Following the Tabby Trail: Where Coastal History Is Captured in Unique Oyster-Shell Structures

Following the Tabby Trail provides a guided tour of tabby structures along the southeastern coast, with over 200 illustrations and profiles of historic figures. Tabby, a unique oyster-shell concrete, was used by Spanish colonists, French colonists, and enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples. The trail includes ancient shell mounds, forts, homes of enslaved people, warehouses, Charleston's seawall, churches, and cemeteries.

Format: Hardback
Length: 277 pages
Publication date: 30 August 2022
Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Following the Tabby Trail offers a comprehensive exploration of the significant tabby structures located along the southeastern coast, featuring over two hundred illustrations that shed light on the human and architectural histories of forty-eight specific sites. Jingle Davis delves into the intriguing history of tabby, a unique oyster-shell concrete, and its role in understanding the complex past of the coast. While the first documented use of tabby in North America occurred in 1672 in St. Augustine, Florida, Spanish colonists had been utilizing its components a century earlier. Additionally, colonizers from France and the British Isles embraced the building material for their colonial missions, employing enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples in the construction process. Tabby remained a popular and enduring building material until shortly after the Civil War. This visually stunning work provides readers with a comprehensive guide to the underappreciated tabby structures still standing along the approximately 275-mile trail from just south of St. Augustine north to the abandoned town of Dorchester near Summerville. The sites included in the book range from ancient Late Archaic shell mounds known as middens and ancient rings of shells thousands of years old to Fort Matanzas, constructed in 1742 but named for a sixteenth-century massacre of French colonists by St. Augustine's Spanish founder, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés. Fort Mose, a significant feature of Florida's B.

Dimension: 203 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780820357492