Masonry Magazine October 1997 Page. 44
The Dungeness mansion boasted 50 rooms, including a library, ballroom, chimneys and 16 fireplaces. The rugged walls were partitions of tabby, six feet wide at the base and four feet wide above ground level. It was said to be the most beautiful home on the coast at the time. It sits now in ruins, destroyed by an Civil War-era fire. The Taves project also includes initial archaeological excavation of these Dungeness ruins.
These are not photo hikes or nature walks. EarthCorps is the field branch of Earthwatch, an environmental organization founded in 1972. EarthCorps is likely to appear in places that are ecologically and biologically threatened, where something is being abused, neglected, exploited or polluted.
Volunteers working with Taves can expect to get dirty pulling off old stucco, sawing lumber, building cradles, mixing tabby and applying it to house walls. Next door in the Dungeness area, teams will survey and map the excavation site using remote sensing gear, take core samples, probing for lime middens (refuge heaps) and tabby ruins, while keeping a complete photographic record of the dig.
The graceful tabby dwellings may be in ruins but the island itself remains unspoiled. The island is reachable only by boat. Volunteers will assemble at the St. Mary's waterfront staging area on the National Seashore for the $5, 20 mile ferry ride across Cumberland Sound. In spite of its remoteness, the 18 mile long island has attracted visitors and inhabitants for thousands of years, some of the most recent being the John F. Kennedy Jr. wedding party last September.
Cumberland Island was actually the second choice of the researchers. The project was originally intended to restore Middle Place, a tabby structure on Ossabaw Island, the northern- most of Georgia's barrier islands. Georgia state politics interceded, however, and the incoming administration decided Ossabaw would make a better hunting preserve than archaeological resource and promptly reneged on the permits issued by the previous administration. The tabby project then moved to Cumberland Island, where 80 percent of the land is controlled by the National Park Service, and no hunting is allowed.
Native American Indians came to these barrier islands for the abundant shellfish as early as 4,000 years ago. Beginning in 1587 the Spanish built and maintained a fort on Cumberland to protect their missionaries from the encroaching French. European settlers occupied the island in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Elegant brick mansions were impossible to construct on the island since it lacked suitable clay. The Spanish solved this problem by inventing a cement called tabby. Tabby was made by burning oyster shells to extract lime, which was then mixed with equal parts sand and oyster shells. Water was then added to the blend, then the mixture poured into great wooden molds to form walls and pillars. The hardened amalgam proved to be cheap, plentiful and durable.
Over time, however, tabby's water-permeability causes it to disintegrate. As a result, most structures made from the historic material are now in ruins, their walls weakened by mildew or buckling because repair attempts added extra weight, aggravating the problem. Taves, who owns a Ph.D. in architecture, plus an MS and 18 years experience in historic preservation, wants to stabilize the structures correctly. She shares the lead on this project with anthropology professor Michael Sheehan, of the State University of New York Buffalo. Sheehan's primary interest is the application of methods and technologies from physics and materials science to archaeological data, including trace element analysis, computer imaging and optical stereology (a method of relating two dimensional structural analysis of materials to their structure as it exists in three dimensions).
Volunteers with basic construction knowledge are particularly sought to help her with the project, as are any architects or construction engineers. Basically, though, she just needs people with a love of historical building techniques to give her a hand. You have to love something more than comfort to spend 10 days in the woods patching a decrepit old home.
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44 MASONRY-SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER, 1997