the family may suggest that a new group of African Americans may have arrived on the island during the war, perhaps under the supervision of Union forces. These could be the people listed under the heading “1865–Contrabands–New regime” in an accounting of Avery family servants made (probably by Sarah Avery Leeds) in the 1880s or later. At least at this point, the family seems to have still distinguished between those freedpeople who had long been associated with the family, and who returned to work on Avery Island, and those who were “new.”²³

What is clear is that people found both on the “new regime” list and on the lists of trusted family servants also kept by later generations of Averys went to work in sugar cultivation on the Island after the war. Although I didn’t scan it, there is a postwar plantation record book from around 1866 and 186 that lists, by person on each page, days worked and a list of items like hats and shoes given in exchange. Many of the same people in Leeds’s list show up in the record book. The work seems to be mainly in sugar and molasses production, because the records are followed by a list of people to whom sugar and molasses were sold in 1867. Various accounts with formerly enslaved people are noted as having been “settled on pay day” around December 23.²⁴

For more information, see Avery Slaves.

Later Descendants

For more on the family towards the end of the century, see Edward Avery McIlhenny, Tabasco, rothfeder2007, and usner2013.