From 1891 to approximately 1930, mussel shells provided employment for much of Muscatine, Iowa and the city provided buttons for much of the county. Buttons made from fresh water mussel shells, called pearl-buttons by the industry, quickly came into vogue and predominated over every other clothing fastener. The rise of the pearl-button industry reveals much of the romance of the economic development of the Upper Mississippi River, in contrast to its decline, which generally reveals exploitation and environmental degradation, mirroring the dramatic loss of extensive mussel beds.

Since the first occupation of the American continent, mussels were abundant in nearly every slough, stream, river, some lakes, and a few ponds, as an easily obtainable resource (Fig. 1). Shells were an important trade item among Indians for tools and adornment, such as hoe blades, fish lures, ankle rattles, temper for pottery (Figs. 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6), and just as today, pearls were strung into necklaces (Fig. 7). Archaeological excavations within the Mississippi River basin confirm that shell use increased through time and extensive refuse deposits attest to the fact that Indians considered mussels as an important food resource (Fig. 8).

Early nineteenth century Midwestern pioneers used mussels in limited qualities. The shells were ground for mortar, lime, and chicken grit, and the meat used for fish bait and hog feed. Shortly before the Civil War, the discovery of fresh water pearls in the east sparked a furor of fortune hunters that littered banks with shells in the wake of their frenzied activities (Scarpino 1985:81,82). Baroque pearls, having irregular shapes and various colors, commanded high prices and became fashionable for jewelry.

During the Civil War, Confederate prisoners at the Military Prison on the Mississippi River at Rock Island, made pearl buttons, jewelry, ornaments, and other trinkets, which were sold or traded to visitors (England 1985:15, Fig. 9). After the Civil War, regional discoveries of pearls renewed and fresh outbreaks of what has been referred to as "an epidemic of pearl fever," also encompassed the Midwest (Scarpino 1985:82, Fig. 10). Throughout this period the shells remained valueless, that is, until John Boepple envisioned them as an important regional commodity, a view last shared by Indians.

Boepple had been employed as a horn-button turner in Hamburg, Germany and was familiar with many aspects of the industry (Carlander 1954:49). A few years before he immigrated to the United States in 1887, a friend provided him with freshwater mussel shells ". . .collected from a river about two hundred miles southwest of Chicago" (Scarpino 1985:84. Boepple observed that the shells excelled in luster and hardness, equal in all ways to the marine shells used for buttons in Europe.

Large mussels beds drew Boepple to central Illinois and the Upper Mississippi River near Muscatine, Iowa (Carlander 1954:48, Scarpino 1985:84,85, Fig. 11). Supplies seemed unlimited, and tradition holds that John Boepple foresaw the economical impact of the button industry and prophesied potential riches for those involved (Scarpino 1985:85). Despite the prevailing view that mussels were worthless, Boepple gained financial support and opened the first freshwater pearl-button factory in the basement of a Muscatine cooper's shop in 1891 (Scarpino 1985:85). The buttons were cut with foot-operated machinery, a process which was soon mechanized (Fig. 12). According to Boepple, demand was enormous and pearl-buttons became so valuable that people starting putting pennies in the collection plate (quoted from Carlander 1954:49).

Crediting Boepple's resourceful ingenuity, Historian Philip Scarpino also identified two other factors which emerged to create the explosive growth in the pearl-button industry (Fig. 13).

First in 1890, Congress passed the McKinley Tariff, which raised the duty on imported buttons and gave the domestic industry a competitive advantage. Second, a proliferation of ready-made clothing created a market for large numbers of durable, inexpensive buttons. Prior to 1891, manufacturers made buttons from a wide variety of materials including marine shells, wood, metal, agate, vegetable ivory, glass, and bone. Buttons manufactured from marine shells were of high quality but expensive, while those crafted from other substances were less expensive, but prone to rust or breakage or warping. The shells of freshwater mussels, however, produced excellent, affordable buttons that were ideally suited for the marketing requirements of the ready-to-wear clothing industry (Scarpino 1985:84, Fig. 14).

Primarily due to Boepple and extensive mussel supplies, Muscatine became the foremost center of the pearl-button industry and known as the "Pearl Button Capital of the World" or "Pearl City" for over 75 years (Fig. 15).

Like most nineteenth century ports on the Mississippi River, towboats and steamboats were loaded with agricultural, timber, and industrial products and bound downriver for St. Louis and New Orleans, or up the Ohio River and headed for eastern cities. In this riverine economy, shell-related goods and services began to replace many of the older, more established industries (Scarpino 1985:95, Fig. 16).

