Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, November 25, 1997

Spicy Avery Island home of salt, pepper, sugar

by Jim Bradshaw

Remains of baskets, stone implements, pottery, and other artifacts indicate that the island was occupied at least intermittently by Native Americans as early as 10,000 B.C. Later Indian cultures put salt recovered from brine springs into large clay pots and traded the salt with tribes in central Texas, Arkansas, and Ohio.

Elizabeth Triett Hayes and her children were probably the first white people to settle there, about 1790. In 1797, she asked to be granted the land she had homesteaded. She said in her petition that "she had been a resident of the Attakapas for 15 years, and that she had been abandoned by her husband for 12 years." Her husband was Malachy Hayes. They had come to Opelousas from Pennsylvania about 1780, probably among a group of settlers coming from Fort Pitt. In 1811, Elizabeth was given title to 400 arpents of land on the island.

Elizabeth had chosen land that was fairly high and level and which, in later years, became a productive sugar plantation. By 1812, she had registered her cattle brand. She died at her home on the island on Dec. 26, 1815. Her burial place is not recorded, but it is most likely that she was interred in the garden near her home.

Her son, John Hayes, would become a sugar planter of some wealth and the owner of several thousand acres of land.

By the time that Elizabeth had been granted her title, other settlers were also laying claims to parts of the island and began a confusing series of sales of bits and pieces of it.

Samuel Lightner, a justice of the peace in Catahoula Parish received title to another 400 arpents about the same time as Elizabeth received hers. Also, Jess McCall was given title to two claims, each 400 arpents, one of them purchased from William Smith and one of them from Josiah French.

McCall bought his land from Smith and French on Nov. 19, 1810. Smith had evidently occupied the land in the late 1790s, selling a part of his claim to French shortly before McCall's purchase.

Also in 1810, Jacques Fontenette, a merchant from New Orleans, made claim to all vacant land remaining on Petite Anse Island, and then began to sell away portions of it, including some that were apparently not his to sell.

Fontenette sold some of his land to Jesse McCall and some to Michael Hayes, who sold his land to William Garrett, who two years later apparently sold the land back to Fontenette, who then sold that land to Jesse McCall, too. Then, on July 5, 1814, McCall sold to Joshua Baker of St. Mary Parish "all that tract of land, containing 14 arpents front by the depth of 40 beet, bounded south by Eliza Hayes and north by the marshes, being the same land McCall purchased from Jacques Fontenette in 1812."

Practically all of these bits and pieces would be consolidated into the holdings of Jonathan Craig Marsh, a native of Rahway, New Jersey, who came to Iberia Parish about 1820.

Some time before 1839, Jonathan Marsh returned home to New Jersey, leaving management of his Louisiana plantation in the hands of his son-in-law, Daniel Dudley Avery, a Baton Rouge attorney who would become a judge. (Avery had married Sarah Marsh in 1837.) About 1839, through sale and donation, the Marsh plantation property was divided, into thirds among Avery Ashbel Henshaw, who was another Marsh son-in-law, and Marsh's son, George Marsh.

In April 1854, Ashbel Henshaw sold his one-third interest to Daniel D. Avery giving Avery two-thirds interest in the plantation. George Marsh died in 1859, and Avery inherited the final one third of the old Jonathan Marsh plantation.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Hayes and his sister Mary, had bought out their brothers and sisters and continued to operate a sugar plantation there. In 1817, Mary married Edmund Rose, and, by 1844, the Hayes and Rose plantation occupied the north half of the island and John Hayes had put up his own sugar mill there. Mary's children operated the mill for their uncle until 1854, when they sold their share of their mother's estate to their uncle and established plantations for themselves off the island.

On Jan. 25, 1869, Daniel Avery bought the last Hayes interest in the island, and for the first time, all of it belonged to one man. Judge Avery's descendants, the Avery and McIlhenny families, have continued to own the island since.

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