Tabby
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Coquina

Tabby, also, Coquina. . , Tabby
Composition , Tabby is a unique North American building material consisting of lime, sand, water, and crushed oyster shells. It is predominantly found in the Southeastern United States. Sixteenth-century Spanish explorers and colonists first brought tabby (which appears as tabee, tapis, tappy and tapia in early documents) to the coasts of what would become Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. Tapia is Spanish for "mud wall" , the mortar used to caulk some of the earliest structures in this area was a mixture of mud and Spanish moss. , The vast majority of tabby structures from this era were located on the southeastern Atlantic coast. This distribution of structures is the result of diffusion from two primary tabby making centers or hearths: a Spanish center at Saint Augustine, Florida, and a British center at Beaufort, South Carolina. These hearth centers represented the core areas for two separate traditions in tabby building. , The Spanish tabby tradition began in St. Augustine in the late 1500s. The British tradition began about one hundred twenty years later, using techniques copied from Spanish Florida. , The use of tabby as building material spread up the eastern seaboard, reaching at least as far north as Staten Island, New York, where it can be found in the still-standing Abraham Manee House, which was built around 1670. , Readily Available Materials , Constructing buildings with tabby was a relatively fast method of construction, and luckily there was a huge resource for raw materials , Timucua shell middens. These local Native Americans built up thick layers of trash over the centuries. Composed mostly of oyster shell, these middens can also contain broken pottery, discarded shell tools, shattered projectile points and animal bones. , Building with Tabby , After the Timucua shell middens were "harvested", the oyster shells were stacked in a wood-lined fire pit called a rick. The shells were then burned and crushed to create lime , the primary ingredient in the concrete portion of the tabby. When it was time for construction, a vertical mold was made by building a wooden scaffold to hold up wooden planks. The tabby was poured into the mold in two to three foot increments, leaving a distinctive stacked look to the finished wall. A tabby structure built using this construction method could withstand the elements for hundreds of years. There is a tabby wall located downtown at 214 St. George Street that dates from the First Spanish Period , still standing after nearly 350 years. , Coquina , Composition , Coquina is a sedimentary rock that is found around the world. This rock forms in marine coastal areas where high tides and strong ocean waves work to align, sort, abrade, smooth, fracture and pack the tiny shells of marine creatures over the course of millions of years. The resulting rock is one of the few native stones occurring in northeastern coastal Florida. , Coquina is composed mainly of the donax clam (donax variabilis). These small bivalves are found around the world, and are sometimes called cockles or periwinkles. They Occur in a wide variety of colors, and live in the sandy intertidal zone of the beach. , Pictured to the right are life-sized donax variabilis clam shells. They are very common on the beaches of Florida. After the clam has died and decomposed, the shells typically assume this pleasing butterfly shape. , Quarrying Coquina , Looking at these two images of coquina quarry workers working the rock from the earth , one from the 1860s and one from the 1940s , it's easy to see that the technique changed very little over time. The soft coquina was chiseled out in slabs and hauled from the site with ropes to a drying area so it could cure in the sun. It was backbreaking, labor-intensive work. , The Rock that Changed St. Augustine , The Spanish knew what coquina was , they had seen it along the coast of La Flórida in many places. Letters from both the French and the Spanish document deposits of the material as landmarks along the coasts , for example, the large coquina outcropping known as El Peñon just south of today’s Matanzas inlet appears on the Bernard Romans map of 1768 and well known to the early Spanish navigators. , It was over a century after the founding of St. Augustine before the Spanish decided to use coquina for construction. Privateers and the 1670 founding of Charlestowne (now Charleston, SC) forced the Spanish to use the rock as a building material to construct a fortress in 1672 guarding the city and bay of St. Augustine. This fortress, the Castillo de San Marcos, was the tenth fort built in St. Augustine and still stands today as the oldest masonry fortification in the United States. The first nine forts, including San Juan de Pinas, thought to have been on this property, were constructed of wood. The coquina was quarried from Anastasia Island by slave, Spanish, and Native American labor. It was then pulled to the shore, ferried over to the mainland, and shaped while it was still soft and malleable. After being left to cure for a year, the coquina was hard enough to be used for construction., Coquina's resiliency made it ideal for building forts, much to the dismay of English attackers. During attacks on the Castillo de San Marcos, where normal stone would have crumbled under cannon fire, the coquina merely absorbed the impact and left nothing more than a minor dent in its place. Thanks to this unique rock, the Castillo de San Marcos has never been taken by force. It wasn't until the Castillo was almost complete that private and civilian homes were allowed to be constructed of coquina. Until that time, the rock, was protected by the king and the quarries were guarded at all times. , [photo caption] , . Pictured to the right is a cluster of American oysters (crassotrea viriginica). Also called the Eastern oyster, these shellfish are very common in the salt and brackish marshes of the Southeastern United States. This delicious bivalve has been a readily available food source for humans in this area for thousands of years.