Tabby! She’s no Alley Cat

Tabby Smokehouse (Bleak Hall, Edisto Island) Built in 1840

Pigs and barbeque and the new rock star butchers in Charleston have been on my mind for the last few days, so this well preserved smokehouse outbuilding, on Botany Bay Plantation, conjured images of charcuterie close to home. Built in 1840, this smokehouse would have originally hung with the well butchered pigs of the Botany Bay Plantation, on Edisto Island, a place owned by John Ferrars Townsend, one of the island’s largest sea island cotton planters.

Charcuterie

The smokehouse is made of tabby, which was a type of concrete made from oyster shells, lime, sand, and water. Lime was created from burning the shells to make oyster shell ash. Tabby was the first concrete building material made and utilized in the United States, and was used as a building material along the sea islands and coast for over a century, until the development of portland cement in 1843. Tabby ruins are found along the coasts in from South Carolina to Florida and are reminders of the vernacular, of the irreplaceable cultural history of the sea islands. So unique is the tabby that one is able to see the varied tactile texture that is obviously a mark of the handmade, the artisan. Historians disagree on whether its use originated along the northwest African coast and was taken to Spain and Portugal, or vice versa. The origin of the word tabby itself is unclear: the Spanish word tapia means a mud wall, and the Arabic word tabbi means a mixture of mortar and lime. Similar words also appear in both Portuguese and Gullah.

A symposium took place a few years ago to study the conservation and preservation of tabby and is an excellent resource was published by the Georgia Dept. of Public Resources, including much about South Carolina building traditions. I was delighted to see so much written about the existing structures on Edisto Island, where I live. In Beaufort, on Sapelo Island in Georgia, and on Edisto, there are examples of the tabby construction that connect cultural histories, that of the sea island cotton planter, whose slaves’ labor surely mastered the art of building with tabby, and the Native American population whose large shell middens, high domes of discarded oyster shell, provided raw material. One shell mound, one they call Spanish Mount, indicates a Native American settlement they say existed 4,000 years ago on Edisto Island. It is now protected by the State Park near the South Edisto river.

Examples of tabby on Edisto Island exist at Point of Pines Plantation on the North Edisto river, where thick wall ruins still stand at the place where the original residence of Paul Grimball was built in 1696, known as the earliest tabby in South Carolina. Botany Bay Plantation boasts several tabby foundations, one for the ice house, which was also uniquely filled with charcoal between the interior and exterior walls, said to have been included to act as insulation.

tabby detail, grain house wall, Botany Bay

Tabby Ruins, Sunnyside Plantation, Edisto Island, SC

Additionally, tabby was used in the early 1700’s to fortify forts, in industrial use to build the Indigo vats at Burlington Plantation in Beaufort County, then again on Edisto, in the church foundation and baptismal pool at the First Baptist Church on highway 174. Sunnyside Plantation, on Edisto, is owned by the same family since 1860, and boasts the tabby ruins of an old cotton gin, built after the civil war in the 1870’s.

The story of Hepzipah Jenkins Townsend (1780-1847) wife of Daniel Townsend, is a fascinating one that still resonates on Edisto Island. She helped endow the First Baptist Church, than gave it to the African American congregation, who pack the church every week to this day, traveling from miles to attend (all morning) services on Sundays, and who serve up some of the delectable celebratory feasts on special occasions, Gullah style.

Edisto Indians, religion and the natural world

“What we can know with any confidence derives from the experience of the senses.”
- John Locke (1632-1704) from “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding”

Carolina's Natural Shore, State Park Edisto Island

I am an artist, not a formal historian, philosopher, or genealogist. My take on the world is primarily through my senses, those visual ones of color and value, but also those of taste, touch, smell, and spirit. But I love this history of the ancestors and like the great poet Robert Frost said, “yet knowing how way leads to way” it has led me to a fascination with the early days of Carolina’s written history.

Imagine my delight this morning, reading online (yay, googlebooks!) about what the English philosopher, John Locke (1632-1704) wrote in his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690). He argues that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience. I can only imagine that this caused a stir in England at the time of its writing, but looking at this thought simply, as an artist, I think he may have been considering the perspective of the Native Americans, who were being described to him in letters from the new English colony of Carolina, by Dr. Henry Woodward. The Native Americans, who did not have the written histories that we have, had, instead, a deep understanding of the natural world in which they lived, one that depended on the rivers and forests and oceans, a dependence we are only beginning to take very seriously as Americans, now that the world\’s ice caps are melting.

