Tabby Manse

About this property

Tabby Manse, also known as Thomas Fuller House, is a building in Beaufort, South Carolina. The house is one of the few remaining early buildings on the South Carolina coast whose exterior walls are built of tabby, a material composed of whole oysters shells and lime from crushed oyster shells. The walls are more than two-feet thick and covered with stucco scored to look like stone blocks. It was built around 1786 by Thomas Fuller, a prominent local planter. Tabby Manse is noted for its classical proportions and superb construction. It is one of only a handful of remaining early American residences whose exterior walls are made entirely of tabby. Thomas Fuller, a rice and cotton planter built this house, first known as the Fuller mansion as a wedding gift to his bride, Elizabeth Middleton. Descended from Henry Woodward, the first English settler in South Carolina, Elizabeth was a member of three of the most prominent colonial South Carolina families—the Barnwells, the Bulls, and the Middletons. Her great-grandfather, John "Tuscarora Jack" Barnwell, subdued the Indians in the Carolinas, and her first cousin, Arthur Middleton, signed the United States Declaration of Independence. Upon settling in Sheldon and Beaufort, Thomas Fuller made a fortune as a planter. He and Elizabeth reared their twelve children here, the most prominent being two Harvard-educated sons---Dr. Thomas Fuller, Jr., physician, and Dr. Richard Fuller, lawyer turned Baptist minister, who became a nationally famous preacher and spearheaded the founding of the Southern Baptist Convention. The Federal occupation of Beaufort immediately following the Battle of Port Royal on November 7, 1861, early in the American Civil War, swept away the Fullers, their friends, and their way of life. In early 1862 the Reverend Mansfield French, a Methodist minister sponsored by the American Missionary Association, headed an expedition to Beaufort to care for abandoned slaves and occupied this house. When in 1864 the house was auctioned to pay Federal real estate taxes, French purchased it. Active in Republican politics, he sought unsuccessfully to become the first United States senator of the Reconstruction era from South Carolina. His son, Winchell, founded a Republican newspaper here, The Beaufort Tribune. In the 1870s when Winchell went bankrupt and moved to Florida, the French family transferred title to Winchell's wife, Emmeline Morrill, a native of Quebec. Her sister, Almira Morrill Onthank, and Almira's nieces, Emma Onthank and Alma and Clara Greenwood, opened a guest house here, which they named Tabby Manse and operated for almost 100 years.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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