Secrets of Sea Glass: Adam Larson

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.

Never heard of Gottlieb-Bauernschmidt-Straus? You’re not the only one. The limited sources that mention it don’t even agree on how to spell Straus (or is it Strauss?). All sources say that it was a brewery based in Baltimore that opened in 1901, although there is disagreement over the year it ceased production (either 1910 or 1920). As the company registered two trademarks in 1913 and one in 1915, closure in 1920 is a much more likely date, especially since Prohibition came into effect on January 17 of that year. 100 Years of Brewing: A Complete History of the Brewing Industry of the World, published in 1903, described GBS as follows: “On March 1, 1899, an organization was formed, including sixteen of the breweries of Baltimore, and called the Maryland Brewing Company. The business was reorganized August 7, 1901, as the GottliebBauernschmidt-Straus Brewing Company, with officers as follows: George J. Obermann, president; Frederick H. Gottlieb, vice-president, and James Barkley, secretary and treasurer. Of the sixteen plants at first forming the combination the Helldorfer, Baltimore, Germania, J.B. Berger, Mount, J.F. Wiessner & Brother, Oriental and the original Bay View breweries were closed.” I guess even in 1901, mergers led to plants closing. Eight breweries remained after the consolidation.

“The combined annual capacity of the plants named above is one million five hundred thousand barrels.” For comparison, Maryland’s 121 craft breweries produce a total of 278,640 barrels of beer each year.

“The general offices of the Gottlieb-Bauernschmidt-Straus Brewing Company are at the southwest corner of Fayette street and Park avenue (sic), Baltimore.” Today, that corner in downtown Baltimore is occupied by Ingerman & Horwitz, personal injury attorneys.

The book goes on to describe the company’s officers in detail, starting with company president George Obermann. Obermann was born

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in 1848 in Milwaukee and learned about the industry from his father in Brew City, taking the reins of GBS in 1901. Vice president Frederick H. Gottlieb started his brewing career in Wheeling, West Virginia, and moved to Baltimore in 1876 to work at “the old Baltimore ale and porter brewery.” Baltimore native James Barkley worked for Solomon Straus for eleven years prior to his appointment as treasurer and secretary.

Of course, there are limits to what can be learned from even the best-preserved beer bottles washed ashore. I now know some of the men responsible for making the bottle, but now I wonder what their beer tasted like a century ago.

Adam Larson is a writer from Kenosha, Wisconsin, and is currently working on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

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