Crane Point: The Only Tabby House Left in the Keys Stands in These Sixty Acres

Between 1903 and 1905, a Bahamian immigrant named George Adderley built himself a house in Marathon out of tabby, a homemade concrete of burnt shell, ash, sand and water. It is still standing. It is the oldest house in the Florida Keys outside Key West, and the only surviving tabby house in the chain.

The House

Adderley and his wife Olivia came from the Bahamas and settled on Vaca Key when there was almost nothing else on it. He burned shell to make lime, mixed it with sand and ash, and poured his walls. The technique came with him from the islands and was old before he used it. The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1992, and it can be toured.

The Sixty Acres Around It

The house sits inside Crane Point Museum and Nature Center, more than sixty acres of hardwood and palm hammock in the middle of Marathon with the Overseas Highway running along one edge. The trails pass through one of the last stands of native thatch palm hammock in the Keys. There is a wild bird center treating injured pelicans, hawks and cormorants, and a museum covering the Calusa shell mounds and the railroad era. Butterflies work the gardens on the way through.

Going

Crane Point is around mile marker 50 in Marathon. It is shaded, it is quiet, and it takes about two hours to walk properly, which makes it the best break on the drive between Key Largo and Key West. Check the Crane Point website for current hours before you go.

One more thing worth knowing: the hammock here is one of the few places in the middle Keys where you can see what the islands looked like before the highway. Thatch palm, poisonwood, gumbo limbo and mahogany, growing the way they grew before anyone built a road through them. That is the real reason to stop, and the Adderley house is the reason to stay an extra half hour.