Before the Cape Cod Bracelet, There Was Hazel Blake French

Today, people line up for the Cape Cod bracelet. A century ago, visitors to Cape Cod sought out Hazel Blake French’s jewelry—silver designs set with colorful glass she gathered from the old glass factory grounds.

Long after the Boston & Sandwich Glass Company’s furnaces went cold, people searched its former grounds and waste heaps for bits of colored glass. French had been drawn to those fragments since childhood. As an adult, she selected pieces for her jewelry, had them cut and polished by a craftsman in New York, and designed and carved the silver settings herself.

French worked in the Arts and Crafts tradition, which valued thoughtful design and skilled handwork. Her silver designs drew on the Cape Cod landscape—shorebirds, starfish, reeds, and other forms from the shore and marsh. A 1927 writer praised a Philadelphia exhibition of her work for bringing those motifs together with glass she had recovered from the factory’s waste heaps.

Her jewelry reached audiences far beyond Sandwich. The Society of Arts and Crafts displayed it in Boston and New York in 1925. In 1928, French brought her tools and examples of her necklaces, pins, brooches, belts, and bracelets to a craft demonstration at Boston’s Horticultural Hall. What had once been discarded glass became the centerpiece of work unmistakably her own.

Photos:Silver Cranberry design necklace with ruby glass cabochons with matching ring and earrings; Silver Gull design bracelet with emerald cabochon; Hazel Blake French at work, photographed for the Boston Evening Globe, July 28, 1925.