Tabasco&reg

I'm a zesty red pepper sauce that has been spicing up people life for 136 years. You Probably have me or one of my family in your cupboard right now.
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1850s – Edmund McIlhenny (1815-1890), a New Orleans banker, was given a gift by a soldier returning to New Orleans from Mexico of some dried peppers that were acquired in Mexico during the United States-Mexican War (1846-1848). The soldier told him to try them in his food. He used one or two and like it, so he saved the seeds from the remaining peppers and planted them. He grew them in his wife’s garden at Avery Island. McIlhenny did not raise them commercially for another twenty years.
1863 – In April of 1863, during the Civil War (1861-1865), Edmund McIlhenny fled with his wife when the Union Army entered the city. They took refuge on Avery Island in rural Iberia Parish, where her family owned a salt-mining business. Because of the salt on the island, the Union forces invaded the island and captured the mines in 1863. The McIlhennys fled to Texas and didn’t return until the end of the war. The area that would become 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." When the McIlhenny family came back, they found their plantation ruined and their mansion plundered. One possession remained, a crop of capsicum hot peppers.
1868 – Determined to turn the peppers into income, he devised a spicy sauce using vinegar, Avery Island salt, and chopped capsicum peppers. McIlhenny packaged his aged sauce in 350 used cologne bottles and sent them as samples to likely wholesalers. He passed some of his sauce onto General Hazard, who was the federal administrator in the region. The general knew a good thing when he tasted it. His brother happened to be the larges wholesale grocer in the United States. General Hazard sent some of the hot sauce to his brother in New York, and told him it was made from a new kind of chili pepper. On the strength of the purchase orders that followed, Edmund McIlhenny began a commercial operation in 1868. At first he wanted to call this new sauce Petite Anse Sauce (after the island), but when family members baked at the commercial use of the family’s island name, he opted for his second choice “Tabasco.” Some historians say it’s a Central American Indian word that means “land where the soil is hot and humid.” This certainly describes the climate of Avery Island. Other historians have put forth that it actually means “place of coral or oyster shell.”
1870 - McIlhenny secured a patent Pepper Sauce. In 1872, he opened an office in London to handle the European market. Bottles with metal tops replaced the corked bottles sealed with green wax as the increasing demand for Tabasco sauce caused changes in the packaging.
Tabasco brand pepper sauce is sold in more than 160 countries and territories and is packaged in 22 languages and dialects. More than 700,000 bottles of Tabasco sauce are produced each day at the Tabasco factory on Avery Island, Louisiana (free factory tours are available; access to Avery Island requires one dollar toll). These range in size from the common two-ounce and five-ounce (60 and 150 ml) bottles available in most grocery stores, up to a one US gallon (4 liter) jug for food service businesses, and down to a 1/8th-ounce miniature bottle.
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