Tabasco

A picture of African American “pepper pickers” from a late-nineteenth-century article in Scribners.

Origins of the pepper? One source says a soldier from the Mexican War brought McIlhenny the peppers from the Tabasco region of Mexico: “McIlhenny … had been a refugee in Texas, and during his absence the cultivation of the pepper had been neglected and only a few wild plants had by chance survived in a neglected hedge where birds had dropped the seeds.”¹