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Author preserves Muscatine’s button history in pictures By Melissa Regennitter - 11/10/2007 Muscatine Journal More Info on This Book: Muscatine's Pearl Button Industry
Though the shells are nearly extinct from the river’s edge, their existence and the story they tell is important to this community and has now been commemorated in a newly published book “Images of America – Muscatine’s Pearl Button Industry. “ By the turn of the century, Muscatine was everything buttons. The noise of cutting machines, piles of cut shells and the pungent smell of a clammer’s harvest sitting in the sun was understood by the city’s residents to be their gold mine. A new pictorial history book has been compiled and authored by Melanie K. Alexander, the executive director of the Muscatine History and Industry Center, which includes photos she has gathered from community members, businesses and from the Musser Public Library and Muscatine Art Center. The research of Jennifer Pustz of the State Historical Society, who helped gather information, is intertwined with Alexander’s own research as well as individual stories that former button workers and clammers had shared with her have shaped the historical book. “I knew nothing about pearl buttons in the beginning,” Alexander, 31, said of the days in late 2004 when she first became employed to give new life to the History and Industry Center, formerly known as the Pearl Button Museum. Now she knows many extraordinary facts about life along the river and the rise and fall of the pearl button industry. Half of the local workforce cut out 1.5 billion buttons per year in the very early 1900s – 37 percent of the world’s pearl button supply. Clammers and factory workers male and female, young and old made up the majority of Muscatine’s population. All of that history could have been lost forever without much digging for information and the many people who came forward to share whatever they could offer to the book, which serves as an opportunity to show the public some things that didn’t make the display at the History and industry Center. Muscatine’s Nancy Keel contributed some photos to the book that her grandfather Arnold Miller took when he and his wife, Ana, worked in the industry during the boom. Keel said during an interview that her grandparents always told her stories but there’s an interesting one she’ll never forget. “They scalded the shells so they would open and then they could take the meat out. If they found a pearl, they’d stick it under their tongue to cool it slowly because otherwise it would crack,” Keel said. “My grandmother would be sitting outside and scavengers would come up from the river to ask ‘have you found any pearls?’ and she’d tell them no, even if she had a mouth full of them.” Alexander said the labor conditions could be quite grueling and the work itself was not the easiest. “Sometimes they’d stand for hours in extreme heat or cold. The machines could be dangerous and the dust they’d breathe when cutting shells couldn’t have been healthy,” Alexander said. She added that the mussels would sit in buckets of water after being gutted but some traces of meat would still be present making the water stagnate, an overpowering smell and a dirty work environment. The book takes the reader from the beginning of the industry in the late 1800s, to the button boom, through workers’ strikes for fair pay and better working conditions to the fall of the pearl button industry and introduction of plastic buttons in the 1950s-60s. “There is so much people don’t know about what went on right here in Muscatine,” Alexander said. “I get asked the same questions all the time.” People who view the Muscatine History and Industry Center’s pearl button display always want to know if people ate the mussel meat, which she replies “no.” She said the most fun part of her job is when former industry workers come in and tell their stories. She encourages people who were involved to meet with her to record their memories, or at least have their families record them before they’re lost forever. One frustrating aspect of her job is trying to identify those who are in many of the photos on display and in the book. “It’s impossible,” she said. The timeless photos tell the story of early Muscatine and life in the “pearl button capital of the world,” as it was once called. The shell road to Leo Hirsch Button Company, the elaborately decorated “button queen” float in a parade in 1946, finishing rooms with women in long dresses working away at machines and shells being unloaded from boats speak of a time forgotten. Alexander created the book because the pearl button industry touched the lives of thousands in Muscatine. Many of the clammers’ descendants might not live here today if it weren’t for the river bottom thick with shell. The book is for sale for $19.99 at the Muscatine History and Industry Center, 117 W Second St., as well as area bookstores and through the publisher, Arcadia, at www.arcadiapublishing.com. Some of the proceeds go back to the History and Industry Center. A book signing will be held from noon-4 p.m., Sunday, Nov. 11, at the Muscatine History and Industry Center. Buy It Now: Muscatine's Pearl Button Industry $21.99 |
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