Tabby Concrete: An Eroding Architectural History (original) (raw)

Tapia, Tabbi, Tabique, Tabby

On the challenge of preserving architectural histories that transcend the site.

Jola Idowu

September 2024

Tabby concrete ruins, McIntosh Sugar Mill, St Marys, Georgia. [Jola Idowu]

The chipped concrete exposes heaps of shells — white, grey, tan, pink, smooth and rough, whole and broken, a textured relief of hills and valleys. For people living in the Southeastern United States, it is a familiar picture. Seashells were mixed into most concrete structures built along the coast before the mid-19th century. Over time, the outer layer of plaster protecting the buildings has fallen away, revealing a rich material history. A couple walking beneath the live oaks in St. Marys, Georgia, might stop beside these ruins to read the historical marker erected by the state. They would learn a little about John Houston McIntosh (a planter who led a failed rebellion against Spanish colonialists in 1812) and his sugar works (“the first horizontal cane mill worked by cattle power”), but nothing about the mill’s architecture or the enslaved laborers who gathered millions of shells by hand, prepared the concrete, and laid these walls.

On the Atlantic Coast, there are traces of an older practice of making concrete with local ingredients, using burnt oyster shells for lime.

Water, sand, lime, and aggregate: the simplicity of this formula has made concrete the most common building material in the modern world. About 30 billion tons were produced last year, most of it with the store-bought lime known as Portland cement. While the ingredients are accessible, they have a massive environmental footprint. The once slow and laborious process of making concrete has been traded for a method that is fast, cost-efficient, and energy-intensive. Portland cement is made by heating limestone to 1,400 degrees Celsius, and its manufacture accounts for eight percent of global carbon emissions. 1 But cement is not the only way to bind concrete. On the Atlantic Coast of North America, there are traces of an older practice of making concrete with local ingredients, using burnt oyster shells for lime and crushed shells as aggregate. This material is known as tabby.

Castillo de San Marcos National Monument, St. Augustine, Florida; William Horton House, Jekyll Island, Georgia; and the Darien Dockside Inn, a former warehouse in Darien, Georgia. [Jola Idowu]

Widely used along the coast in the 18th and early 19th centuries, tabby concrete and plaster can be seen today at military forts, factories, plantations, and other historic landmarks, in various stages of preservation. Almost all of these places were built by enslaved Black people and indentured laborers, but few are recognized as sites of Black history and reservoirs of Black architectural knowledge. Perhaps the most significant is the Kingsley Plantation on Fort George Island, located thirty minutes east of Jacksonville, Florida. This ecological and historic preserve managed by the National Park Service features many tabby structures accessible to the public, including rare examples of tabby concrete cabins built and inhabited by enslaved people.

Few of these places are recognized as sites of Black history and reservoirs of Black architectural knowledge.

Kingsley was the last stop on a research trip that took me through the Sea Islands of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, documenting tabby architecture at sites within the U.S. historic preservation system. 2 I had read about the plantation and knew of its importance, but when I arrived, I found the stories that intrigued me were only partially legible. As I sought to uncover the subaltern history of the Black and Indigenous people who built this place, my project evolved into a complex and personal investigation of labor, materials, and architecture spanning the Atlantic World.

Planter’s house, Kingsley Plantation, Fort George Island, Florida, photographed with scaffolding in 1934. [Jack E. Boucher, Historic American Buildings Survey; Library of Congress]

On the website of the National Park Service, you can take a virtual tour of the Kingsley Plantation, starting with a panorama of buildings on the north side. The main attraction here, and the primary project of preservationists, is the two-story wooden home that belonged to enslaver Zephaniah Kingsley, who owned Fort George Island from 1817 to 1843. Constructed in 1797 by craftsmen enslaved by John McQueen, and now restored to represent a picturesque Southern past, this is the oldest existing planter’s house in Florida. The exterior walls are painted a pristine white, and the façade and structure show little sign of wear. The tour continues with views inside and outside the adjacent barn before moving on to a third structure, the kitchen house, noted for its “delicate tabby (shell concrete like material) floor.” 3

