Sea Glass Secrets by Adam Larson
It’s amazing what archaeologists can learn from a single artifact, telling a whole story from a single coin or trinket. Most of us don’t have their amount of education and experience, but a piece of sea glass I found showed me that laymen can use their own powers of deduction (aided immensely by internet search engines) to pull off similar feats of discovery. I wasn’t looking for sea glass the day I stumbled across the piece in question. I was focused on collecting as many kinds of seashells as I could on a particularly productive stretch of beach on Delmarva until I passed another beachcomber who remarked about the amount of sea glass he was finding that day and shared a piece he found with me. Alerted to the presence of sea glass, I had the good fortune to stumble across a piece in the sand a few minutes later. It was a square piece about two by two inches, curved along one axis and with a lip extending concave on one side. The edges of the seafoam green piece were smooth, like most sea glass, but this piece had something that most don’t have: an embossed design with legible lettering. This was a fragment
that could tell a story. Within some sort of circular design read “GISTERED”; around part of the outside of the circle was “COMPANY” and below the circle was “IMORE, MD.” It doesn’t take much sleuthing to infer that “GISTERED” is part of “REGISTERED” and “IMORE, MD.” is short for “BALTIMORE, MD.” Of course, there have been a lot of breweries that made green beer bottles in Baltimore, but thanks to the power of search engines and what remained of the logo, I was able to determine the maker of the bottle: GottliebBauernschmidt-Straus Brewing Company.
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