Crunching along a rocky Fox Island beach Thursday afternoon Tonya Strickland stopped for a moment, a smooth gray-blue rock catching her eye. Matte, light and perfectly rounded, the stone was a clay baby, a rare geographical formation found locally in select areas along Puget Sound.
Nicknamed “fairy stones” or “spirit babies,” clay babies, also spelled as one word, are known for their unusual shapes. Some look like fingers, puddles, animals, grapes, people or clouds. Others have knobs, curves and warts or resemble ears, bowling pins and lemons.
Washing up on the shoreline of places like Fox Island or growing out of clay flats at Point Defiance, clay babies can take decades or centuries to form, former University of Puget Sound geology professor Jeff Tepper told The News Tribune Sept. 5. They are a type of concretion, a mass of mineral that grows in fine sedimentary clay banks that once were part of ancient lakes fed by glaciers, he said.
Today you can find them near exposed clay banks, polished by the waves until smooth. Strickland, a writer from Artondale who’s blogged about clay babies, said she and her two young children love to wander beaches and look for them in the surf, a special kind of treasure hunt.
You can’t remove clay babies, shells or rocks from areas like the Tacoma DeMolay Sandspit Nature Preserve on Fox Island, but Strickland said that doesn’t make the search any less fun.
“We really enjoy the scouting expedition of it,” she said. “We love to find things that are rare and special and have a story behind them.”
A couple dozen interesting-looking clay babies are on display at the Fox Island Historical Museum, where you can also purchase clay babies from a basket for $1. Those babies have been donated by locals who found them on private beaches or discovered them prior to beachcombing restrictions, said Fox Island Historical Society president Gail Jones.
Jones said many people don’t know about clay babies and residents want to preserve the character and beauty of the island by keeping them where they’re found. Several Fox Island residents left messages with The News Tribune prior to publication, urging us not to write this story, lest the secret get out.
The legend of the girl and the sea
Local legends about the origin of clay babies come from multiple sources. Some recorded in the Puyallup Tribe historic archives say a Native American girl who lived on Fox Island, either from the Puyallup Tribe or the Nisqually Tribe, could not have children of her own so she would visit the site where clay babies are made and mold them into small animals and creatures, which can still be found today, said Jennifer Keating, an enrolled Puyallup Tribe member who grew up on Fox Island and has family who still lives there.
Other legends shared by the Fox Island Historical Society describe a Native American girl who, after rejecting marriage proposals from young men far and wide, noticed a strange man appear one day as she walked along the beach. Over time the two courted, but he would disappear into the water as mysteriously as he came every morning. The young woman told her parents of the strange event, who became alarmed, concerned this was the son of the ‘Old Man of the Sea.’
Her parents were worried they would offend the ‘Old Man of the Sea’ by refusing to allow their daughter to marry him, and as a result feared he would dry up the springs on the island until his son’s suit was granted, the legend goes. As if by magic, the water in the springs soon disappeared, the grass became brown and the crops dried up. When the woman’s parents gave their consent for his marriage proposal, the springs returned to normal.
One day the man came for his wife and taking her hand, they stepped into the sea and disappeared below the surface. Three times the daughter returned to visit her parents, but on the fourth visit there was kelp growing on her face. She was changing to become more of a sea creature.
Saddened to see their daughter’s transformation, the girl’s parents told her it would be better if she did not return again, and she left them forever to live with her husband below the ocean, the legend goes. Now when she becomes lonesome, she returns to her old playground and makes odd shapes that visitors find in the clay and sand.
When there were significantly fewer families visiting and living on Fox Island, Keating said you’d find clay babies all over.
“Unfortunately, like the entire Puget Sound region, there’s so much growth out there that you don’t really find them very frequently anymore” as a result of beachcombing, Keating said. Clay babies offer a unique opportunity to highlight, teach and preserve Native American history on Fox Island, she said.
Keating serves as a tribal land use manager and is the assistant Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Puyallup Tribe, identifying sacred sites and preserving them around Puget Sound. Fox Island, what was considered territory of the Puyallup and Nisqually people, was utilized for seasonal camps and temporary villages and continues to be a shellfish harvest site for geoduck divers, she said. It was also the site of an internment camp in the 1850s where between 640 and 790 Native Americans were forced to live there during the Puget Sound War.
“What I would love folks to understand is those clay babies are not just a part of Fox Island and Fox Island’s current culture and Fox Island’s history, it’s a part of Native history and Native culture as well,” Keating said. “Cultural resources like that are becoming more and more difficult to preserve with the growth in the area, and if we don’t actively protect these items, they won’t be around for us to continue to teach future generations about.”
Formed over thousands of years
It takes a lot of time, and a lot of luck, for a clay baby to be born.
Barry Goldstein is a professor emeritus in the geology department at University of Puget Sound who has studied glacial patterns and the landscapes they leave behind in Washington and Minnesota. He said the youngest clay-rich deposits from ancient lake beds left from receding glaciers in Puget Sound are about 15,000 years old.
Over time, fine-grain lake sediments made of silt and clay stacked up on top of each other, creating layers you can sometimes see as rings on clay babies, Goldstein said. Unlike sand, clay particles stick together. Variations in the amount of clay in the sediment, how much water infiltrated the clay bank, the strength of nearby waves and the location of the clay bank all impact the shape and size of a clay baby, he said.
To form a clay baby, the clay deposit needs to have intruding still water, Tepper said. During the retreat of the glaciers, frozen lakes were still under the surface, so clay settled to the bottom, creating a fertile breeding ground for clay babies, he said. Glacial lakes have less organic matter, which is why the clay color is more light gray compared to the dark sediment of a lot of modern lakes, Tepper said.
Layers of concretion build upon a nucleus made of inorganic or organic matter, like a fossil, Tepper said. Hidden within cliffs clay babies most often form the shape of flattened discs, which can intersect and merge with one another to create interesting shapes like barbells or Mickey Mouse ears. When the cliff erodes and the concretion falls into the surf, the water washes off the sediment that hasn’t hardened, leaving behind the particles that have cemented together. Over time the clay chunks get tumbled and rounded by the surf until they become smooth clay babies, Tepper said.
The lifespan of clay babies varies based on material type, the rigorousness of the waves and the abrasion of the shore, Goldstein said. Some that aren’t rock hard can break and may only survive a few tidal cycles before they’re broken down.
“It’s sort of the luck of the draw,” he said. “If you go to any place where the clay beds are exposed, which ones you’ll see, or how long they’ll be there, or what they’ll look like … it’s going to change.”
Tepper predicts large undisturbed clay babies far enough from the water could survive years or decades on a beach before it disintegrates back into the surf. Some clay babies on display at the Fox Island Museum even have barnacles on them.
Clay babies, like any other chunk of solid material, help protect beaches from erosion and removing them could increase the rate of shore erosion, Goldstein said. Removing them from cliff faces could also destabilize the cliff, causing it to slump or landslide, so it’s best to leave them be, he said.
Where to find clay babies
Any exposed clay banks around Puget Sound could be a place where you can find clay babies, Goldstein and Tepper said.
Around Tacoma some places to find them include Fox Island and the Tacoma DeMolay Sandspit Nature Preserve at Bella Bella Beach. You might also find them walking about a half mile out along Owen Beach.
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