Not included here is the first thing visitors see when they enter the plantation gates: the ruins of 25 tabby concrete cabins, built and inhabited by enslaved people, arranged in a semi-circle on both sides of the main road. These homes had one or two rooms, a fireplace and chimney, a door and two windows, a thatch or wooden roof, and tabby walls and floors. Maintained properly, tabby is a durable material in wet environments because of its porosity, which allows water to evaporate. Damage caused by hurricanes and heavy rains can be repaired in the dry season by applying new layers of concrete and plaster. But when tabby is patched with asphalt and Portland cement, as it was here, water gets trapped within the walls, causing rot and cracking. 4 These cabin walls were once twelve feet high and fourteen inches thick, but they are now less than half that size, with jagged edges and tabby residue falling to the floor. Many cabins have deteriorated past the point of restorability. When I asked a park ranger about the red brick around the window openings, doors, and fireplaces, he said the brick was added to stabilize parts at risk of collapse — an ironic (or at least insufficient) fix, considering the missing roofs and walls. 5

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On the day I visited, many people drove straight past these ruins; others stopped for a quick look, curious about the buildings but unsure of their history and purpose. For much of my time at the cabins, I was alone. I walked through each one, gently touching the crumbled walls, imagining the lives lived here, a quarter mile from the planter’s house. The Kingsley Plantation utilized a task system in which enslaved people were assigned daily work and, after its completion, were allowed the rest of the day for their own activities. They spent this time in and around the cabins — cooking, cleaning, and keeping their daily routines. 6 The buildings were set only twelve feet apart, encouraging a tight community based on mutual aid and cooperation.

The architectural practice was enacted and refined by enslaved people who made the material their own through their labor and homemaking.

Storm damage was expected, and its repair was an annual event, as people worked together to gather and burn oyster shells to patch their cabins and build new ones. Tabby-making occurred over several days in the spring or summer, when the weather was dry. People would walk to the shore to collect oysters, returning with sacks of shells to be burned for lime in the field in front of their homes. They built a large kiln, or rick, some 50 feet long and 10 feet wide, made of layered logs and stuffed with pine knots to create high temperatures. In this kiln, they burned enough oyster shells to produce 200 to 300 bushels of lime, which would be mixed with equal quantities of sand, water, and shell fragments to make concrete. As the fires burned, some people measured and stirred the remaining ingredients, while others cut wood and set up stakes for the brick molds. It took a few days for the bricks to dry, and during that time people used wet tabby to repair their cabins and other structures, including the plantation storehouse. An outer layer of tabby plaster smoothed the walls and added protection from rain. Though tabby was a popular choice among planters, the architectural practice was enacted and refined by enslaved people who made the material their own through their labor and homemaking. 7

Interior of one of the cabins of enslaved people, Kingsley Plantation, Fort George Island, Florida, 1934. [Jack E. Boucher, Historic American Buildings Survey; Library of Congress]

Small replica of a rick used to burn oyster shells for lime, Kingsley Plantation, Fort George Island, Florida. [Jola Idowu]

This practice connected Black people in the Caribbean and Southern colonies with Indigenous people who cultivated oysters and inhabited the coasts before and alongside them. Oysters could be found along the Eastern shore of North America as early as 7,000 BCE, in large reefs that also supported fish, crabs, scallops, and other mollusks. 8 For the Indigenous Timucuan who settled in what is now northern Florida, oysters were a vital part of their diet, and the shells were used for tools, decoration, and religious ceremonies, or discarded in refuse mounds known as middens. These large forms, made by Indigenous people across the continent, stand as monuments to the life and history of the people who built them, but many have not been used since the 15th or 16th century, and today they are often overgrown by plants and trees. 9

When I stepped out of my car, shells discarded by Timucuan people crunched beneath my feet.

As I left the plantation, I stopped to investigate a tabby ruin on the southern side of the island. When I stepped out of my car, shells discarded by Timucuan people crunched beneath my feet. If you were to draw a map of tabby structures and shell middens throughout the region, you would find them closely aligned. Kingsley, for example, borders an ancient and expansive midden along the St. John River at its delta with the Atlantic Ocean. 10 This is no coincidence; it was easier to build where enslaved Black people could mine these sites for construction material. While the mixing of modern concrete often implicates distant geographies — sand from the West Coast, gravel from Appalachian quarries, with significant energy costs in the extraction and transport of materials, even before the manufacturing process — the ingredients for tabby could be sourced locally. The main cost was labor, which was forced upon the millions of people brought from across the Atlantic to work under slavery, and those born into it. Tabby architecture was made possible by the labor of Indigenous people who harvested oysters and created the middens, and the labor of the enslaved people who mined that resource, prepared the concrete, and built the structures. Standing near the edge of the water, I felt the confluence of these histories and realized it wasn’t the preservation of this one site that interested me, so much as these relations that reached across time and distance.

