TABBY RUINS, THIS & THAT IN BEAUFORT, SC (Cheri)

We walked most of The Point neighborhood of Beaufort, South Carolina while we were in the area.

One particular house intrigued me.  Not because it's the most beautiful in the area - which would be a very difficult decision - but because you can see several periods of history on one property.

The picture above shows possibly the earliest period in the foreground, and the current, occupied home in the background.

I was just meandering while Mark was taking some pictures, and decided to find out what house prices in the area are like.  This house was a block or two away.  After I pulled the Zillow listing up, I noticed that there was actually a stairway built into the front fenceline:

which was pretty strange, because the lot is almost half an acre, and the house itself is on the back half of the lot!

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​Apparently this​ is the "modern" entrance to the house:

​Mark showed up pretty soon, and we walked around the block to see the "tabby" ruins that are mentioned in the listing. 

"Tabby is a type of concrete made by burning oyster shells to create lime, then mixing it with water, sand, ash and broken oyster shells."  (Wikipedia)  There are a lot of tabby ruins in the area.

As we were taking pictures at the front of the property, two men walked by and asked if we were going to buy the property and build something else there.  (Nope, got over that idea a while back.)

​We asked about the freestanding front stairway, and they explained that the "original" house had burned about a hundred years ago.  The tabby structures had been a separate kitchen and "servant" quarters.  (The neighbor who explained this stumbled over the word "servant," making it clear that it was a euphemism for "slave.")  When that house - which was brick - burned, many surrounding properties suddenly acquired brick decorations in their yards.

Even the current house seems to have been constructed at two different times, as you see both a brick front and a very different wood structure that T's onto its back.  We frequently see buildings which were previously occupied in different places, then combined, as we travel the South.

Beaufort has been the site where many different movies have been shot, including one of my all-time favorites, ​The Big Chill:

​That movie included an iconic scene of friends jogging through downtown in morning fog, talking about the upcoming initial public offering of stock in two friends' running shoe business.  When I entered law school six years after The Big Chill came out, the professor mentioned the scene and explained that that was what "insider trading" was all about!

​Here is a close-up of the moss that you see hanging from trees all over the area, including in Mark's pictures in his post about Beaufort and Hilton Head Island:

I'm always looking at the ground as we walk, taking pictures of things like sewer grates.

​The Big Chill was set in the 1980's, so probably the timeframe is off, but theoretically those runners, if not fictional, could have seen what I saw embedded in asphalt in this waterfront neighborhood:

History can be seen literally everywhere here.  I saw this memorial to Harriet Tubman in part of an unassuming church complex, and was glad I walked across from our street parking to figure out what it was.