Humboldt County Is a Worldwide Center for Marble Makers and Marble Hunters, Says Local Marble Maker

Transcript of Topher Reynolds speaking about Humboldt County’s role in the worldwide passion for marbles.

I’m Topher Reynolds. I’m a glassblower here in Eureka, California. I run a small shop here in Old Town called the Glass Garage. It’s a cooperative studio. There are five full-time artists who make their living out of this little spot. We’ve all been friends for a lot of years.

There’s always been a glassblowing scene here. The marbles kind of grew out of that, but six years ago, marble hunting became a big thing in Humboldt County, and Eureka in particular, really kind of took the ball and ran with it. And we now are kind of a worldwide center for marbles, marble collectors, marble makers, marble hunters. So Humboldt, and Eureka in particular is top of the list when it comes to people thinking about marbles.

From the point of view of us marble makers, we work on a 3000 degree torch just inches away from us. And the fact that we have this very, very temperate climate that never gets too hot, never gets too cold is fantastic. As far as from the marble hunters, it’s a couple fold. One, there’s a lot of marble makers around the area. So there’s a lot of marbles available. Second, there’s a strong attitude to pay it forward in this community. I’ve never lived anywhere else where people more quickly bought into the idea that this is just us and we kind of have to take care of ourselves and definitely an attitude of if somebody did something nice for you, so you kind of pay it forward. And then the last thing is just our physical environment with the beach so close to the redwoods, and the number of parks we have here in the city, all those things combine to make us kind of the nexus, the best place to be if you’re a marble hunter or marble maker.

And the big thing is getting on the Facebook group. So that’s where a lot of the marble hunting and hiding goes on is the Facebook groups, if you just look up Humboldt and marbles, a number of groups will come up. There’s also the world’s biggest marble hunt. That’s a, I believe it’s 30,000 people worldwide. We’re very active in that as well.

[Image provided by Topher Reynolds for an earlier story]

So there’s a number of things, but it’s mainly online and through Facebook is the best way to get ahold of people and be involved.

Humboldt Marble Weekend is our big event that happens in February every year. We’ve had it three years. It’s quickly become the largest marble event on the planet. Our last one, we had 72 artists from 19 different states, and we had 5,000 participants from 27 states. So we’ve definitely got a reputation throughout the country and we’re starting to draw in people. We had a glass artist come in from Belgium a year ago. So we’re even getting onto the world stage with that. We’re really excited about that. It draws a lot of people in here to the community.

It usually happens in February. We think we’re going to stick with that format. Our website will be going back up. It’ll be HumboldtMarbleWeekend.com. We took it down during the pandemic just to save a little bit of money, but we’ll be starting that back up here really soon.

For Humboldt Marble Weekend we had the mayor declare it an official day for the city. I don’t think we have a single Arts Alive! where I don’t see two or three of our city council members dropping down through.

You can kind of write your own situation here and you have to provide the energy, but if you’ve got the energy, people are very reflective about that.

Eureka is unique that whatever you stick your head up and say, “this is who I am, and this is what I do,” If you do it slightly better than the person next to you, everyone will just applaud and go along with it. We have a high tolerance for just you doing you and we’ll appreciate it as long if you’re excited about something and in Eureka, other people will be excited about it as well. It’s a really good supportive community for that. We have a lot of unique events and a lot of unique things going on that if there’s a core group that’s really excited about it, that energy spreads and everybody else is willing to appreciate that and feed into that and be part of the whole event.