I went to Muscatine, Iowa on a work trip once. There was a restaurant there called Button Factory. It was housed in a former button factory. Pretty old building. The bar top had an epoxy inlay with embedded buttons that were produced in the factory.
The meal was pretty good. The restaurant closed in 2012.
I grew up in Muscatine along the river and always wondered why the shore was littered with shells with holes in them. As a kid, being told there used to be a button factory was good enough for me. I should visit the museum some day.
There was a button museum at the time, though I never made it in. I'm not sure if the museum is in the same spot as the restaurant was, as I was there in 2017.
One block over from the museum, there was recently a partial building collapse. 20 buildings were evacuated and 17 are still not able to be occupied.
When you translate Johns surname into German, you get Böppel, which is slang for sth. small which you don‘t know the exact word for. So basically Böppel was making Böppel.
Some of this old stuff is really interesting - I used to live in Wisconsin and there was this place called “Crex Meadows” near my house which was a wildlife area but the name seemed so weird I looked it up and it used to be a grassland where the Crex carpet company farmed grass for making carpets. I had no idea they used to make carpet out of grass fibers.
Very well written article. Had a natural feel to it that was engaging and relaxing. The broader point of just having complete abandon for natural resources when manufacturing was certainly of the era (not that it has directionally changed much).
I recently learned about using mussels for buttons when I visited the Mississippi River Museum in Dubuque, Iowa and have been wondering since: can Zebra Mussels be used for buttons? That would create (even more) economic incentive to go after them.
In college, I worked as a lab assistant for a professor studying them. I spent a lot of time counting microscopic young, scraping adults off of traps, measuring and weighing them before cracking them open to scoop out their insides and weighing them.
These little fellows are, in general, small. I guess they can get 50mm (2in), but most aren't that large and they have thin shells.
Further, I'd be somewhat afraid that creating products from them would spread the invasive species even further. The professor I worked for studied them because of their invasiveness - the lakes he set traps on were obviously spread by people. They spread easily by the water in boats - microscopic young means people don't know they spread them.
As noted in the article, plastic buttons displaced buttons made from clamshells long ago. I doubt a market for zebra mussel buttons could make any dent on the population.
Yes, cheaper ones can be very thin, to save on material and produce twice as many buttons.
The trick to identify genuine shell buttons is to to touch one against your upper lip. A shell button will feel cool to the touch, a plastic one won't.
An economic incentive to hunt a particular species does not result in a decrease in population. What you have instead is an economic incentive to breed large populations in uncontrolled conditions, likely on public land, which then get abandoned and/or released when you realize the economic incentive has made your invasive species problem far, far worse.
> TLDR: Consequently many freshwater mussel species are now extinct
The problem with the DR part of TLDR is that you miss a lot of detail. There are more factors than just the button industry.
> To survive past the larvae stage, they must become parasites that attach themselves to fish. If the fish populations are declining, that oftentimes has an indirect effect on mussel abundance
> the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers deepened the rivers and constructed a system of dams, destroying the habitats of mussels that had evolved to live in shallower waters.
Regarding the dams, I recommend the book "Cadillac Desert" to anyone even remotely curious about the background and scale of water projects in the US. It's not boring despite the what the subject matter might suggest.
Yes, it's an outstanding book, well worth reading:
Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, by Marc Reisner, Penguin Books, 1986, 1993.
A recent perspective on this excellent book by Ryan Cooper is also very good. He says that journalists in the 1970s and 80s were infected with Reaganite ideology and made some mistakes. Worth reading:
>Reisner [...] often relies on neoliberal economics
So, correct economics?
>[the] idea that public works projects should each pay for themselves individually is straight out of neoliberal dogma
I mean, not really; it's not an idea unique to neoliberalism. And if it were, that it is characteristic of neoliberalism does not constitute an argument against it.
That's about the US West. It might as well be a different country, with respect to water. East of, say, Omaha, the concern is more getting rid of water than collecting it.
Regarding buttons, or rather 'buttony' (which used to mean the craft of making buttons), the UK has many regions that have historical claims to being the former button capital of the world. First it was Dorset, thanks to the sheep, then Yorkshire stole that business, then the Black Country (Birmingham) brought the full weight of the Industrial Revolution to the product.
