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Black concrete power: The Tuskegee block and Low Cash-Cost Housing
Published in João Mascarenhas-Mateus, Ana Paula Pires, Manuel Marques Caiado, Ivo Veiga, History of Construction Cultures, 2021
While building concrete silos was a novel experience for Black workers in southern United States, concrete on the farm was a more familiar undertaking. Indeed, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, enslaved laborers employed tabby concrete to construct farm and residential buildings on plantations. Tabby concrete – a concoction made by burning oyster shells, crushing, and mixing them with sand and water – appeared across Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. First used by Spanish colonists to construct their communities in the 16th century, the material’s laborious manufacture quickly fell into the hands of enslaved workers who spent a significant portion of their working time collecting oyster shells and acquiring the necessary heat to burn them (Carney 2002, Carney & Rosomoff 2009, Fields-Black 2014). The construction process was challenging and involved building large wooden formwork into which the tabby mixture was poured; each layer had to solidify before another could be added. And since the material was thick and chunky, builders relied on its large mass and weight to keep together. When poured to construct agricultural buildings or slave dwellings, the partially-burned shells exposed their sharp edges and presented a cold and unwelcoming surface ready to scrape and injure unsuspecting passersby. Some enslaved people painted their dwelling in white color while others covered their interior walls with newspapers that promised to keep away the haints: legend had it that the evil spirits had to read every word on the walls before they could practice their voodoo magic on the inhabitants (Gwin 1953).
Assessment of historical foundation response of Fort Sumter, South Carolina, using finite element modelling
Published in International Journal of Geotechnical Engineering, 2021
Daniel Kyser, Nadarajah Ravichandran, Sez Atamturkur
The base of the scarp wall below the ground surface consists of solid brick, and the upper section of the scarp wall consists of portions of brick and tabby concrete (Brosnan et at. 2011; Prabhu et al. 2014). These components were spatially discretized using linear elastic plate elements, and their sectional properties were calculated using the available data. The key material model parameters are summarized in Table 2.