Hampton park Charleston, SC marbles

Lakota · Mar 29, 2017

These were found near Hampton park. I picked I thought would be the best ones to show. I found so much marbles in the yard. I think some are hand made like the clay marble and I believe the blue with white ribbon is handmade also. At the end of the white ribbon it is not even. I believe the big marble with the old style 3 is a Victorian pool ball. Not sure what it's made of but the red hot needle did not melt it. Hampton park got some very old history so I'd like to know what I may have found. I did not show the agate marble because I could not find it. My girlfriends favorite one. Anyway if you know the value for the lot or individual let me know. May trade or sell.

Lakota · Mar 29, 2017

Just pull these out of the ground. Texas long horn marble. Go long horns.

Lakota · Mar 30, 2017

Looks like I pulled a rare marble after all. Ruby red that is handmade. Very cool.

cheese · Mar 30, 2017

Pretty marble. It appears to be machine made though.

Lakota · Mar 31, 2017

That's what I thought so I posted to a couple sights thinking that I would place these in a time period. I wanted to see the color so I put it under the light. Usually green or purple are the rare colors but it is very hard to make red with glass. They think it's hand made also because it is not round. May look round but it's not. Could not see any bubbles but a very thin ribbon on the outside. I'm looking for a place here to get that conformed because pictures can only tell so much.

cheese · Mar 31, 2017

Old handmade glass marbles will have pontil marks. Machine made marbles are not perfect, they are often out of round, some were egg shaped, some were full of creases and defects, some even were football shaped and worse. Many were discarded by the workers but they rolled off the rollers fast and not every defect marble was caught by quality control.

Here are some handmade marbles. You can see some of the pontils. The last picture shows one of the pontils well down at the bottom of the marble. It's not a true "pontil mark" as a blown glass item would have, but it's where the marble was cut off of the glass cane and another where the previous marble was cut off. Machine made marbles don't have them because the glass they are made from is not in the form of a cane... it's in a pool of melted liquid in a tank. It comes out in a stream and a mechanized cutter chops the stream while it drops out of the tank and then it falls onto a set of rollers that round and cool the marbles as they approach the end, where they fall into barrels.