Sea glass: From trash to treasure, shaped by tides

By Cornelia Dean

Although sea glass collectors talk about bottles, porcelain and other cargo lost in shipwrecks, most sea glass originated far more prosaically, in garbage dumped into the ocean or piled in coastal landfills. But sea glass hunters do not necessarily limit themselves to glass. Some look for crockery shards, bottle stoppers, fragments of old toys, marbles — virtually anything that left human hands to be tumbled by the sea.

Laura McHenry started walking Cape Cod beaches searching for sea glass a few years ago, when her marriage was breaking up and she was looking for something she and her daughter Katie, could do together for fun.

"Sometimes we'll just sit on the rocks and just comb through," said McHenry, who lives in Centerville, Mass., as Katie, 10, displayed her finds nearby. "It's a great place to talk."

History draws Rachel Mack, of Grandview-on-Hudson, N.Y. "These could have come from the Half Moon," she said, pointing to white clay pipe stems, each an inch or two long and perhaps half an inch in diameter. She finds these artifacts when she kayaks along the shore of the river Henry Hudson sailed 400 years ago.

Richard LaMotte's wife got him into it. She is a jeweler who works with sea glass, and he went with her on expeditions to Chesapeake Bay beaches near their home in Chestertown, Md. LaMotte, who works for a water analysis equipment company, got interested in how water acidity affected the glass, and how the chemicals used to make glass changed its color over the decades. Soon he was consulting archaeologists and studying the history of American glass manufacturing. Now his book, "Pure Sea Glass" (Sea Glass Publishing, 2004), is a bible for collectors.

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