I went to Muscatine, Iowa on a work trip once. There was a restaurant there called Button Factory. It was housed in a former button factory. Pretty old building. The bar top had an epoxy inlay with embedded buttons that were produced in the factory.
The meal was pretty good. The restaurant closed in 2012.
There was a button museum at the time, though I never made it in. I'm not sure if the museum is in the same spot as the restaurant was, as I was there in 2017.
One block over from the museum, there was recently a partial building collapse. 20 buildings were evacuated and 17 are still not able to be occupied.
I grew up in Muscatine along the river and always wondered why the shore was littered with shells with holes in them. As a kid, being told there used to be a button factory was good enough for me. I should visit the museum some day.
I recently learned about using mussels for buttons when I visited the Mississippi River Museum in Dubuque, Iowa and have been wondering since: can Zebra Mussels be used for buttons? That would create (even more) economic incentive to go after them.
As noted in the article, plastic buttons displaced buttons made from clamshells long ago. I doubt a market for zebra mussel buttons could make any dent on the population.
Yes, cheaper ones can be very thin, to save on material and produce twice as many buttons.
The trick to identify genuine shell buttons is to to touch one against your upper lip. A shell button will feel cool to the touch, a plastic one won't.
In college, I worked as a lab assistant for a professor studying them. I spent a lot of time counting microscopic young, scraping adults off of traps, measuring and weighing them before cracking them open to scoop out their insides and weighing them.
These little fellows are, in general, small. I guess they can get 50mm (2in), but most aren't that large and they have thin shells.
Further, I'd be somewhat afraid that creating products from them would spread the invasive species even further. The professor I worked for studied them because of their invasiveness - the lakes he set traps on were obviously spread by people. They spread easily by the water in boats - microscopic young means people don't know they spread them.
An economic incentive to hunt a particular species does not result in a decrease in population. What you have instead is an economic incentive to breed large populations in uncontrolled conditions, likely on public land, which then get abandoned and/or released when you realize the economic incentive has made your invasive species problem far, far worse.
The story starts with a German man, John Boepple, in his button shop in Germany. He immigrates to the US with the resolve to search for more freshwater mussels. So yes, it is relevant if you're interested in telling a story.
Because the article is about more than just the buttons.
For Boepple, buttons were the family business. At his shop in Germany, he had learned to craft them out of wood, shell, horn and bone. But pearl buttons brought in the biggest profits. When a German tariff put him out of business, Boepple became one of the nearly 1.5 million Germans who immigrated to America in the 1880s. “They each brought their own skills,” Joy says. “Mr. Boepple was a button maker.”
When you translate Johns surname into German, you get Böppel, which is slang for sth. small which you don‘t know the exact word for. So basically Böppel was making Böppel.
Some of this old stuff is really interesting - I used to live in Wisconsin and there was this place called “Crex Meadows” near my house which was a wildlife area but the name seemed so weird I looked it up and it used to be a grassland where the Crex carpet company farmed grass for making carpets. I had no idea they used to make carpet out of grass fibers.
Very well written article. Had a natural feel to it that was engaging and relaxing. The broader point of just having complete abandon for natural resources when manufacturing was certainly of the era (not that it has directionally changed much).
My Aunt spent her 'empty-nester' years tracking down our family. She found the immigration records and went back as far as the Habsburg monarchy. She went to the village where her grandfather was born and looked into the town's records.
She found people who looked exactly like her brothers (my father and my uncle)
To her, it was like a religious experience.
When she returned she said the village kept birth & marriage records to make sure new marriages were 'far enough apart'. I don't know if that's true, or just some color she put on the story.
I just tried looking up my last name on https://www.familysearch.org and got over 1.2M record results. daunting!
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 44.5 ms ] threadThe meal was pretty good. The restaurant closed in 2012.
One block over from the museum, there was recently a partial building collapse. 20 buildings were evacuated and 17 are still not able to be occupied.
I found the restaurant on google street view, the pictures go back to 2008! https://maps.app.goo.gl/UxWzN5bcd4cLG6eH9
The trick to identify genuine shell buttons is to to touch one against your upper lip. A shell button will feel cool to the touch, a plastic one won't.
These little fellows are, in general, small. I guess they can get 50mm (2in), but most aren't that large and they have thin shells.
Further, I'd be somewhat afraid that creating products from them would spread the invasive species even further. The professor I worked for studied them because of their invasiveness - the lakes he set traps on were obviously spread by people. They spread easily by the water in boats - microscopic young means people don't know they spread them.
This has happened many times throughout history.
It's significant that "Boepple immigrated to the United States in the late 1880s, resolving to search for more of these freshwater mussels."
And he was German. Lots of Germans emigrated to the USA, especially around that time. so it's important context of who this man was
For Boepple, buttons were the family business. At his shop in Germany, he had learned to craft them out of wood, shell, horn and bone. But pearl buttons brought in the biggest profits. When a German tariff put him out of business, Boepple became one of the nearly 1.5 million Germans who immigrated to America in the 1880s. “They each brought their own skills,” Joy says. “Mr. Boepple was a button maker.”
The buttons are pretty too
https://youtu.be/h-QgWOSVKm4?t=724
She found people who looked exactly like her brothers (my father and my uncle)
To her, it was like a religious experience.
When she returned she said the village kept birth & marriage records to make sure new marriages were 'far enough apart'. I don't know if that's true, or just some color she put on the story.
I just tried looking up my last name on https://www.familysearch.org and got over 1.2M record results. daunting!