Avery Island’s benevolent baron led legendry life
If someone wrote a novel in which the hero lived the life of Edward Avery McIlhenny, it would never be printed. Publishers would say, “This is too far-fetched, nobody could do all of this.” He was eulogized as a man who lived an “almost legendary life.” That was not fiction.
Aside from being a shrewd businessman who ran a handful of enterprises on Avery Island, including the Tabasco company founded by his father, he was a naturalist, explorer, ornithologist, zoologist, herpetologist, game warden, amateur doctor, author, photographer, and humanitarian.
His legacies, in addition to the esteem of practically everyone who knew him, included a sanctuary for 120,000 egrets; an incredible 190-acre garden filled with tens of thousands of camellias and azaleas, thousands of irises, and exotic and colorful plants from around the world; and books on topics as diverse as bamboo culture, Louisiana’s alligators, keeping a pet bear, and Louisiana folk tales.
The Shreveport Journal wrote after his death in August 1949, “In his island kingdom, where he was known as ‘M’sieu Ned,’ he ruled like a prince who endeared himself to all of his subjects.” Much of what he did was driven by a lifelong curiosity about plants and animals.
He was born in 1872, not long after his father, Edmund McIlhenny, began to make Tabasco sauce, and as a boy “began tramping through the surrounding swamplands … [displaying] an interest in ornithology and plant life,” according to one obituary.”
He left college while still in his teens to join an ill-fated Arctic expedition led by famed explorer Frederick Cook. The ship struck an iceberg only 10 days after it sailed. It was repaired, but only days after sailing again hit a reef and sank off the coast of Greenland. Everyone was rescued, and the frigid soaking did nothing to dampen Ned’s enthusiasm for studying plants and animals.
When he returned to Avery Island, the 20-yearold began an imaginative experiment to save egrets that were being hunted nearly to extinction. As a boy he’d heard a story about a raja in India who kept exotic birds in a huge bamboo cage. The cage rotted away after the raja died, but the birds did not fly away. Ned wondered if the same thing might happen with egrets.
He built a huge wire cage over part of a lake on Avery Island to protect seven young birds he’d captured in the swamps. He kept them until they reached maturity and hatched their young, then he destroyed the cage. However, uvnlike the raja’s birds, the egrets did not stay. Like other migratory birds, they flew away in the fall. But then they came back to their old nests in the spring to hatch another generation. Migrating egrets have now been nesting at Avery Island each spring for more than a century.
Wanderlust recaptured Ned in 1897, when he organized his own expedition to study birds in Alaska and Siberia. The expedition not only contributed to the understanding of the birds he studied, but displayed his humanitarian spirit. When 105 men from a whaling fleet were stranded near his base at Port Barrow, Alaska, he housed them all and hunted wild game to feed them.
Ned returned to Avery Island in 1900, married New Orleans socialite Mary Given Matthews, and began to devote much time and energy to wildlife conservation. He lobbied for laws protecting the ducks, geese, and other birds that migrated each year from Canada, and in 1912 began banding them to help trace their flight patterns. He wrote in 1933 that he’d tagged 23,000 birds by then and was still doing it.
He created wildlife refuges along the Louisiana Coast, including the 86,000-acre Rockefeller Refuge, today deemed one of the most important sanctuaries in the world.
And he also began to create perhaps his bestknown legacy, the 170acre Jungle Gardens, where, according to one account, thousands of visitors each year can “feast their eyes on the only stand of Tonkin cane outside of Indochina,” can see “sacred orange trees from the palace of the [an] Emperor of Japan … given to McIlhenny out of gratitude for … saving [his] son from drowning,” and myriad other plants that “bring the island into a torrent of color” each Spring.
Ned himself was not part of the display. The Kansas City Times story of his fabulous life concluded: “Few tourists saw M’sieu Ned … for his was far too busy a life. But each person who visited the island found it one of the beauty spots of the nation, and found there, too, something of the busy, friendly spirit of the man who ruled over it all.”
That was as true when we last visited the island several years ago as it was when the benevolent baron still looked after it all.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@ gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
