Avery Island | New Iberia | Jeanerette | Delcambre | Loreauville

The first inhabitants of what would become Iberia Parish, Louisiana, were American Indians, who migrated to the region about 12,000 years ago. They were drawn particularly to the roughly 2,000-acre geographical oddity now called Avery Island, which is actually a salt dome located about three miles inland from Vermilion Bay. There the Indians boiled the Island’s briny spring water to extract salt, which they traded to other tribes as far away as central Texas, Arkansas, and Ohio.

By the eighteenth century the allegedly cannibalistic Attakapas tribe inhabited much of south-central and southwestern Louisiana. (The name Attakapas translates as "Man Eater.") Despite the Attakapas’ fierce reputation, during the eighteenth century European settlers trickled into the region, which they dubbed the Attakapas District.

In 1779 a group of Spanish settlers under the leadership of Francisco Bouligny settled in Attakapas, and established a community on Bayou Teche called Nuevo Iberia (New Iberia). As historian Glenn R. Conrad has observed, "it is today the only remaining town in the state of Louisiana to have been founded by the Spaniards."

They were joined by French and Acadian settlers, and by 1788 the community consisted of about one hundred ninety individuals. (British troops had expelled the Acadians from their Nova Scotian homeland earlier in the century, and the first exiles arrived in Attakapas in 1764-65. Over generations they and the other ethnic groups with whom they intermarried on the south Louisiana frontier developed into a new ethnic group, the Cajuns.)

With these settlers of European descent came Afro-Caribbean slaves and the gens de couleur libre ("free persons of color"). The latter occupied a middle tier between enslaved blacks and free whites; by 1870 their descendants had formed a large Creole enclave at Grand Marais, in southeastern Iberia Parish.
After the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, these French, Spanish, Acadian, and African inhabitants were joined increasingly by Anglo-American settlers.

During the early 1800s sugar cane became the region’s principal crop, and so it remains today. Each September the arrival of the harvest and ginning season is celebrated in Iberia Parish with the Sugar Cane Festival, founded in 1941.

The area that would became Iberia Parish was hotly contested by Union and Confederate forces during the Civil War. Their battle lines moved back and forth through the area, and Union troops twice looted the town. They also seized the Weeks family mansion, now called "Shadows-on-the-Teche," and used it as a command post — but not before it, too, was looted. As a Union officer noted, "the boys were allowed to go through it, sack, pillage and destroy every article within its walls."

In 1868 Iberia Parish was created from parts of St. Martin and St. Mary parishes, with New Iberia being appointed its seat of government.

That same year local resident Edmund McIlhenny grew his first commercial crop of tabasco peppers, which the following year he marketed as TABASCO® brand pepper sauce. That world-famous condiment is still manufactured in Iberia Parish. Its home, Avery Island, also boasted the nation's earliest solid rock salt mine, first excavated in 1862 — an event that prompted Union gunboats to attack the Island.

Although sugar continued to play a vital role in Iberia Parish, during the twentieth century oil became a major component of the local economy. Oil was first discovered in Louisiana in 1901, and numerous petroleum-related businesses were soon operating out of Iberia Parish — not only because of its oil deposits, but also because its proximity to the Gulf of Mexico and offshore drilling platforms. The inland Port of Iberia opened to service the oil industry, both locally and worldwide. Many of the world’s offshore drilling rigs and platforms are fabricated in this massive port facility.

Today Iberia Parish thrives as a center of sugar, oil, and salt production, and draws over 100,000 visitors annually to its bayou-country attractions, including the Shadows-on-the-Teche plantation home and Konriko rice mill in New Iberia, the Tabasco factory, Jungle Gardens, and Bird City wildfowl refuge at Avery Island — to name only a few.

Sources: Jim Bradshaw, The Daily Advertiser's History of Acadiana, No. 6, Iberia Parish (25 November 1997); Glen Conrad, New Iberia (1986); David C. Edmonds, Yankee Autumn in Acadiana (1987); Encyclopedia of Cajun Culture (s.v. "Iberia Parish"); Morris Raphael, The Battle in the Bayou Country (1990).