TABASCO^® brand Pepper Sauce is known and loved throughout the world. It has been produced by McIlhenny Company at one location since 1868 — on Avery Island in southwest Louisiana.

Until summer 2000, the original factory building where the famous pepper sauce was first created had not been fully explored.

The building that was the actual birthplace of TABASCO^® Sauce, called "the Laboratory," was razed in the late 1920s. But during the summer of 2000, the ruins of this "Lost Lab" were excavated. It was a six-week archaeological dig that explored the origin of the world-famous hot pepper sauce.

An eight-member team, led by Dr. Ian Brown, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alabama, unearthed thousands of artifacts and ruins at the site of the "Laboratory".

Destroyed in the 1920s, the two-story brick and clapboard building was the site where former New Orleans banker Edmund McIlhenny blended aged red pepper mash with salt and vinegar to concoct the first batches of TABASCO^® Sauce in the mid-to-late 1860s.

Several items of interesting historical significance were uncovered — the most notable being a flawless, antique cork-top TABASCO^® Sauce bottle — the kind used from 1868 to about 1928. Many other TABASCO^® relics were uncovered, including the Laboratory's underground ruins and outer walls.

Aside from finding early TABASCO^® Sauce bottles in the dig, several pieces of mega-fauna fossils were discovered at the excavation site.

Speculated to be 10,000 years old, these fossils probably came from a giant sloth, and were found mixed in with the Laboratory's debris — meaning that they weren't indigenous to the site. It's suspected that the fossils were a part of Edmund McIlhenny's natural history display, which he kept in the Lab.

What else did the team uncover? Well, in addition to the underground ruins of the Lab, the archaeological team uncovered bullets, buttons, shotgun shell casings, lead shot, fishing hooks, alligator teeth, glassware, glazed pottery, porcelain, china, fragments of a clay pipe, and a doorknob.

The summer 2000 excavation helped unearth more of the history of the beloved sauce, and it shed more light on its creation and the Civil War-era events that led to its birth.

In the summer of 2001, it was time to dig again — to find out even more about the mysteries of the Lost Lab.