The Cultural and Material Legacy of Tabby on Daufuskie Island

Tabby is a concrete-like material composed of lime, sand, water, and oyster shells, historically used along the southeastern coast of the United States. Though its architectural lineage is often traced to Spanish colonial and North African influences, tabby in the Lowcountry was shaped most directly by the labor, knowledge, and adaptation of enslaved Africans.¹ As Brooker notes, “Tabby is not just a material but a historical narrative encoded in lime and shell.”²

Introduced in the 17th century, tabby gained widespread use in the 18th and 19th centuries throughout Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida, prized for its resilience in humid coastal environments. On Daufuskie Island, it was employed in constructing dwellings, outbuildings, cisterns, and plantation walls. The remnants of the North Slave Settlement at Haig Point include some of the most intact tabby slave dwellings in Beaufort County.³ Built between 1826 and 1833, these one-room structures are laid out in a gentle arc along the Cooper River—a deviation from the rigid, linear grid typical of plantation quarters. This curved orientation may reflect a blend of African spatial logics, environmental responsiveness, and community structure.⁴

Tabby’s construction process was highly skilled and labor-intensive. Oyster shells were burned in open-air kilns to create quicklime, a task requiring careful heat control and material expertise. This lime was then slaked with water and combined with sand and whole shells to form a wet mixture. Builders poured the mixture into wooden molds in successive “lifts”—individual layers about 12 to 18 inches high—allowing each to dry before adding the next.⁵ These lifts can still be read in the walls today, visible as striated horizontal bands. As Brooker writes, “the very rhythm of tabby—its pours and pauses—marks the repetition of labor under bondage.”⁶

This construction technique likely drew on African, Indigenous, and European traditions, but was innovated on-site by enslaved people with intergenerational building knowledge. The laborers who made and laid tabby were not simply following orders; they were applying and adapting techniques to suit coastal materials, plantation demands, and climate conditions.⁷

Despite its hardiness, tabby is vulnerable to erosion from salt spray, plant intrusion, and structural neglect. Today, many tabby structures on Daufuskie exist as roofless ruins. Yet their endurance speaks to the skilled labor of their builders and the cultural memory embedded in the material. The tabby dwellings at Haig Point are not passive remnants—they are what Brooker calls “active carriers of spatial memory and cultural presence.”⁸

However, despite this deep cultural significance to Gullah descendants of Daufuskie Island and African Americans more broadly, the tabby ruins at Haig Point are not publicly accessible. The site lies behind the gates of a private residential development and golf club, where access is restricted to property owners and their guests. As of 2024, the Haig Point Homeowners Association lists annual membership dues exceeding $37,000—a barrier that renders this important heritage site effectively inaccessible to the very communities whose labor and lives it embodies. This raises urgent questions about who has the right to memory, access, and preservation on land shaped by Black histories.

The tabby structure featured in this 3D archive was documented using a Leica RTC scanner. Though situated along the Robert Kennedy Trail—a publicly promoted cultural heritage route—it is notably less visible than other stops. Unlike the better-known ruins at Haig Point, which are maintained within a private golf development, this site bears no interpretive signage beyond a single post directing visitors into the woods. It has received no apparent preservation treatment or structural stabilization, and remains hidden in plain sight. The contrast between this structure and the curated, gated ruins of Haig Point underscores how visibility, investment, and interpretation remain unevenly distributed—even within efforts to commemorate Black heritage.