Oyster shells near the Charles Thomson House, Fort George Island, Florida. [Jola Idowu]

Charles Thomson House, Fort George Island, Florida. [Jola Idowu]

Over the course of about five centuries, knowledge of how to make concrete using oyster lime traveled from North Africa to Spain to Spanish Florida and then to the British colonies, a history that can be traced through the etymology of tabby. The word descends from the Spanish building material tapia, or rammed earth. When tapia was used in North Africa, it shrunk under the hot sun, compelling builders to develop a formula that could withstand drier weather. The North African tabbi added lime from shells and stone fragments to make a stronger, more resistant form of rammed earth, which the Almoravid and Almohad dynasties of the Moorish caliphate used for military construction from the 13th to 16th centuries. Later, the conquistadors who crossed the Atlantic to explore and colonize the West Indies brought tabbi to the Americas. 11

I felt the confluence of these histories and realized it wasn’t the preservation of this one site that interested me, so much as these relations.

When Juan Ponce de León arrived in Puerto Rico as its first Spanish governor, he built his home with tabbi, then known in Spanish as tapia real. This is the oldest continuously inhabited residence in the Western hemisphere, and it was built with local stone mixed with shells and lime sourced from Cuba. But shipping was too expensive for large architectural projects; builders needed a local solution. So in 1580 the colonists began making tapia with oyster shells from nearby reefs. Tabique de ostión, or oyster concrete, was used for the old walls of San Juan and other construction projects on the neighboring island of Hispaniola. Soon this architectural knowledge spread to Spanish Florida, and up the coast to Georgia and the Carolinas. 12

The first trace of tabby in the British colonies was in Beaufort, South Carolina, likely the result of British shipbuilders or enslaved Black people who passed through Saint Augustine, the capital of Spanish Florida. 13 That was the site of the Castillo de San Marcos, which was built in the late 17th century and then strengthened over decades, using tabique mixed with coquina, a natural rock. The Spanish had first fortified Saint Augustine with wood, but after frequent fires, the military petitioned the crown to construct a masonry fort. 14

Castillo de San Marcos, St. Augustine, Florida. [Jola Idowu]

Castillo de San Marcos, St. Augustine, Florida. [Jola Idowu]

Castillo de San Marcos, St. Augustine, Florida. [Jola Idowu]

When the British saw how easily the soft walls of the Spanish forts absorbed musket fire, they decided to adapt the architecture for their own defenses. The English word tabby was popularized by James Oglethorpe, the general who founded the colony of Georgia in 1732, and who initiated the practice of sourcing material from shell middens. He used tabby concrete to build Fort Frederica in 1736 and introduced its use in residential building through the construction of the adjacent town and his own home, Orange Hill. Eventually that house fell into the ownership of the Spalding family, and its architecture inspired a lifelong fascination for Thomas Spalding, a planter, enslaver, and U.S. Representative, who in the early 19th century wrote and lectured across the South on the benefits of tabby, promoting a revival style in Darien, Georgia, that spread to the rest of the Sea Islands. 16

Tabby was popular for its structural resilience and the low cost of materials, but to produce enough concrete for a single building required many hundreds of hours of labor, which was only economical under slavery. In the Northern states, the cost of construction was too high, compared to other methods; and in the South, tabby was not used after the emancipation of Black people during the Civil War. This coincided with the invention of Portland cement, the readymade binding agent that replaced burnt oyster lime. Though the raw materials cost more than shell waste, Portland cement was much simpler to prepare. There was another brief tabby revival among Sea Island mansions in the early 20th century, when a hybrid concrete made with oyster shells and Portland cement was fashionable, but otherwise tabby architecture became obsolete. 17

McIntosh Sugar Mill, St Marys, Georgia. [Jola Idowu]

Darien Dockside Inn, Darien, Georgia. [Jola Idowu]

