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Edward Avery McIlhenny

Edward Avery "Ned" McIlhenny (1872 – 1949), son of Tabasco brand pepper sauce inventor Edmund McIlhenny, was a Louisiana businessman, explorer, and conservationist.

Born in 1872 on Avery Island, Louisiana, McIlhenny was educated by private tutors before attending Dr. Holbrook's Military School in Sing Sing (now Ossining), New York. McIlhenny enrolled at Lehigh University, where he joined Phi Delta Theta fraternity, but he dropped out of school to join Frederick Cook's 1894 Arctic expedition as an ornithologist. In 1897 he financed his own Arctic expedition to Point Barrow, Alaska, where he helped to save over a hundred stranded whaling fleet sailors (including Japanese adventurer and entrepreneur Jujiro Wada).

As businessman

On his return to Louisiana, McIlhenny assumed control of McIlhenny Company, overseeing Tabasco sauce production as president of the organization until his death fifty-one years later. During his tenture, McIlhenny expanded, modernized, and standardized sauce production, as well as experimented with new ways of promoting the world-famous product, such as advertising on radio.

McIlhenny also introduced the now ubiquitous modern screw-top Tabasco sauce bottle, which replaced the original cork-top Tabasco sauce bottle that had been used from 1868 to 1927; he also redesigned the iconic Tabasco diamond logo trademark, largely creating the version known today.

As conservationist

McIlhenny founded the Bird City wildfowl refuge on Avery Island around 1895, which helped to save the snowy egret from extinction. Enrolling the help of Charles Willis Ward, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Sage Foundation, McIlhenny was instrumental in securing nearly of south Louisiana coastal marshland as wildfowl refuges. He banded over 285,000 birds during his lifetime and ran a game farm on Avery Island that experimented with breeding new animal varieties. He helped to introduce the nutria to Louisiana, although — contrary to popular belief — he did not import the creatures to Louisiana, nor was he the first Louisianan to set them loose in the wild on purpose.

McIlhenny used his personal estate, known as Jungle Gardens, to propagate azaleas, irises, camellias, bamboo, and other plant species. He wrote numerous academic articles, mainly about birds, oversaw the publication in English of two European botanical treatises, and edited Charles L. Jordan's unfinished manuscript The Wild Turkey and Its Hunting (a book often mistakenly attributed to McIlhenny). He also wrote books about alligators, egrets, and African-American gospel music, including:

Befo' De War Spirituals (1933).
Bird City (1934).
The Alligator's Life History (1935).
The Autobiography of an Egret (1940).

Death and legacy

McIlhenny died in 1949, three years after suffering a debilitating stroke; he is buried on Avery Island. Today, Jungle Gardens and Bird City continue to serve as havens for bird and plant species; they are also popular tourist destinations. Furthermore, the nearly of coastal marshland he helped to set aside as wildfowl refuges continue to exist as state wildlife areas. The E. A. McIlhenny Natural History Collection at Louisiana State University is named in his honor.

Sources

Shane K. Bernard, "M'sieu Ned's Rat? Reconsidering the Origin of Nutria in Louisiana: The E. A. McIlhenny Collection, Avery Island, Louisiana," Louisiana History, 43 (Summer 2002), 281-93.
Shane K. Bernard, Tabasco: An Illustrated History (Avery Island, La.: McIlhenny Company, 2007).
John Bockstoce, The Arctic Whaling Disaster of 1897 (New York, N.Y.: Explorers Club, 1978).