Button Museum

This week on Prep day we enjoyed a field trip up the river to Muscatine, Iowa where the National Pearl Button Museum is located.  This was a very interesting place of history.  Our tour guide taught us much about what happened there, what led up to it's beginnings and how it faded into the past.  It started with a German immigrant, John F. Boepple, button maker.  He made buttons in Germany from all kinds of things, such as deer horns, bones and sea shells.  He knew a lot about mussels, how they grew in slow moving fresh water rivers in abundance.  Supplies were low in Germany so he studied waterways in the United States, and migrated to the Mississippi river near Muscatine.  He was right in his predictions when he found an abundance of mussels.  So he set up shop harvesting the mussels to make beautiful pearl buttons.  Others caught on to his venture and business boomed for a time.  The industry became the "gold rush " or in other words the mother of pearl of the Midwest.  This all happened between 1890 and 1950.  Eventually the mussels were all farmed out and the invention of the plastic button ended the era of the button factories in Muscatine.  Here are a few photos of our tour.

A depiction of how they would fish for the mussels on the river.

Machine that punched out buttons.

These are called pearl slugs.  Pearls were in the mussels.  It was just very rare to find a perfect pearl, due to the conditions of how they lived in the river.

The buttons had to be counted.  Someone invented this tool for scooping up buttons and counting them, speeding up the process.  

Buttons were an indication of wealth.

Artistry 

We then went on to Iowa City.  Nearby we found the camping area for the handcart companies, where they would assemble their handcarts and make preparations for the trek west.