Bert Gildart: Writer and Photographer

©Bert Gildart: Not far from the almost contiguous South River and the Bigwheel campgrounds near St. Mary, Georgia, stands old Tabby Ruins, a sugar works plantation built by John Houstoun McIntosh about 1825. Though McIntosh’s plantation was of interest, what was of particular interest was the blending of sea shells into a walls that function like the concrete walls of our era. The technique was used throughout Georgia, often in slave housing.

 

Because I was totally unfamiliar with this type of construction I located a site on the Internet and have extracted information from the New Georgia Encylopedia. Here’s what the dictionary has to say about tabbly construction and about its origins.

ENCYCLOPEDIA DEFINITION

“Tabby is a type of building material used in the coastal Southeast from the late 1500s to the 1850s. Historians disagree on whether its use originated along the northwest African coast and was taken to Spain and Portugal, or vice versa. The origin of the word tabby itself is unclear: the Spanish word tapia means a mud wall, and the Arabic word tabbi means a mixture of mortar and lime. Similar words also appear in both Portuguese and Gullah. The Spanish brought the concept of tabby to the New World and used it extensively in Florida. Locals in Georgia adapted the concept or “recipe” for tabby to local materials.

 

True tabby is made of equal parts lime, water, sand, oyster shells, and ash. The ash is a byproduct of preparing the lime, but its presence contributes to the hardening of the end product. Tabby can be poured into molds for foundations, walls, floors, roofs, columns, and other structural elements. It dries to a hard finish, is generally a grayish-white color with variations according to the materials used, and is extremely durable. It is best maintained by applying stucco to the outer surfaces as protection from water damage. Roots and vines can cause the deterioration of tabby, so vegetation must be kept away from structures built of the material.”

So there you have it: tabby construction, and because McIntosh’s basic foundation structure still stands after all these years, enduring hurricanes, possible some freezing and thawing, it has obviously performed well.

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 19th, 2010 at 6:28 am and is filed under National Lands, Natural History/Conservation, Photography, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.