Beaufort, South Carolina, is well known for its historical
architecture, but perhaps none is quite as remarkable as those
edifices formed by tabby, sometimes called coastal concrete,
comprising a mixture of lime, sand, water, and oyster shells. Tabby
itself has a storied history stretching back to Iberian, Caribbean,
Spanish American, and even African roots--brought to the United
States by adventurers, merchants, military engineers, planters, and
the enslaved. Tabby has been preserved most abundantly in the
Beaufort area and its outlying islands, (and along the Sea Islands
all the way to Florida as well) with Fort Frederick in 1734 having
the earliest example of a diverse group of structures, which
included town houses, seawalls, planters' homes, barns,
agricultural buildings, and slave quarters. Tabby's insulating
properties are excellent protection from long, hot, humid, and
sometimes deadly summers; and on the islands, particularly, wealthy
plantation owners built grand houses for themselves and improved
dwellings for enslaved workers that after two hundred-plus years
still stand today. An extraordinarily hardy material, tabby has a
history akin to some of the world's oldest building techniques and
is referred to as "rammed earth," as well as " tapia" in Spanish,
"pise de terre" in French, and "hangtu" in Chinese. The form that
tabby construction took along the Sea Islands, however, was born of
necessity. Here stone and brick were rare and expensive, but the
oyster shells that were used as the source for the tabby's lime
base were plentiful. Today these bits of shell, often visible in
the walls and forms constructed long ago, give tabby its unique and
iconic appearance. Colin Brooker, architect and expert on historic
restoration, has not only made an exhaustive foray into local tabby
architecture and heritage; he also has made a multinational tour as
well in search of tabby origins, evolution, and diffusion from the
Bahamas to Morocco to Andalusia, which can be traced back as far as
the tenth century. Brooker has spent more than thirty years
investigating the origins of tabby, its chemistry, its engineering,
and its limitations. The Shell Builders lays out a sweeping,
in-depth, and fascinating investigative journey--at once
archaeological, sociological, and historical--into the ways prior
inhabitants used and shaped their environment in order to house and
protect themselves, leaving behind an architectural legacy that is
both mysterious and beautiful. Lawrence S. Rowland, a distinguished
professor emeritus of history at the University of South Carolina
Beaufort and past president of the South Carolina Historical
Society, provides a foreword.
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