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The National Pearl Button Museum is a treasure trove of history, science and lore of the humble but necessary pearl button of the 19th and early 20th centuries. This museum tells the story of the people who lived and worked on the Mississippi River, turning out 1.5 billion of these discs a year.
Sep 27, 2015 · At the turn of the 20th Century, 1.5 billion pearl buttons were produced annually in Muscatine, the undisputed Pearl Button Capital of the World. “Pearl” buttons drilled, cut, and carved from freshwater mussels. At some point late on a Sunday afternoon, I stumbled into the Muscatine History and Industry Center.
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What's so special about the little pearl button Museum?
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Is Muscatine Iowa a pearl button city?
Jan 5, 2022 · Though a few button factories existed in Indiana before the Civil War — relying on shell, horn, and bone — the American freshwater pearl boom didn’t really gain momentum until 1900. In that year, a pearl frenzy erupted along the Black and White Rivers near Newport, Arkansas.
- An Immigrant with An Idea
- Iowa Becomes The "Button Capital"
- Jobs Are Plentiful
- Cheap Labor
- No More Clams
John Boepple was a master craftsman in Hamburg, Germany. He was skilled at making buttons from animal horn and hooves, bone and seashells. John had heard about the fresh-water mussels in the Mississippi River. He was convinced there was a fortune to be earned in making buttons from these shells with their pearl-like inside coating. In 1888 John Boe...
As button manufacturing caught on in Muscatine, business just seemed to slip away from John. Other people took his ideas and made their own fortunes. The craftsman from Hamburg was a good button maker, but not such a good businessman, and his company failed. Meanwhile John Boepple's method for making buttons had been taken up in cities all along th...
Even a fairly simple kind of manufacturing like button making creates many jobs. Clam fishers in small boats dragged sets of hooks along the river bottom where, as the History of Muscatine County (1912) tells us: The fishers then brought in their catch, and the clams were thrown into big pots of boiling water to kill them. Men and women pried the l...
Women held many jobs in button manufacturing, usually the less skilled and lower paying positions. Cutters made an average of $8 to $10 a week, considered fairly good pay at the time. Facers, drillers and packers—all positions filled by women—were paid between $4 and $6 a week. This was also good wages, but the women could not hope to move up to th...
When John Boepple opened his button factory in 1891, there were thousands of mussels bedded in the mud at the bottom of the Mississippi River. The factories cut, polished and sold pearl buttons as fast as the fishers could bring in the shells. By 1900 there were very few clams left "lying with (their) mouths open upstream" to snap up the hooks. But...
Oct 5, 2018 · Otto John Tobias brought the Healey brothers, Frank and Ted, from Muscatine to see the potential for a button factory in Mercedes. The brothers leased a building near the corner of Illinois and 4 th Street from W.D. Chaddick and opened Continental Button Company in June 1929. The Healeys were vice presidents in charge of operations at the plant.
Nov 1, 2023 · The Pearl-Button Fever: Fishing Fortunes from the Mississippi River Bend. For many years, Muscatine, Iowa, on the Mississippi River, was the Pearl-Button Capital of the World. Harikleia Sirmans Nov 1, 2023 - 12 min read. Buttons, twenty-two, mother-of-pearl, small circular, varied sizes with four holes for sewing, some have a small lathe mark ...
Experience the story of becoming the Pearl Button Capital of the World and the “Gold Rush of the Midwest”