The story of tabby is not easily told within the dominant structures of the U.S. historic preservation system, which is organized around individual sites. The temporal and geographic blur between Black and Indigenous and White populations — from North Africa, to Spain, to the Caribbean, to the American coast — involves legacies of colonialism and capitalism united by the expanse of an ocean. Inscribed here is a marginalized history of exchange and labor that reverberates through architectural practice. For Southern planters, tabby was a practical choice that reflected a calculation of costs and benefits. But simultaneously for the enslaved communities who were excluded from ownership, tabby was a durable material available to build and repair their own homes. The slowness of this architecture — and the free, local ingredients — allowed enslaved Black people a small degree of agency in creating a sense of place. How can a site like Kingsley Plantation present this transcontinental history? Considering the current state of these cabins, nobody has really tried.

How can Kingsley Plantation present this transcontinental history? Considering the current state of these cabins, nobody has really tried.

In this way, Kingsley highlights the failures of a preservation regime that has overwritten and erased many invaluable histories. American preservation practice started right around the time tabby disappeared, and it was initially defined by wealthy, White benefactors who used their resources to protect and prioritize objects significant to their vision of an idealized American history. 17 Efforts to preserve the built heritage of Black Americans started a half century later, with a campaign in 1917 by the National Association of Colored Women to buy Cedar Hill, where Frederick Douglass lived. 18 Today, organizations such as the Trust for Public Land, the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund at The National Trust for Historic Preservation, The Texas Freedom Colonies Project, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation continue this work; but, with a lack of resources, many Black historical sites are left in ruin. 19

An example of this inequity is the National Register of Historic Places. 20 Of the 95,000 entries on the register — a status that comes with institutional legitimacy and promise of financial investment — less than three percent relate directly to the Black experience. Of the 2,500 entries that are National Landmarks, less than 200 are Black sites. 21 There are many reasons for this. Slave cabins and Black and Indigenous historical sites were often not preserved due to their “modesty,” which contradicts the grandiose image of American history promoted by early preservation groups. Other sites were destroyed to suppress Black political and social power during and after Reconstruction, or as a result of urban renewal projects in the mid-20th century. Applying to the register requires extensive documentation, and acts and methods of preservation common within Black communities, such as oral tradition or histories carried generationally through the body, do not match bureaucratic demands for evidence and primary sources, like deeds or letters, that may not exist for these sites. 22

African American cemetery, Fort Frederica National Monument, St. Simons Island, Georgia. Buried here are the formerly enslaved relatives of Robert Abbott, founder of The Chicago Defender and one of the first black millionaires in the United States. These graves were “discovered” in 2019. [Jola Idowu]

African American cemetery, Fort Frederica National Monument, St. Simons Island, Georgia. [Jola Idowu]

In 1988, the National Park Service and the State of Florida established the Timucuan Preserve, encompassing 46,000 acres of coastal wetlands and historic attractions, including Fort George Island, Kingsley Plantation, Fort Caroline, Cedar Point, and American Beach. 23 Returning this land to an ecological state while curating its various histories is a complex and difficult task, and the significance of the tabby architecture is just one of many stories that can be told. 24 Kingsley was one of the most profitable Southern plantations of its time, noted for an innovative crop rotation that made efficient use of the entire island and contributed to high production yields. An exhibit in the barn adjacent to the main house highlights the plantation’s agricultural importance under Zephaniah Kingsley. But there are efforts by researchers, preservationists, and park staff to bring awareness to the labor of the Indigenous and Black peoples who sustained and developed the island. According to a ranger I spoke with, there are plans to devote more resources to presenting the history of the cabins and to relocate the main road which runs over the graves of enslaved people who lived on the plantation. 25

Of the 95,000 entries on the National Register of Historic Places, less than three percent relate directly to the Black experience.

Still, the institutions that support historic preservation — public agencies, private funders, disciplinary training and conferences — are organized around the protection and restoration of individual objects and sites. They are oriented toward assumptions of visual evidence, physical presence, and attachment to a nation-state. Black and Indigenous materials and knowledge reach further. Tabby has a different meaning when it is used by enslaved people in their own cabins than when it is used for building a military fort or an enslaver’s house. Though the tabby structures at Fort George are protected from further damage, the nuances of tabby as a cross-generational, transnational material are lost. Presenting this fuller history requires a shift in preservation practice, recognizing the fluid, multiple meanings emplaced at Black and Indigenous sites.

