From the Archives: Button, Button, Who’s Got the Button?
We drove through Buffalo Iowa early on a Sunday morning, just as Judy’s Barge Inn, a local variation of the more common Dew Drop Inn, was opening for the breakfast crowd. It was too early for a local historical society to be open. It was not too early to stop and read the local historical marker, which reminded us that Buffalo, like other small towns along this stretch of the Mississippi was part of the nineteenth century’s button boom, which we learned about in 2019 during an earlier trip on the Great River Road.
The nineteenth century button industry based on fresh-water mussels was a recurring theme of our ten days on the Great River Road this year.
In 1891 a German button manufacturer named John Frederick Boepple opened a button factory in Muscatine, Iowa, after a change in tariff laws caused his business in Germany to fail. Shell buttons weren’t new. The Boepple family had made buttons from shells and horn for many years. But the plentiful mussel shells found in the Mississippi River near Muscatine were thick and well suited for cutting into buttons.
At the time that Boepple opened his small factory, the McKinley tariff of 1890 meant that imported shell buttons were expensive. The original foot-operated lathes that Boepple adapted from those used to make buttons from ocean shells were designed to allow skilled craftsmen to create a button from beginning to end, which meant that even without the additional cost of the tariff buttons were not cheap.* With the introduction first of steam-powered lathes and then a revolutionary machine called the Double Automatic that, well, automated the process, attractive mother-of-pearl buttons were affordable to the average household. By the late nineteenth century, buttons made from river mussel shells were so popular that bars in at least one river town accepted mussel shells as payment.
Like other industries along the Great River Road, buttons were a boom and bust business. “Clammers” earned good livings harvesting shells from the river in large quantities. Button factories sprang up in towns up and down the Mississippi, creating hundreds of factory jobs and more opportunities for cottage industries where women and children sewed buttons to cards at home. In the same way that the logging industry overcut the great forests of Minnesota and northern Wisconsin, by the 1920s, the button industry had decimated the Mississippi’s mussel population, and precipitated its own demise.**
* Today we tend to think about buttons as nothing in particular. Or more accurately, unless you knit or sew, you probably don’t think about buttons at all unless you have to sew one back on your jacket. (A skill everyone should learn, in my opinion.) But historically buttons were a luxury item: made by hand and often from expensive materials. It turns out there was a good reason my grandmothers (and probably yours) kept a button jar. (For that matter, I still have one.)
For those of you who’d like to know more, I recommend this article:
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/design/2012/06/button_history_a_visual_tour_of_button_design_through_the_ages_.html
** The related story of efforts to restore the river mussel population was also a recurring theme of our trip. At one time there were 51 species of mussels in the upper Mississippi; today theater are 38, eighteen of them endangered.
Road Trip Through History: The Putnam Museum
My Own True Love and I make a point of visiting local historical museums whenever we’re on the road.* What a museum choses to focus on can tell you how a community or a region defines itself. Even a museum that seems at first glance to be an uncurated (or as autocorrect intriguingly suggests, uncharted) collection of stuff tells a story with the choices it makes.
The Putnam Museum in Davenport is an excellent example of the hybrid natural history/history museum that we occasionally find in smaller cities. As always, the combination is a reminder that a region’s natural history is the basis on which its human history is built.
We spent our time in the museum’s two major exhibits.
The first, titled Black Earth Big River, focuses on the natural history of the area, beginning with the different habitats that make up the area and ending with today’s small city version of an urban environment. I was fascinated by the exhibits dealing with prairie grass and the creation of black earth, which the exhibit dubbed “prairyerth.” This exhibit was a useful counterpart to the story of John Deere’s creation of the self-scouring steel plow: the root patterns of prairie grass are pretty amazing. (Take a look at the illustrations in this Nat Geo piece: Digging Deep Reveals the Intricate World of Roots )
The second, titled River, Prairie and People, began with the geographic history of the region, and then followed the history of humans in the region from the earliest peoples who reached the region through the mid-twentieth century. I was pleased to see a sign at the front of the exhibit asking visitors to help make the museum more inclusive and drawing attention to signs throughout the exhibit marked “New Content,” all of which added stories about women and people of color in the Quad Cities.** In at least one case, a “New Content” sign fleshed out a reference in an existing exhibit, allowing an important woman to appear in her own right who had previously been referred to only as her husband’s wife.
Three stories in particular caught my imagination:
- Alexander Brownlie and his brothers, who were trained masons, created a unique form of sod house. Most sod houses, known as soddies, were made from mats of sod. The Brownlies pounded sod into molds and created firm blocks that were essentially sod bricks. They used them to create sod and clay walls that were a foot thick and could support a two story structure. Luxury living on the prairie!
