Ossabaw Island — Marion "Bo" Bowens was 5 years old when he left Ossabaw Island, a boy witness to the tail end of an era on the Georgia coast.

Sixty years later, what he remembers comes in snatches: The chauffeured touring car that carried around the island's owner, Mrs. Nell Ford Torrey. Sitting in the bed of a pickup truck with an alligator presumed dead until it awoke with a thwack of its tail against the side. His mother riding the back of a loggerhead sea turtle down to the surf.

Curtis Compton/Staff (ENLARGE)

Alex Skellon (right), owner of Scottish Stonecraft, oversees the renovation of a tabby slave cabin as Daniel Elliott, lead archaeologist on the project, begins a dig to research the underground components of the building. Elliott said items can reveal what slaves wore, what they ate and even how they spent their free time.

Curtis Compton/Staff (ENLARGE)

Historic preservationist Mark Frissell of Savannah works to repair a window frame, using as much of the original woodwork as he can. He is working on restoring slave quarters at the North End Plantation on Ossabaw Island.

Curtis Compton/Staff (ENLARGE)

A worker sifts oyster shells from tabby slave quarters that will be recycled in the renovation of the cabins.

Curtis Compton/Staff (ENLARGE)

Marion 'Bo' Bowens wonders who will recall the islandÕs black history when he is gone.

RELATED • See video of the project

The history of Ossabaw's black inhabitants, like that of Bowens' family, have mostly been in the shadows of the island's history. Until now.

Through researchers, three cabins built by slaves in the early 1800s on the island's North End are starting to tell the stories of black island culture.

The Ossabaw Island Foundation, a nonprofit group that has refurbished a 19th-century hunting lodge on the island, is completing a $1 million project to restore the three former slave quarters. At the same time, archaeologists are documenting a treasure trove of artifacts that are a peek into the lives of slaves, freedmen and their descendants — members of the Gullah/Geechee culture —one of whom lived in one of the buildings until the early 1990s.

The three cabins on this large barrier island seven miles from Savannah are some of the best remaining examples of tabby construction left on the southern Atlantic Coast. Tabby, a centuries-old, homemade cement mixture of oyster shells, lime, sand and water, was developed in Africa and used by slaves in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Archaeologists say the shells probably came from American Indian middens, mounds of trash left by the island's first human inhabitants about 4,000 years ago. Pieces of pottery are mixed in the cement, which was poured layer by layer into wooden forms.

Bowens, talking on the porch of his bait shop on the mainland, laughs with his memories of the island. He left when he reached school age and his mother got a job on the mainland.

In fact, after the state acquired Ossabaw in 1978 there were few jobs left for people who had worked for the island's owners. Most of the black inhabitants left for the mainland.

Bowens wonders who will remember life on the island when he's gone. Most of the known details of Ossabaw's history have been passed down through the island's white owners. Books and documents tell stories of the early plantation owners through to Eleanor Torrey West, the 93-year-old heiress who sold the majestic piece of Georgia to the state.

Bowens and his mother, who worked for the boat captain, lived in one of the cabins during World War II. Two families lived in each duplex-style cabin. Two hearths shared a single chimney in the middle.

"You had four rooms," Bowens said. "I look at it now and I say if they were that small then I just wonder how we stayed in them."

Tabbies were common on islands off Georgia and South Carolina. But Ossabaw offers an unparalleled view of coastal black life dating back to colonial times, said State Archaeologist David Colin Crass of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.

"I can't think of another African-American site here on the South Atlantic seaboard where you have this combination of tabbies that are so intact," Crass said. "You now have these three strands of the story — the architecture, the oral history, and the archaeology — that has dynamite potential."

It's not clear how many slave cabins were built on the island's four plantations. The three on the North End are the only ones still intact because of their long occupation and tin roofs. But by 2003, they had started to deteriorate.

For one thing, donkeys had rubbed hollows belly-high on the edges of the tabbies where they could get a good scratch from the rough surface.

The state didn't have the money to fix them up, and not much was being done to protect them.

In 2004, the Ossabaw Island Foundation won a $400,000 Save America's Treasures grant from the National Park Service to start the restoration. The Robert W. Woodruff Foundation in Atlanta matched the grant with another $400,000. Other money came from actress Sandra Bullock, who bought a home on Tybee Island, and the Charles Evans Hughes Memorial Foundation in New York.

The state DNR has provided more than $100,000 of in-kind services, including barge trips and garbage bins.

Elizabeth DuBose, the Ossabaw foundation's Savannah-based director, said the cabins have "been talking to us more than we originally anticipated. . . Archaeologically, this is a gold mine because it's not been disturbed."

Wood floors added to the cabins in the 1920s preserved the discards of daily life. Beneath the blackened dirt, archaeologists have found Civil War-era buttons, an 1825 half cent and other coins, buckshot, clay tobacco pipes from the early 1800s, a 19th century porcelain doll's head, pottery, and various animal bones.

Daniel Elliott, lead archaeologist on the project and president of the archaeological nonprofit LAMAR Institute, said the items can tell us what the people wore, what they ate, and even how they spent their free time, hidden from the island's white population.

Among the many animal bones, including alligators and migratory birds, Elliott has found raccoon penis bones probably used as talismans or charms. He's also uncovered what appeared to be a magic kit that may have been a traditional healer's medicine bag.

Through radar and probing, Elliott discovered the original North End plantation built on about 10 acres starting in the 1760s. He found evidence of as many as 11 tabby cabins built in two rows.

The three remaining tabbies were built on the ruins of earlier tabbies dating to the 1700s.

In researching the island's history, Elliott came across a Georgia Historical Quarterly from 1917 that published a 1782 letter from the Georgia governor to the Florida governor complaining of a raid on Ossabaw Island by a Loyalist. According to the letter, the Florida raider stole a large quantity of indigo grown on the island, burned a ship under construction, and displaced 30 slaves.

Ashes buried under the current structures indicate the original tabbies may have been burned at the same time, Elliott said.

DuBose, of the Ossabaw Island Foundation, plans to use the three tabbies to interpret three different periods of black life on the island, from slaves, to Freedmen, to workers for the wealthy owners. Once completed, foundation wants to bring visitors to "walk through" history.

With about $1 million already invested in the project, DuBose said the foundation is seeking another $475,000 to finish the work. She hopes the cabins will be completed and ready for public viewing next fall.

The foundation has a lease with the state to bring visitors to the island for study and research. Recent guests included a group of friends from Atlanta working on a presentation of the Sidney Lanier poem The Marshes of Glynn, and an honors writing class from a Savannah charter school. About 1,800 people are expected to visit Ossabaw this year.

Bowens hopes the tabbies will renew interest among the descendants of the Gullah/Geechee culture he grew up in. He's vice president of a newly formed group called the Ossabaw Heritage Foundation, which is reaching out to coastal black families to maintain the oral histories, since so little written history is available.

Bowens and other African-Americans who grew up on the island or visited family there also want to be able to gather there annually, to remember and pass down the history to their children. Unlike on other barrier islands, freed slaves never became landowners on Ossabaw. Sometime around 1898, when a major hurricane hit the island, the community reformed on the mainland in a community called Pin Point.

"How can we get back over there again?" Bowens asked. "It's part of our life."