Fort Mose, a free Black settlement in Spanish Florida. [Jola Idowu]

In Provincializing Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty examines colonialism as an ongoing process of translation between colonizer and colony that occurs on two timelines, one marked by colonialism’s totalizing effect and the other characterized by the adaptation of people living within it. Blackness within the Atlantic World has a similar duality. 26 On one hand, Blackness is a fluid identity moving between countries and cultures but united by shared African heritage, a concept popularized in the 1930s by the Négritude movement in the French Caribbean and Francophone Africa. 27

On the other hand, Blackness is conceived by the Créolité movement as a “composite culture,” “born from history,” emerging from the in-between of civilizations, not at the origin or destination, but on the journey across the Atlantic, shaped by the brutal path of the slave ship. 28 The Gullah/Geechee people of the Sea Islands in the United States are stewards of a hybrid culture, preserving Central and West African customs and languages in isolation from white settlers. 29 In Cuba, the Black population reflects an amalgamation of Spanish, American, and African influences, including the descendants of escaped American slaves who gained freedom through allegiance to the Spanish crown after the fall of Spanish Florida. 30 Both the Négritude and Créolité movements recognize that the nation-state cannot contain the narratives of marginalized people. Instead, they call for a reimagining of Blackness as borderless and fluid.

Tabby has a different meaning when it is used by enslaved people in their own cabins than when it is used for building a military fort or an enslaver’s house.

Tabby architecture has been shaped by flows of capital and labor moving throughout the Atlantic World. To tell its story we must reject the visual primacy of U.S. preservation practice and embrace an archive of the kinesthetic — one that includes touch, smell, rumors, and other forms of knowledge that hold particular importance for populations subjected to historical violence and silenced by colonial hegemonies. We need networks and systems of preservation attuned to these many dimensions of experience, and to intercultural exchange. Organizations like UNESCO invite countries to propose sites of cultural significance and facilitate cooperation across political borders, but they are still bound by hegemonic understandings of nationhood and of what is worth preserving. There are also preservation networks that operate entirely outside national frameworks, pooling monetary resources and research materials. Independent creators like BlackPast — a digital archive and website dedicated to Black history — collect and present resources from Africa and the African diaspora, supported by a network of 900 historians across six continents. 31

Tabby cabins of enslaved people, Kingsley Plantation, Fort George Island, Florida, 1886. [George Barker; Library of Congress]

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Tabby can also be preserved through a network of making, similar to bamboo and laterite, which have experienced their own cultural resurgences. Bamboo is promoted for its eco-friendly qualities and adaptability in modern architecture, from South America to Southeast Asia. 32 Laterite, a clayey soil rich in iron and aluminum, has been used for its durability and thermal properties in tropical regions of Africa and India. 33 Likewise, tabby concrete could be revived by communities interested in a slower, deindustrialized approach to construction.

This requires a shift in preservation practice, recognizing the fluid, multiple meanings emplaced at Black and Indigenous sites.

In the context of the current climate crisis, tabby could be used to build homes in areas where material and energy resources are scarce. Made in small batches with sustainably farmed oysters, tabby would require significant labor, but that could be an opportunity to create new practices of collectivity and care in building and repair. A notable example of cultural preservation is the practice of artist Beverly Buchanan, who made tabby sculptures in Georgia, beginning in the late 1970s. Her public artworks, inspired by the architectural ruins of the rural South, highlight tabby’s aesthetic and historical value, contributing to a broader appreciation and ongoing interest in this traditional material, while emphasizing that tabby degrades over time without proper care. 34

As was true for the Black grassroots preservationists who came before us, the demand to carry forward our histories involves relentless struggle. This struggle must be directed toward a future that reflects the truths and conditions of our past. Objects of preservation like the tabby architecture at the Kingsley Plantation should be placed within a narrative that encompasses the Atlantic World, reflecting a cultural heritage that is as fluid and complex as our own identities.