A year or so ago, I received an enthusiastic email from Jim Farr, Chair of the department of Political Science of Northwestern University. He is a John Locke scholar who was writing a new paper, and he had stumbled upon my little family history web page about Henry Woodward and the native from Edisto Island, named Shadoo. He was the Native who served as the exchange when Woodward stayed onshore after the Robert Sandford Expedition from Barbados, in 1666. Apparently there is some written correspondence about two more Natives, simply called “Honest” and “Just” who visited England. Professor Farr graciously sent me a copy of a letter that my ancestor Henry Woodward wrote to John Locke, in 1675. From what I understand of John Locke, he was insatiably curious, about not only philosophy, but science, education, religion, medicine, and much else.

Excerpts from this letter are below. The Natives he found in Carolina are so attuned to the sensual world that they can tell the tides from the songs of birds. He reveals, too, that the Natives tell the story of “the deluge,” replacing the dove with a red bird, in the story we know as The Great Flood of Noah. It is an archetypal story that appears in many cultures from Gilgamesh to the Bible.

305. Dr. Henry Woodward to Locke, 12 November 1675
The letter is mentioned by Locke in his Journal, 7 June 1679 (p. 99). The writer was active as a surgeon and explorer between 1666 and 1686.

Sir, I have made the best inquiry that I can concerneing the religion and worship. Originall, and customes of our natives. especeally among the Port Royall Indians amongst whom I am best accquainted. they worship the Sun and say they have knowledge of Spirits who appeare often to them… they acknowledge the sun to bee the immedeate cause of the groth and increse of all things …every year they have severall feast and dances particularly appointed. they have some notions of the deluge, and say that two onely were saved in a cave, who after the flood found a red bird dead: the which as the pulled of his feathers between their fingers they blew them from them of which came Indians. each time a severall tribe and of a severall speech. which they severally named as they still were formed. and they say these two knew the waters to bee dried up by the singing of the said red bird. and to my knowledg let them bee in the woods at any distance from the river they can by the varying of the said birds note tell whether the water ebbeth or floweth…
Yours to command,
HENRY WOODWARD

Lowcountry Gumbo: Bluebloods, Natives, Pirates!

Mary Woodward Hutson (1717-1757) whose very proper portrait this is, hardly came from what some Charlestonians would call ‘proper’ stock. Her grandfather, and mine, many generations ago, was Henry Woodward, an Englishman who arrived near Edisto Island in 1666 with a group of wealthy men on expedition from Barbados. He was left on the Eden Isle to make friends with the natives and to rustle up some trade for the King. His is an heroic tale that involves being kidnapped by the Spanish, and rescued from St. Augustine, by the buccaneer Robert Searles (for more on this tale see the book Twenty Florida Pirates by Kevin M. McCarthy. Henry worked as ship’s surgeon, and subsequently charmed kings, pirates and priests, and no doubt, the ladies. His legacy is one of daring and mystery. He wrote letters back to John Locke, in England, about the culture and the religion of the Indians, which interested the great philosopher. I like the letter where he talks about the glitter of gold on the bottom of his Indian moccasin, mica no doubt, the stuff I played with, as a child, in the creeks of North Carolina and what we called ‘fool’s gold’. “The man that most students of South Carolina Indians would most like to interview would probably be Dr. Henry Woodward, an Englishman who … was left by the Robert Sandford Expedition (in 1666) in exchange for an Indian called “Shadoo” as a sort of early cultural exchange program. He was not left against his will, but remained voluntarily. He returned to England in 1682 and was something of a celebrity.” - from Chapman J. Milling, Red Carolinians, p 55.

Henry Woodward’s story is fascinating to me, just different from that of his grandaughter, the pious and devoted Christian that Mary’s diary reveals her to be, published in London after her death, by her husband, The Rev. William Hutson. The testament to their character is the survival, of not only her diary but his, here at the South Carolina Historical Society. Just steps down the street are their large, beautifully carved slate tombstones in the historic graveyard Circular Church on Meeting Street, stones that have miraculously survived wars and fires and earthquakes. Mary Woodward Hutson’s portrait, and that of the good pastor, William Hutson, were painted by Jeremiah Theus, the early colonial painter, who arrived in Charleston in 1740. Many of the portraits he painted hang across the street at the Gibbes Museum of Art. These paintings hang beside each other in history, secure in the tall pink hall of this grand and beautiful architectural wonder of a place. The Fireproof Building, at 100 Meeting Street, houses the collections of the South Carolina Historical Society. Inside is an oval stair hall, lit by a cupola, with stone stairs, cantilevered through three stories. The building, the architect, and more of the stories the society protects and preserves here, are deserving of another tale, on another day.