Above: Glass shards at the Outer Banks Beachcomber Museum face the historic Buchanan Cottage, Old Nags Head, North Carolina. Below and opposite: Sea glass shards from the Nellie Myrtle Pridgen Outer Banks Beachcomber Museum Collection. She allowed journalist writer Charles E. Cobb Jr. inside for a closer look. He then featured Pridgen’s collection in his October 1987 National Geographic story. In 2004, Carmen Gray cradled her mother’s heirloom collection from Nags Head to Rockport, Massachusetts, for Between the Tides, the first Northeast Sea Glass Festival. “We talked our way onto the train,” Gray said, laden with six European vacation-sized trunks packed with more than 350 pounds of her mother’s flotsam. The Outer Bankers were the surprise hit for many festivalgoers, but most had come to meet LaMotte and seek his signature on their copies of “Pure Sea Glass,” his self-published coffee table book. In addition to autographing copies of his 2004 runaway bestseller, LaMotte played antique sea glass road show with his fanatics, who brought personal beach glass for him to classify. When the Chestertown, Maryland, author opened one of Pridgen’s assorted sea glass purses filled with 90-year-old purples, colored by oxidized manganese last manufactured in 1915, he was swept away. During his national book tour, LaMotte made a special point of visiting the Outer Banks Beachcomber Museum where he could not contain his kid-in-the-candy-store reaction. “Like the reclusive collector herself,” LaMotte says, “the diverse items from our past have remained mostly out of the public eye. She never desired attention for her collection. Chaz Winkler and Dorothy Hope now carefully watch the store and its treasure. Their reluctance to move anything out of the nest is easily understood. Members of the beachcombing community would likely agree this is the immaculate collection. … It’s like the Sam’s Club for beachcombers.” 49 String lip bottle, circa mid-1700s. www.wrightsvillebeachmagazine.com WBM
2014-6
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