Shells in the grass beside the tabby cabins of enslaved people, Kingsley Plantation, Fort George Island, Florida. [Jola Idowu]

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Notes
  1. “Concrete Needs to Lose Its Colossal Carbon Footprint,” editorial, Nature 597 (2021), 593-94, https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02612-5.
  2. Besides Kingsley, the list of tabby sites visited during my research trip includes Saint Augustine, Fort Matanzas, Bulow Plantation Ruins Historic Park, and Dunlawton Sugar Mills Garden, in Florida; and McIntosh Sugar Mill Park, Horton House, Saint Cyprian’s Episcopal Church, Fort Frederica National Monument, and Wormsloe State Historic Site, in Georgia.
  3. The planter’s house was built in 1797 and modified in 1869 and 1886. Since its acquisition by the National Park Service, it has been repaired and restored in stages. See “Virtual Tour of Kingsley Plantation,” National Park Service, updated April 1, 2020; “National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Kingsley Plantation Historic District Additional Documentation,” 2016, National Park Service History Electronic Library and Archive [PDF]; and Historic American Buildings Survey, Kingsley Plantation, 6 Palmetto Avenue, Jacksonville, Duval County, FL, 1933, Library of Congress.
  4. Lauren B. Sickels-Taves, “Understanding Historic Tabby Structures: Their History, Preservation, and Repair,” APT Bulletin: The Journal of Preservation Technology 28.2-3 (1997), 22-29, https://doi.org/10.2307/1504529; and Lauren Allsopp (formerly Sickels-Taves), “The Care and Preservation of Historic Tabby,” 2023, fact sheet, Benson Ford Research Center, The Henry Ford [PDF].
  5. I observed 23 of the 25 tabby cabins at Kingsley Plantation. The plantation has a main central road, and the tabby cabins are situated on either side — sixteen cabins east of the road and nine to the east — in a semi-circular formation. I recorded all the eastern cabins and seven of the western ones. Originally, there were sixteen cabins on the west side, but seven were demolished by John Rollins (an owner of Fort George Island after Zephaniah Kingsley) to build a boathouse and dock. The height of the ruins varies from 1′-3′ to 7-8′, with 12′ x 20′ dimensions. The cabin walls were originally built to be 14.5″ thick, but due to erosion are now 6.5″ thick. One of the cabins, E1, has been restored to its Antebellum form, and many have been structurally stabilized through replastering and the use of brick supports to prevent collapse.
  6. At the Kingsley Plantation, enslaved people did not work Sundays and half of Saturday.
  7. See, again, “National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Kingsley Plantation Historic District Additional Documentation”; Sickels-Taves, “Understanding Historic Tabby Structures,” and Allsopp, “The Care and Preservation of Historic Tabby.” See also Thomas Spalding, “On the Mode of Construction of Tabby Buildings, and the Propriety of Improving Our Plantations in a Permanent Manner,” The Southern Agriculturist (December 1830), 617-21.
  8. See “Eastern Oysters,” Chesapeake Bay Foundation; and “Eastern Oyster,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Oysters are bivalve mollusks found in intertidal saltwater habitats, and the range of the Eastern Oyster extends from Louisiana to Massachusetts. During the “sticking” phase of oyster reproduction, new oysters attach to older oysters as substrate, enabling the growth of large reefs. The reduction of the Eastern Oyster population has led to increased architectural and environmental interests in restoring reefs to their former scale to combat climate change. Environmentalists and design firms such as SCAPE Studio have invested in the expansion of oyster reefs to aid in the rehabilitation of ocean habitats and the mitigation of ocean and river swell, but such studies usually do not discuss the connection to Indigenous middens and tabby concrete.
  9. Indigenous tribes would visit middens in late winter and spring to discard shells, and as a place for gatherings and ceremonies. The calcium carbonate in oysters creates alkaline conditions that are conducive for material preservation, and so middens are studied by archaeologists as a record of the historical and climatic conditions of Indigenous societies. However, many middens have been looted of historical artifacts and are further endangered by sea level rise. See Murray Carpenter, “Native American Secrets Lie Buried in Huge Shell Mounds,” The New York Times, October 24, 2017.
  10. “Shell Middens at Fort George,” Florida State Parks. Other middens in what is today Florida include Otter Mound Preserve and Crystal River Site.
