The Queen City of the Teche
Spanish settlers led by Francisco Bouligny founded New Iberia in 1779 on the banks of Bayou Teche, and Acadians exiled from Nova Scotia followed. Locals still call it the Queen City of the Teche. Its historic downtown, with a live oak lined Main Street, won a Great American Main Street Award in 2005. Close by are Shadows-on-the-Teche, an antebellum house Union soldiers occupied during the Civil War, and the Bayou Teche Museum, which holds George Rodrigue's studio.
Also in town is the Conrad Rice Mill, which bills itself as the oldest rice mill in America. P.A. Conrad founded it in 1912, cutting rice by hand and drying it on the levees before milling. The name Konriko, short for Conrad Rice Company, was trademarked in the 1950s. Mike Davis bought the idle mill in 1975 and had it running again within ten days. It still uses a belt drive, rare enough that the building went on the National Register of Historic Places in 1981.
New Iberia is also the home of James Lee Burke, the Pulitzer Prize winning author whose Dave Robicheaux novels are set here, and the tourism bureau runs a walking tour of the places in the books.
Avery Island: the salt and the pepper
Avery Island is not really an island. It is one of five salt domes that rise above the flat coastal marsh, about 2,200 acres of live oaks and subtropical plants sitting on a deposit of rock salt thought to go deeper than Mount Everest is tall. Salt springs may have drawn people here as long as 12,000 years ago. The salt mattered so much that, during the Civil War, Union forces based at Brashear (now Morgan City) planned to destroy the Avery Island salt mines.
After the war E. McIlhenny, a former New Orleans banker, planted pepper pods that a traveler from Mexico had given him in his in-laws' garden on the island. Around 1866 he crushed the ripest peppers with Avery Island salt, aged the mash, added French white wine vinegar, and bottled it. He grew his first commercial crop in 1868 and the next year shipped 658 bottles to grocers along the Gulf. That was Tabasco, still made on the island. The factory and Jungle Gardens, with its Bird City wildfowl refuge and a grove of giant timber bamboo, are open to visitors.