Increased musseling activities were exacerbated by the great pearl craze of the last half of the nineteenth century which resulted in the destruction of mussels of all sizes and types, with little regard for future productivity (Scarpino 1985:83). Eventually, this growth was gauged by the fluctuation of mussels supplies. As mussels beds were systematically discovered and exploited, repeated episodes of pearl mania occurred (Scarpino 1985:83).

As the popularity of pearl-buttons increased, the industry expanded throughout the Upper Mississippi River Valley and beyond. Shells were brought by river and rail to factories to be drilled, cut, and polished into buttons and distributed throughout the nation and abroad (Figs. 17, 18 & 19). Although Boepple was the catalyst for the development of the pearl-button industry through his initiative and vision, others applied the mechanical techniques fined-tuned by nineteenth century industrialism. While his prophecy that buttons would make people rich came true, he failed as a manufacturer.

Boepple was eventually hired by the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries as a shell expert to monitor the very mussels the button industry sought to harvest (Scarpino 1985:85). As the button industry grew musselers quests for pearls and shells led them into streams which emptied into the Gulf of Mexico, Great Lakes, and middle and lower Mississippi and Ohio River Valleys (Scarpino 1985:86). Mussel gatherers customarily lived and worked in temporary riverside camps they occupied seasonally or until pickings became scarce.

Mussels were collected using steel crowfoot hook draglines, rakes (Fig 20), glass bottom buckets, underwater scopes, and by diving deep water or wading shallow streams and creeks. During the height of the pearl-button (Fig. 21) industry the use of crowfoot or treble hooks in tandem, called brails, were popular for collecting mussels (Fig. 22). Brails were pulled through the bed by boat and the mussels, which face upstream with their shells open, closed on the hooks to protect their soft interior (Fig. 23). The hooks were pulled in and the mussels removed and killed by steaming in large handmade cookers or vats to aid in opening the shells (Fig. 24). Some shellers cut the mussel hinge with a knife or other sharp tool and pried the shells open. The meat was searched for pearls and the shells sorted and marketed.

Factories were built nearby the musselers boomtowns at their newly discovered mussel beds to gain more control of the shell market. By 1899, there were sixty button factories in the Mississippi River Valley alone; forty-one were in Iowa, eleven in Illinois, six in Missouri, and two in Wisconsin (Carlander 1954:49,50). Muscatine, with a population of about 11,500 had thirty-three button factories. Five of these factories were complete plants and the remainder saw plants (Scarpino 1985:95,96).

At the height of the boom of the pearl-button industry in 1916, approximately 20,000 were employed manufacturing $12.5 million worth of buttons (Scarpino 1985:95) and branch offices were formed in many of the larger cities, such as Chicago, St. Louis, New York, and San Francisco.

In 1929, when the industry had already begun to slide towards its nadir, it still provided work for over 5,000 persons who produced $5.8 million worth of buttons. These workers labored in seventeen major factories situated in Iowa, Wisconsin, Missouri, New York, and Massachusetts, as well as numerous smaller plants located throughout the Mississippi River basin (Scarpino 1985:95).

At the factory's cutting or saw shops, the shells were washed and categorized by use, size, color, and species. Cylindrical plugs were drilled from the shell and sanded to remove the rough shell exterior and produce thin discs of nacre, called blanks (Fig. 25). The diameter of the blank was gauged in lignes, an English measurement of 40 lignes to the inch, traditionally used for buttons. The price of buttons was higher if patterns were cut or ground into the blank. During the finishing process, the blanks were polished and sometimes dyed, then drilled for thread holes or other means of attachment. Holes were typically in even numbers and shanks and eyelets were also popular.

Finished buttons were sized, weighed, and boxed in bulk quantities or individually sewn on cards as part of an extensive cottage industry (Fig. 26). Many factories had specialty shops for making fancy, handmade, or special order items. Specialty products may have based upon regional use and influences, such as fishing lures, knife handles, and trinkets (Fig. 27), while others were entirely new or experimental and included scarf rings, brooches, watch fobs, ashtrays, rosaries, key charms, lamps, and souvenirs (Fig. 28). Even waster shells, riddled with holes, were often broken up and packaged as aquarium gravel, ground up as lime or chicken grit, and powdered as an ingredient in mortar and house stucco. Factories typically mounded the extensive deposits of waster shells along river banks, identifying those ports by the generic name of button towns.