  11. When Charles E. Peterson, an architect working for the National Park Service, traveled to Spain and Morocco in the 1960s to conduct research on the evolution of concrete, he wrote to his friend, an expert on the Moors, reporting that the “walls of Rabat were made of the stuff [tapia] and in talking (with an interpreter) to men who are repairing them found that the old mix was 50% hamri (the local reddish clay) and 50% jir (lime burned on the beach at Sale across the river).” Tapia can also be found in Senegal as block houses in Saint Louis and Fadiout. In 1728, a French clergyman, Pere Labat, was walking down the streets of Saint Louis, when he observed a strange occurrence: “African tabby” in a “Portuguese style.” The knowledge of tabby in Senegal was likely acquired from Iberian slave traders or North African travelers who traded on the Senegalese coast. See Janet Bigbee Gritzner, “Tabby in the Coastal Southeast: The Culture History of an American Building Material,” dissertation, Louisiana State University, 1978, https://doi.org/10.31390/gradschool_disstheses.3205.
  12. The first Spanish settlement in the Americas was Nueva Isabela, established by Christopher Columbus in January 1494, on the northeastern coast of Hispaniola. It was built of wood (houses), stone (public buildings), and tapia (the fort). Tapia real has also been found in Santo Domingo, San Salvador, Antigua, and Guatemala. See David Gregory Cornelius, “Cement and Concrete, Creativity and Community, and Charles E. Peterson,” _APT Bulletin: The Journal of Preservation Technology 37._1 (2006), 17-25; and Albert C. Manucy, “Tapia or Tabby,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 11.4 (1952), 22-32, https://doi.org/10.2307/987587.
  13. In Beaufort, tabby was used to build the Charleston Powder House (1713) and Beaufort Arsenal (1795).
  14. See Gritzner, op cit. In 1564, the Protestant French Huguenots established Fort Caroline near what is now Jacksonville, Florida. The following year, Catholic Spanish settlers, who were based in the Caribbean, sought to extend their dominion over Florida by building a rival fort and town, Saint Augustine. This is the second oldest continuously inhabited city in the Americas and the first Spanish settlement in what is now the United States. In 1668, the Spanish crown approved the construction of a masonry fort, but it had to be rebuilt repeatedly due to holes from musket balls that would crack and diminish the structural integrity of the wood. Due to the lack of stone in the region and the high cost of importing tapia real lime from Cuba, settlers looked for an alternative, which led to the discovery of coquina on Anastasia Island. Coquina is formed by the vigorous abrasion, fracturing, and adhesion of shells caused by wave pressure. Castillo de San Marcos was built with a combination of tabby and coquina.
  15. See Gritzner, op cit. Oglethorpe lived on St. Simon’s Island, Georgia. His technique, popular in the 18th century, used tall 22″ tabby molds and uneven supports for casting, causing holes in the tabby. Spalding built tabby structures on Sapelo Island and in Darien, including his home and plantation, Ashantilly. His technique used 12″ molds and evenly aligned supports that left no cast marks.
  16. After 1900, almost no new structures were built with traditional tabby, though shells are still used today as aggregate for sidewalks and paved trails along the Southern coast.
  17. See Whitney Martinko, Historic Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020). Historical preservation was mobilized to erase the diversity of the American people and argue for white European settlers as the “inheritors” and “builders” of this land. For example, the men who in the late 18th century sought to preserve the Indigenous earthworks at Marietta, Ohio, did so because they wanted to advertise them as evidence of an “Ancient America,” built by early European explorers, and thus a precursor to colonial architecture. In fact, the mounds were built by the late Adena and Hopewell cultures more than a thousand years before European contact.
  18. See Casey Cep, “The Fight to Preserve African-American History,” The New Yorker, January 27, 2020.
  19. The African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund at the National Trust for Historic Preservation launched in 2017 and is the largest effort ever to support African American historic sites. See also Trust for Public Land, “Explore 20 Sites Honoring Black History,” January 4, 2024; The Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites, Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania; and the Texas Freedom Colonies Project, founded by Dr. Andrea Roberts, discussed on Places in Andrea Roberts, Danielle Purifoy, and Maia L. Butler, “Stewarding Black Worlds,” Places Journal, October 2023, https://doi.org/10.22269/231031.
