Welcome to Erin Mankie's Cabinet of Curiosity's, a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm

and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display,

just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

It's possible to live somewhere all your life and not know everything about it.

When we move to a new place, much of what we learn about it is gleaned from exploration.

There might be hidden treasure within the walls of a home or buried in the backyard.

For the Avery family in 1861, that treasure wasn't just inside the home.

The whole place was a gold mine.

Daniel Dudley Avery was a legal scholar from Baton Rouge.

In 1831, he married into the Marsh family, a wealthy clan of landowners with their own

island near the Gulf of Mexico.

The marshes turned the island into a sugar plantation, as its soil and climate provided

ideal growing conditions.

But years later, after Daniel had become the sole owner of his in-laws empire, he made

some changes.

First, he renamed the island Avery Island.

Next, he started digging around, eventually stumbling upon a salt mine deep underground.

Avery didn't know that the Native Americans who had originally owned the island used

to harvest the salt to trade with other tribes in neighboring states.

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