Pearl-button manufacture in Muscatine, the largest button town, continued to grow despite the industrial concern over diminishing mussel supplies. In 1920, approximately 5,000 workers, or one-third of its residents, were employed in the button industry (Knott 1980:15). Advertising was successfully relied upon to increase button sales (Fig. 29). Also, industrial success can be traced to reduction of overhead through subcontracting and piecework combined with successful attempts to prevent unionization (Fig. 30).

As late as 1930, shells were shipped to Muscatine by rail and barge from as far away as Arkansas to supplement regional demand (Scarpino 1985:86). In the years which followed, many factories consolidated or closed, as over-harvesting was compounded by declining water quality (Fuller 1980:89), indiscriminate mussel collecting techniques (Scarpino 1985:88-94), and the passage of numerous state regulatory codes and laws in the 1920s and 1930s.

In 1931, Biologist Dr. M. M. Ellis, of the University of Missouri, studied the natural replacement of mussels and discovered nearly all of the few remaining beds were under ten years of age, much to small for harvesting (Carlander 1954:48).

Dr. Ellis felt that silt was the outstanding factor in producing adverse river conditions. He warned that unless erosion and pollution problems were solved, rapid reduction, amounting almost to extermination of the mussels in some places could be expected.

Despite Ellis' studies, river degradation continued, so the protection of many mussel species fell under Federal and state jurisdiction.

Through the 1930s and 1940s, the Muscatine pearl-button industry, as in other towns and cities, began to realize an inevitable death due to manufacture of plastic buttons (Lopinot 1968:addendum, Fig. 31), continued loss of shell reserves, economic hardships of the Depression, and more successful attempts as unionization. Following World War II, the demand for musseling nearly came to a standstill and many factories continued to flounder as plastic buttons grew in popularity (Lopinot 1968:addendum).

In 1954, at the height of the musseling season under favorable weather, Biologist Harriet Carlander (1954:51) noted only twelve or fifteen shell-fishing boats in Muscatine harbor. During this decline, Muscatine retained its hold as the center of the pearl-button industry into the mid-1960s (Parmalee 1967:2), emphasizing small specialized shops and products, although output was minimal (Goodman 1986:6).

The last Muscatine factory ceased making pearl-buttons in the summer of 1967 (Knott 1980:15), marking the end of ". . .a multi-million dollar industry that lasted over 75 years" (Parmalee 1967:4). Today, the Weber and Sons and the J and K Button companies of Muscatine have survived to make the transition to synthetic buttons (Anonymous1 n.d., Fig. 32). Not Surprisingly, Muscatine factories still make the majority of their plastic buttons in the traditional shapes, styles, and pearly lusters (Fig. 33).

In the 1960s the musseling industry, nearly obsolete by the mid-twentieth century, found a resurgence in the cultured pearl industry (Parmalee 1967:4). The Japanese discovered early in the twentieth century that pellets of fresh water shell placed in oysters formed pearls in a few years (Lopinot:appendix) and recently, Japanese and American pearl farmers have nearly perfected the culture of pearls from fresh water mussels, in contrast to naturally occurring pearls which are rare and often quite old.
The host mussels and oysters relieve the irritation of the pellet, the oyster applies layers of nacre, and turns the cyst into a high quality "gem" pearl. As a result of the cultured pearl industry musseling is strictly regulated from over-harvesting and to protect Due to the popularity of cultured pearls mussel shell prices are $500 to $900 per ton, compared to the $65 to $260 range paid in 1965 and 1966 (Tetreault 1990:15).

During the last decade an awareness of the pearl-button industry and its historical importance has grown due to a newfound and somewhat commercialized, appreciation of the river. With increasing river-related tourism, steamboat gambling, and the observance of the 1991 centennial of the pearl-button industry, Muscatine's former title as the "Pearl button Capital of the World" has prompted media attention, advertisements, and presentations.

The legacy of the pearl-button manufacture is its wide-reaching influence and regional significance. Despite a growing appreciation, physical remains of the industry are quickly vanishing from Mississippi River port cities and towns and rarely can informants be found to provide glimpses into this past. This loss is important to future research and archaeological interpretation. Also, plastic buttons offer little comparison to the former popularity and importance of their pearl counterparts.

Today, the few remaining waster shells associated with the labors of the pearl-button industry are largely ignored due to their preponderance within the cultural landscape (Fig. 34) and nearby; a few abandoned riverfront factories stand as decaying monuments to this legacy (Fig. 35), both reminders that the pearl-button industry once reigned supreme.