  20. The Historic Sites Act of 1935 codified the government’s role in preserving the nation’s built history. The act created the Historic Site Survey, which hired historians and architects to document buildings and other notable sites. Fewer than five percent of the properties identified by this survey as historically significant were formally declared National Historic Sites, and they were placed under the management of the U.S. Department of Interior and National Park Service, creating competition for resources with national parks and other programs within that agency. In 1966, Lyndon B. Johnson signed the National Historic Preservation Act, which created the National Register of Historic Places, to collect and manage information on sites of national and local importance. The process of listing a property or landscape under the National Register involves an extensive application and research process, started by constituents who contact their State Historic Preservation Office. The standards are higher and the procedures more involved for National Landmarks, which must have significance related to a theme of American history. See Stephanie Jacobson, “History of Historic Preservation,” HeinOnline, August 25, 2022; and National Park Service, “National Historic Landmarks: Frequently Asked Questions.”
  21. The analysis of sites on the National Register of Historic Places is by the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, as cited in Diane Regas, “Conserving Black History Sites Should Be A Priority For Us All,” Trust for Public Land, February 15, 2022. BlackPast.org maintains a full list of “National African American Historic Landmarks by State.”
  22. See Regas and Cep, op. cit.
  23. American Beach was an African-American beach founded in 1935 by Abraham Lincoln Lewis, Florida’s first Black millionaire and husband to a Kingsley descendant.
  24. In 1817, Kingsley purchased Fort George Island from its previous owner, John McIntosh, having moved there with his wife Anna Jai Kingsley, a freed slave born in Senegal. Kingsley believed that freed people of color should hold the same rights as Whites, but he also believed in slavery as essential to the human condition and American economy. He saw giving rights to freed Black and Brown people as a way to side free people of color with the White majority. His theory was rejected by the Florida government, which forbade interracial marriage and prevented his children from inheriting his property, so he moved with his family (by this time he had two other wives) to Haiti. The enslaved people at his plantation became indentured servants because Haiti was a free nation. See “National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Kingsley Plantation Historic District Additional Documentation.”
  25. According to the National Register documentation, there are six graves at the Kingsley Plantation.
  26. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton University Press, 2000).
  27. Souleymane Bachir Diagne, “Négritude,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, revised January 24, 2023. Négritude began with the friendship between writers and political leaders Aimé Césaire of Martinique, Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal, and Léon Damas of French Guiana. Though from different countries, they found similarities through their shared Black identity and wanted a movement that advocated for this unity and attempted to bridge the distance created by slavery. They were inspired by the Harlem Renaissance and rejected the European elitism of their education.
  28. Ibid. The Creolité movement is rooted in Edouard Glissant’’s theory of creolization, which differentiates between “atavistic” cultures based on creation myths and “composite” cultures shaped by historical events. Glissant cites his own identity as emerging from the experience of the slave ship, rather than from any specific place or nation. He uses examples like the identity African-American to illustrate a more personal and expansive sense of selfhood, in contrast with the more fixed cultural definitions promoted by the Négritude movement.
  29. National Park Service, Low Country Gullah Culture: Special Resource Study and Final Environmental Impact Statement (NPS Southeaster Regional Office, 2005). [PDF] The Sea Islands have a historical importance to African-American history as the spatial origin of Gullah/Geechee culture. Prior to emancipation, these islands were the site of many plantations that produced sea island cotton, the highest-quality cotton in the United States. To avoid inclement weather and diseases carried by mosquitos, many European settlers chose to live on the mainland. As a result, enslaved Africans and their descendants lived with Indigenous people, in almost complete isolation from White people. However, many of the islands and their history are subject to encroaching development, which has forced Gullah/Geechee people out of these areas.
  30. Spanish Florida was a refuge state for escaped Black enslaved peoples, as slavery was illegal. Escaped slaves were made Spanish citizens after four years of military service.
  31. See BlackPast.org, cited in note 21.
  32. “Natural Building Materials: Bamboo,” Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, January 1, 2018.
  33. Nisha Maklur and Parag Narkhede, “Study of Laterite Stone as Building Material.” International Journal of Engineering Research 7.3 (2018), 223-26, https://doi.org/10.5958/2319-6890.2018.00063.6.
  34. Siddhartha Mitter, “A Vanishing Masterpiece in the Georgia Marshes,” The New York Times, July 29, 2023. See also Beverly Buchanan’s website.
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