"The Laboratory" served as the first TABASCO^® brand Pepper Sauce factory from 1868, the condiment's inaugural year, to 1905, when a new factory was built elsewhere on Avery Island, Louisiana.

According to Island tradition, the building started out during the antebellum period as a two-story pigeonniere, or pigeon house.

When the Civil War erupted, Avery Island became a strategic point because of its valuable salt mines. Confederate soldiers were sent to guard these mines (the Island was attacked twice by Union forces before its capture in 1863), and tradition holds that the soldiers converted the pigeon house into a watchtower by adding a third story. Tradition also maintains that they built a rectangular two-story brick and clapboard addition as a barracks.

After the Civil War, Edmund McIlhenny, inventor of TABASCO^® brand Pepper Sauce, took over the Laboratory, which stood across the lawn from his in-laws' house where he lived with his wife and children. Edmund used the Laboratory to produce TABASCO^® Sauce - in fact, he may have first created the fiery sauce inside the building sometime between 1866 and 1868.

During the last twenty-two years of Edmund's life, he manufactured nearly 350,000 bottles of TABASCO^® Sauce in the Laboratory. And after his death in 1890, his sons continued to produce sauce in the building, adding several outbuildings to the business as it grew.

When a new factory was built on Avery Island in 1905, the Laboratory was abandoned, and during the late 1920s it was razed - its salvageable parts being used to build a family residence.

The site of the Laboratory was nearly forgotten over the next half-century, and when in the late 1980s a team of archaeologists attempted to dig up its remains, it was nowhere to be found!

In the mid-1990s, Dr. Shane K. Bernard, historian & curator of McIlhenny Company and its sister company Avery Island, Inc., found the floor plans of the Laboratory in a TABASCO^® warehouse. Using these plans, Bernard, with the help of McIlhenny and Avery family members, located the Laboratory's ruins in a thick bamboo grove. He proposed that an excavation be undertaken.

Bernard called in anthropologist Dr. Ian W. Brown of the Gulf Coast Survey at the University of Alabama, who for three decades had conducted digs on Avery Island of prehistoric American Indian sites. Brown agreed to take on the excavation in summer 2000 with a team of several students - including master's student Ashley Dumas, who would eventually become the excavation's field director.

This initial four-week project in the summer of 2000 confirmed that the ruins in the bamboo grove were, in fact, those of the Laboratory. And a huge collection of artifacts was uncovered - from early cork-top TABASCO^® bottles to fossils of an extinct giant mammal!

Read on to find out what was discovered in the summer of 2001...