- During World War II, children collected 25 million pounds of milkweed pods, which were used to fill 1.2 million military life vests. Twenty-six ounces of milkweed floss could keep a 150 pound soldier afloat in salt water for 48 hours. That is a LOT of milkweed.
Image courtesy of Stephen Williams – https://phrontistery.info/para/a05/a05-pinsky.htm
- In 1877, amateur archeologist Rev. Jacob Gass discovered three inscribed slate tablets in a local burial mound. The tablets, which were inscribed with what he took to be characters of an ancient language depicted a cremation scene, a hunting scene, and an astronomical calendar . Gass believed they were proof that the mounds had been built by an ancient people of European ancestry rather than Native American peoples.*** The Davenport Tablets were initially hailed as an American Rosetta Stone, but scholars, including a team from the Smithsonian, soon began to look at them more carefully, using new techniques that would help change the nature of archeological study. The final consensus was the the tablets were frauds. Oddly, there is reason to believe that Gass was the victim of the fraud, which was perpetrated by members of the Davenport Academy of Sciences as a way to embarrass Gass. Which seems like an odd thing for adult scientists to do.
* In fact, my love affair with local historical museums dates from high school. My friends and I hung out at the local historical museum the way the kids from Happy Days hung out at Al’s Diner. But that’s a whole different story.
**This is becoming more and more common in the museums we visit, and I, for one am mighty happy to see it.
***A popular idea at the time. And by European, they meant ancient Egyptian. Don’t get me started.
Rock Island Arsenal, Pt 2 Taming the Mississippi
As so often happens on our road trips, our visit to the Mississippi River Visitor Center at Lock and Dam 15 on Arsenal Island turned out to be much more than we expected.
We went to the center expecting to see exhibits on the flora and fauna of this stage of the river, the general history of how the Corps of Engineers made (and keep) the Mississippi navigable, and the specific history of Lock and Dam 15.* At most, we hoped to see a boat go through the lock—eternally fascinating as far as we are concerned. (Though not quite as magical as watching a blacksmith at work.)
In fact, the vistors’ center had all of that, including what turned out to be a detailed topographical map of the area around the lock and dam on the first floor of the center, with a clever way to display the map’s scale. (Turns out I have a six-mile foot. Who knew?)
We would have been perfectly happy with all of the above. But when we walked in, the ranger on the desk asked “Are you here for the tour?” We were not. When she asked if we would like to join, we did not even have to confer with each other. The answer, obviously, was yes.
Once again, we had an enthusiastic and knowledgeable volunteer guide. He talked about how the lock and dam worked, the unusual bridge that links Arsenal Island to the Iowa side of the Mississippi and its predecessors, and the role Fort Armstrong played in the American Civil War. We got to see boats go through the lock, and a close up look at the bridge swinging open to accommodate the process. (We also got a close up look at water running over the dam, and the bright yellow “last chance ropes” suspended from the bridge. Together they emphasized just how dangerous the dam is.)
Here are the bits that caught my imagination:
- Rock Island was the site of the first railroad bridge to cross the Mississippi. The bridge was finished in April, 1856. Two weeks after it opened, the steamboat Effie Afton hit one of the bridge’s pillars. Both the steamboat and the bridge caught on fire. The Effie Afton sank. The Illinois side of the bridge collapsed onto the wreck of the steamboat the next day. The trial that followed played an important role in the conflict between riverboats and railroads over which technology would control access to the west—not an insignificant issue at the time. (It also had a role in the career of a little known Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. )
- Government Bridge has two layers: the top layer is a railroad bridge and the lower lay was originally for horse drawn vehicles. Which seems wrong. After all, trains are heavier than horse drawn vehicles, and you always put the heavy stuff on the bottom for balance. However, it turns out that horses are freaked out by having trains go under them. Who knew?
- The bridge is now painted with radar resistant paint for security purposes. Which somehow struck me as funny.
*Because every lock and dam on the river has its own story that begins with the river conditions at a certain spot.
Travelers’ Tips.
For those of you who did not read the last post here on the Margins,# Arsenal Island is home to the Rock Island Arsenal and the district headquarters of the Army Corp of Engineers Since the Arsenal is an active military base, you need to get a pass to get to the welcome center. (Unless you have a military id.) Take the bridge from Moline—not the bridge from Davenport—and follow the signs to the Visitor Control Center. You will need a valid state id or U.S. Passport.
There are public tours of Lock and Dam 15 on Saturdays. However, you can schedule a tour at other times. The website says you need a group of ten or more people, but the tour we joined up with was originally a group of two. You don’t know until you ask.
#Not pointing fingers. I realize you have many choices about things to read, on line and off, and I appreciate any time you choice to spend with me.