What's Covered in Seashells But is Not at the Beach?

Given Autumn Hall’s commitment to the natural environment, it is lost on no one that the fireplace, as impressive as it is, doesn’t work without the presence of Autumn Hall’s first landmarks- big live oak trees that have been there for over 100 years and towering long leaf and loblolly pines. But it does work really well both during the day and even more on a cool night with a big fire in it and oysters roasting nearby.

Like so much else of Autumn Hall, the Arbor Park fireplace gets its inspiration from the historical fabric of the area and, in this case, it is the oyster cooker from the famous Pembroke Jones hunting estate that provides the goods. Jones’ original fireplace on the waterway was made from oyster shell tabby, a concoction of burned oyster shells, sand and whole oyster shells. Tabby was the traditional way of making cement in the early days on the Southern coast due to the lack of lime used in traditional cement fabrication.

Jones was one of the original titans, a railroad guy who built a train track to Wilmington in the 1880’s to travel to his wife’s summer home at Airlie and his hunting grounds at Landfall. The phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” evidently originated with this Jones. For all that, the family was said to be some of the nicest, most well grounded people you could hope to meet and did great things for Wilmington during their time here.

Arbor Park’s fireplace is made of modern materials with a tabby veneer. With thought for today’s need for oyster shells in habitat restoration projects in our watersheds, we used a sea shell mix for the tabby. The Fireplace is 19 feet high with a nearly 6 ft high fire box. Like the old days, it burns wood and, also like the old days, there is no better place to gather around on a cool evening in the Carolinas.