Jim Bradshaw: Avery Island salt adds spice to local history

The decision by Cargill to stop mining salt at Avery Island interrupts, maybe forever, an activity that has gone on there for a thousand or more years.  
The salt itself is millions of years old. Avery Island is one of five Louisiana domes that long, long ago were covered by a salty ocean.
Seawater evaporating over eons created a huge sheet of salt that was later covered by tons of sediment. The sediment’s weight forced the salt into huge columns that pushed through the soggy silt.
Some scientists think humans may have tasted Avery Island salt as early as 12,000 years ago, although there has been much debate about that.
Harvard archaeologist Ian Brown did extensive studies beginning in the 1960s and is more conservative. He said Indians were probably trading the island’s salt throughout eastern North America about 1,000 years ago.
Brown noted that the local Indian tribes were hunters and fishermen who did not need much salt added to their diets, but people who relied on agriculture did.
The early traders evaporated water from salty springs. Pottery bowls were propped over a low fire to evaporate the water, leaving a residue of salt in each bowl. This trading went on for centuries, until something happened somewhere in the dim past to cause the Indians to leave the island and never return.
Elizabeth Hayes and her children settled on the island about 1790, long after the Indians were gone, and newspaperman Daniel Dennett visited Elizabeth’s son John Hayes, who was in his 80s and still living on the island in 1866. “There were no Indians on the island [when the family first settled],” Dennett wrote, “and no sign that they had been there for ages. [Hayes] could never get an Indian to go on the Island. … They said a great calamity once happened to the Indians there, and they had never dared visit since.”
Jonathan Craig Marsh bought the island about 1820 and his daughter married Judge Daniel Avery, who bought the island from his father-in-law. They did some salt evaporation, but it was only a small enterprise until a shortage during the Civil War prompted Marsh’s grandson, John Marsh Avery, to improve the salt works. Workmen deepening the brine springs in 1862 hit solid salt about 16 feet down. That was a big deal; rock salt had never been found before in North America.
According to an old account, “The news of the wonderful discovery … spread throughout the entire South, and … hundreds of wagons came from the adjoining states to carry back the precious article.”
That lasted until April 1863, when Union troops destroyed the mine. An 1895 news account claimed that when the war closed the Avery family had banked $3 million in (practically worthless) Confederate money.
When Dennett visited in 1866 a mining company was just investigating the bed of salt. Drillers bored 65 feet down and found no sign of the bottom of the salt bed. 
Little did they know they had barely scratched the surface. A later geological report speculated that the salt column is as deep as Mount Everest is tall.
Dennett visited again in 1870 and “went down into … the very bowels of Petite Anse Island,” as Avery Island was sometimes called. “A platform about six feet square … was suspended by a two-inch manila rope … worked by a steam engine.” He said it took half a minute to drop 80 feet down the shaft.
“From the platform, the chamber extends two hundred feet west, and a hundred and fifty feet east, making a continuous chamber three hundred and fifty feet long, twenty-five to thirty feet wide, and seven feet high.” He said the mine was producing six tons of salt each day.
American Salt Co. leased the mine in 1880, but that didn’t turn out well.
In an 1895 lawsuit, the Avery family complained American sub-leased the mine to the New Iberia Salt Co., which “totally disregarded the terms of the lease and … worked the mine so that it was practically ruined and destroyed.”
They said they had to start over with a new shaft and new mine.
A succession of companies has leased and operated the mine since then, with Cargill taking over in 1997.
The company planned to leave Avery Island when its lease ended later this year, but the decision was hastened after two miners were killed when a roof collapsed.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, “Cajuns and Other Characters,” is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.