The big one in the middle measures over 3mm. I love the orange, yellow and brown one. Don't know anything about it but it is probably from India- lol!
I owe you photos on this one, but I too have a collection of marbles all of which were found lying on the ground. Most of them emerged from the soil of my garden. This land was cattle pasture until 1885, then was farmed, mostly walnuts, until 1948. An elementary school was built on the block in 1925, next to the walnut grove. My house was built 1949. A former resident used to bury trash here and there, and I still find old rusty bits and many pieces of broken glass, sometimes something interesting. Not any/many beads that I can recall.
The marbles are all mid 20th century, I believe. I discovered the source of many of them one day while working among the vegetables. I heard the neighbor's teenage son lobbing small objects over the fence with a badminton racket, and the swoosh and click as they hit tree leaves and branches. Later I found several clean, fresh marbles lying in the dirt. Others of my garden marbles look older and more battered.
Some other marbles in my collection were found on the street or the park or while camping... the criteria is that there had to be found on the ground. I don't buy marbles generally, except for a really big hand made one I bought last week at a thrift store.
I owe some pictures also...
Dee & I have been finding marbles ever since we moved into our current house some 20 years ago. Most are pretty basic ones, the kind you'd get in a tin of "Chinese Checkers." We have a couple of bowls full of them. Our guess is that the family that lived here in the 50's and 60's played with (and lost) a lot of marbles.
The "midden" behind the garage has broken pottery, bottles, plates, etc but no marbles. We think the old dump area dates back to 1900-1920 while the marble players were much later. The house was built in 1909.
As we renovated the house we've found marbles and small toys stuffed through holes in the floor and walls.
For what it's worth, our previous house with a much larger back yard that was regularly dug & turned for the garden was not a source for marbles.
We've found a few beads in the yard and in the water feature but we trace these to visits from George O'Grady.
A couple of years ago I found some old marbles underneath the wooden floor of an old farmhouse we had to restore. Some of the marbles where really beaten up, some others Danny could certainly bring them back to live. They must have been there for more then hundred years. The house was in really bad shape and about three hundred years old.
Hendrik
Hi Stephany,
The project is almost finished now and yes most of the time it was fun to do this.
Hendrik
When I use to have my retail store in Greenwich Village NYC. I met a man that dug old wells all over The tri state area. He primarily dug the wells looking for old hand blown bottles, inevitably he would come across old marbles of different types and bring them to me and since I already new about the German marbles beads from Africa I was fascinated and I would buy them from him. It was all good fun and not expensive but (see next post)
I started to get addicted to marbles and was buying them all over the place.As I started looking to collect more and more and looking for the rare and uncommon I realized that I could not collect marbles and beads so I stopped collecting marbles but not before the collection below was accumulated. I still enjoy taking them out and looking at them and it is hard not to look at marbles in flea markets and online but I am happy to say that I have not purchased a marble in over 10 years, I can not say that about beads though:)
Happy bead collecting everyone.
Wayne
