Pearls on the Mississippi: The Story of the Pearl Button Industry in Muscatine, Iowa

(drums..bugles..)

From 1891 to about 1930, thousands of Iowans made their living or supplemented their 
incomes by catching freshwater mussels, locally referred to as clams, to sell to the button 
factories blossoming on the banks of the Mississippi. The whole freshwater pearl button 
industry was an Iowan invention and made its home in Muscatine.

The manufactured buttons from freshwater shells began when Johann Böpple used his 
homemade foot-powered lathe to make a few crude buttons from freshwater clam shells 
he found in the Mississippi River near his home in Muscatine, Iowa.

It was the decade of the 1880's. Young Böpple had learned to cut  
buttons from animal horns and ocean shells from in his native  
Germany and had experimented with freshwater shells from America  
knowing that they had come from a river about 200 miles southwest of  
Chicago. When high tariffs hurt his business in 1887, he packed his turning lathe 
equipment and tools and headed for America to find the 
river with the shells, making his way to Gibson city and Petersburg on the Sangamon 
River in Illinois.

Later Böpple said "it was here while bathing in the river one day, my 
foot was cut and upon examination of the cause I found the bottom of  
the river covered with mussel shells. At last I found what I had been looking for. Yet, 
there still was problem before me. I was without capital in a strange land among strange 
people and unfamiliar with the language.

Whether Böpple's swimming accident really occurred is now lost in 
history, but one way or the other is was in the Sangamon River that  
the Pearl Button Industry was born. He worked on farms and railroad construction crews 
locating other shell beds. In the Rock River near 
Rock Island, the Mississippi near Muscatine, and in the Iowa River  
at Columbus Junction where he opened a little shop made and sold a  
few freshwater shell buttons and novelties. Finally he came to Muscatine, raised a little 
money and launched the first button factory early in 1881.

Eventually Böpple opened two factories, neither of which was commercially successful. 
It wasn't until 1895, when other factories were operating, that the industry really was 
established.

At first clams were collected by hand or by digging them out of 
shallow waters with a hayfork, but as demand for shells went up so  
did the price. Instead of selling by the pound, clams began to sell by the ton and the 
fisherman needed more productive methods. In 1897, the crow foot bar was invented. It 
was a long piece of pipe with lines tied to it at four to six inch intervals. Each line was 
three feet long and had from two to six hooks on it. The four pronged hooks were 
dragged over the clam bed. A good clammer could drag 500 pounds of clams out of the 
river. At 1897 prices, this could net him about three dollars.

Serious clammers built shanty boats and lived on the river. Always ready to move to a 
new bed when the one they were working on stopped producing. The whole family got 
involved in the business. While Dad was out catching clams, Mother and their children 
stayed on shore and cooked out the clams.

Pearl Gantz remembers camping on the river bank shelling all summer.  
How many summers?
"Oh mercy,a lot of them. Oh yes. Many because once you start and get the freedom of 
outdoor life you don't want to work in the shop in the summer. One year when we were 
on the Rock River with another couple, we had a large Army tent that was 16 by 16. It 
had a big pole up in the center and it was really nice. We had old linoleum on 
the floor, we had folding cots and a table and orange crates piled  
up for a cupboard and an oil stove too. We just loved it out there.  

It was very pleasant and a lot of fun when there would be several of friends with us 
camping. We always made more money shelling but they always let you come back to 
the shop in the fall because they needed the shells. We hated to come home. We were the 
last ones to come back.”

There were many small button factories cutting blanks for the finishing plants. Some 
people had inexpensive cutting machines in their homes. Wood sheds, barns or basements 
cutting blanks for sale to the manufactures. Some people caught clams to sell to the 
factories. Others worked in factories or with the firm that made cutting machinery. Some 
worked in the shell crushing plants and turned left over shells into grit and gravel. Others 
set up their own home work shops to produce rough blanks for sale to the polishing 
companies.

Housewives participated by sewing buttons on cards in their spare time. Muscatine 
became known worldwide as the pearl city and as the pearl button capital of the world. 
Fortunes were accumulating and the future looked promising for everyone involved in the 
homegrown industry. John Weber a button worker from Vienna, Austria came to 
Muscatine in 1896 eager to succeed in the burgeoning button business. He formed a 
partnership with Henry Umlott and they opened a small factory in a house at 509 East 3rd 
Street calling it the Automatic Button Company. All they had were hand machines; hand 
drillers, hand backers, hand facers, and as Weber's son Charles 
explains very, very limited production. Charlie Weber came to know the button business 
intimately. Working from the age of 12 with his seven brothers in his father's business.

"In early days we shipped buttons from Muscatine to St. Louis on 
paddlewheels. Oh yes right there on 3rd street was a boat landing  
and we would come up from St. Louie and unload buttons on the same  
boat. And we'd have freight trains going through on maybe every half to three quarter of 
an hour. They hauled coal, oil, shells, everything."

Some of the button finishing plants in Muscatine were the Automatic, Hawkeye, Shrears, 
Pioneer, Weber and Sons, McKee, Hanover, Hirsch, US Button, and Vienna Button. At 
the height of the Muscatine Button Industry the growth was phenomenal and grew from 
cottage businesses to large button factories. The invention and marketing of an automatic 
button cutting machine by the Berry Company replaced the old hand cut method of 
sawing out buttons. By 1905 annual output of freshwater pearl buttons in Muscatine had 
reached 1.5 billion with an estimated three million dollars, or nearly 37 percent of the 
buttons produced in the world.

In time the unrestricted fishing pressure began to build. Seemingly  
inexhaustible beds, one in New Boston, Illinois for instance, was  
estimated to have produced over one hundred million clams in a  
three year period, became dangerously depleted. But the danger in 1909 wasn't seen as a 
danger to the lowly clam, it was seen as a danger to an industry that supported thousands 
of people and provided Muscatine with a valuable export product. As a result, the 
government restricted fishing in depleted areas and set up a hatchery at Fairport to find 
ways to propagate clams. Mr. Böpple was hired as the shell expert.

Eventually the hatchery people succeeded in learning how to propagate the mussels, but 
time was running out on an industry. The twin inventions of a method of raising cultured 
pearls and the ability to produce plastic buttons brought to an end the reign of the pearl 
button in Muscatine. No freshwater pearl buttons are made in Muscatine these days. 
Today the shellers on the Mississippi sell their shells to cultured pearl producers in Japan. 
A tiny grain of a Mississippi clam shell placed in an oyster shell in Japan will stimulate 
the creation of a beautiful cultured pearl. Only three companies, McKee, J and K, and 
Weber and sons continue to make buttons. Not freshwater pearl buttons shiny and 
iridescent, but practical plastic.

Edited by Dean Sessler
Narrators: Max Churchill, Dean Sessler, Martha Tate, Paul Wilts
Photographs: Oscar Grossheim Collection, Musser Public Library, Mike  

O'Hara, Muscatine Community College
Research Sources: Musser Public Library, Pearl Button Museum,  

Muscatine Iowa, Iowa Historical Society
Made possible by a grant from the Iowa Humanities Board
Copyright 1994 Muscatine Community College