Jekyll Island
I remember being stopped, at a red light, with my window rolled down, and listening to a subtle clanking, which caused me to look around, until I found its source; it was a shutter being blown by a gentle wind, back and forth. I had arrived in Brunswick, Georgia, after having driven alone, from Los Angeles; hitting the road without any particular destination.
Since that first unplanned stop, I have found my way to Georgia, on more than one occasion, always welcomed by an unexpected pleasure, like Jekyll Island.
The small barrier island is accessible through a causeway. Once a playground for those of means, who frolicked in the sea, played golf and croquet at the Jekyll Island Club, today there is room for the ordinary folks to go camping, swimming, and exploring!
Besides sight-seeing or spending the night in one of the building in the Historic District, the ruins created from tabby, which is literally crushed oysters shells, which have been compressed, were fascinating, easily accessible, and well worth the drive.
“Tabby was the building material for walls, floors, and roofs widely used throughout costal Georgia during the Military and Plantation Era. It was composed of equal parts of sand, lime, oyster shell and water mixed into a mortar and poured into forms.
The lime used in tabby was made by burning oyster shell taken from Indian Shell Mounds, the trash piles of the Indians.
The word tabby is African in origin, with Arabic background, and means ‘a wall made of earth or masonry’. This method of building was brought to America by the Spaniards.
When the Coquina (shell rock) quarries near St. Augustine were opened, hewn stone superseded tabby for wall construction there. Costal Georgia has no coquina so tabby continued to use here even as late as the 1890’s.”
