Edmund McIlhenny

Biography

Edmund McIlhenny was born in Hagerstown, Maryland, in 1815. He moved to New Orleans around 1840 and worked in banking there. Of Irish and Scottish descent, he built up a small fortune and became the owner of his own bank. On June 30, 1859, he married Mary Eliza Avery, and the couple had eight children. During the Civil War, McIlhenny fled to Texas with his in-laws, the Avery family. There he worked as a civilian for the Confederate army, first as a clerk in a commissary office and later as a financial agent for the paymaster. After the South’s defeat, the economic collapse left him ruined. He then lived with his in-laws on their plantation on Avery Island, Louisiana. In the family garden there, tradition holds that he grew a variety of fruits and vegetables.

Tabasco sauce

According to one legend, McIlhenny was given tabasco peppers and a recipe for tabasco sauce by a friend, plantation owner Maunsel White, who died in 1863 – though company legend says McIlhenny himself invented the sauce between 1866 and 1868. In 1868, he grew his first commercial pepper crop, selling the first bottles of his product the following year, which he called Tabasco brand pepper sauce. In 1870, McIlhenny obtained letters patent for the sauce, which he packaged in cork-top two-ounce bottles with diamond logo labels very similar in appearance to those in present-day use.

At first McIlhenny sold the product mainly along the Gulf Coast in places including New Orleans, New Iberia, Louisiana, and Galveston, Texas. By the early 1870s, however, he had broken into larger markets, such as New York City, Philadelphia, and Boston, helped by major nineteenth century food manufacturer and distributor E. C. Hazard and Company.

Death and legacy

McIlhenny died in 1890, and apparently did not consider his production of Tabasco sauce to have been a particularly notable accomplishment. Indeed, he made no mention of Tabasco sauce in an autobiographical sketch composed toward the end of his life, nor was it mentioned in his obituaries. Regardless, his successors, sons John Avery McIlhenny and Edward Avery McIlhenny, realized that their father had created a foundation on which they could build a larger family business, and they shortly expanded and modernized the manufacturing process. Today each carton of Tabasco sauce bears a facsimile of McIlhenny's signature.