Grommet

This is an old brass grommet that I found on Cape Henlopen at the same site as this and this. There's a lot of history in that area, so I'd be hard pressed to say that all of these items were from the same source, but they were from the same location (within 10 yards of each other), so who knows?

Assortment of nails?

Sort of. These are all from known or probable shipwrecks on the Delmarva Peninsula. The two on the upper left are from a known wreck, which I cannot name, located somewhere in Maryland. The big treenail (pronounced "trun-el") on the bottom is from an old wooden coal barge on the beach south of Woodland Beach, Delaware. The other three are from wrecks or probable sections of wrecks in and around Lewes, Delaware. The one on the far right is a "cut nail". You are not likely to find these in your local hardware conglomerate...it came from the same location as this and this.

More stuff I pulled out of the water #7

Actually, these came off the same beach as the lead buttons discussed previously. These are bits of brass, copper, or bronze nails - making them distinctly for nautical use. These were found in nearly the same spot as the lead buttons. Could they be from an old ship or boat wreck, or might they be coffin nails?

More stuff I pulled out of the water #6

Actually, these were found on a beach. They are very old clothing buttons, and they are made out of lead.

As the man says, they don't make 'em like that anymore.

These were found on the surface of the sand not too far from each other, but about a year apart, near Lewes, Delaware. I found a few other things at this spot, too, which I will blog about one of these days. I'm uncertain of the age of these, but given the construction and the location in which they were found, there's every possibility that these once adorned a sailor's coat. The fascinating and exceedingly rare 1965 book entitled Pilots of the Bay and River Delaware, and Lewes Lore by James Marvil sheds some remarkable insight into the number of historic shipwrecks in the area, and how the bodies of deceased sailors were treated. This reference is one of the reasons why I suspect that these buttons belonged to a sailor (hint - many of the bodies recovered by Lewes "wreckers" were unceremoniously buried in the dunes). Only 1000 copies of the book were ever printed (I have two copies of this work myself).