This American/German story is just one Johnny-come-lately part of the epic story that is button making, albeit without a 'Cadillac Desert' grade book to put the story together for you.
The river I live next to had the same thing happen. The mussel populations aren't what they once were (said to be hundreds per square meter back in the 1800's). There was also button factories along the river, and they briefly tried pearl farming. The big problem was pollution, dams, etc. as you say. The river is better now than it's been since I was born - and more dams are being removed year by year.
I lived right outside of Muscatine as a kid. When I was young the rivers were still muddy as hell all of the time. They passed some laws and the DNR started enforcing laws about runoff and water quality massively improved.
Over the 10 years I've frequented HN* regularly (usually multiple times daily), I too have been occasionally confounded by new-to-me abbreviations/acronyms, such that I've Googled them to find their meaning. I can't imagine asking the meaning of an such an unknown in a comment, for two reasons:
1. An answer depends on someone else's effort/time to furnish it. Why expect/hope someone's feeling generous enough to spend theirs since you're not willing to spend yours?
2. You have to revisit your query to see if someone has answered it; if not, you either abandon your quest or repeatedly revisit the unknown.
The comment was edited, originally it said "The problem with the DR part is that you miss a lot of detail" and I thought it was perhaps some term of art regarding endangered species or conservation.
Anyhow, I believe it always adds value to bring clarifications "in-line" to the original thread so everyone reading it can gain the benefit of knowledge, instead of requiring every reader look up something on their own.
I agree with you. Still, you're required to hope someone has enough good will and energy and time to do a solid for the HN readership if you take this approach. I'm not wired to be passive; for me, hope is not a strategy.
The story starts with a German man, John Boepple, in his button shop in Germany. He immigrates to the US with the resolve to search for more freshwater mussels. So yes, it is relevant if you're interested in telling a story of the events that transpired.
Because the article is about more than just the buttons.
For Boepple, buttons were the family business. At his shop in Germany, he had learned to craft them out of wood, shell, horn and bone. But pearl buttons brought in the biggest profits. When a German tariff put him out of business, Boepple became one of the nearly 1.5 million Germans who immigrated to America in the 1880s. “They each brought their own skills,” Joy says. “Mr. Boepple was a button maker.”
My patrilineal ancestor came over somewhere around then (or, at least, between the end of the Civil War and then, records are not clear). It would be nice to trace that back into Germany but records don't seem to be easily available, if they even exist.
I went to Muscatine, Iowa on a work trip once. There was a restaurant there called Button Factory. It was housed in a former button factory. Pretty old building. The bar top had an epoxy inlay with embedded buttons that were produced in the factory.
The meal was pretty good. The restaurant closed in 2012.
I grew up in Muscatine along the river and always wondered why the shore was littered with shells with holes in them. As a kid, being told there used to be a button factory was good enough for me. I should visit the museum some day.
There was a button museum at the time, though I never made it in. I'm not sure if the museum is in the same spot as the restaurant was, as I was there in 2017.
One block over from the museum, there was recently a partial building collapse. 20 buildings were evacuated and 17 are still not able to be occupied.
Reminds me of the famous Keswick pencil museum: https://www.derwentart.com/en-gb/c/about/company/derwent-pen...
I think the museum is a different spot nearby.
I found the restaurant on google street view, the pictures go back to 2008! https://maps.app.goo.gl/UxWzN5bcd4cLG6eH9
Perhaps Joe stopped pushing that button with his left hand.
When you translate Johns surname into German, you get Böppel, which is slang for sth. small which you don‘t know the exact word for. So basically Böppel was making Böppel.
Nominative determinism! The hypothesis that people tend to do things that remind them of their own names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism
Some of this old stuff is really interesting - I used to live in Wisconsin and there was this place called “Crex Meadows” near my house which was a wildlife area but the name seemed so weird I looked it up and it used to be a grassland where the Crex carpet company farmed grass for making carpets. I had no idea they used to make carpet out of grass fibers.
Relevant link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crex_Carpet_Company
Very well written article. Had a natural feel to it that was engaging and relaxing. The broader point of just having complete abandon for natural resources when manufacturing was certainly of the era (not that it has directionally changed much).
Man I miss getting lost in something, this is passion right, a craft
The buttons are pretty too
I recently learned about using mussels for buttons when I visited the Mississippi River Museum in Dubuque, Iowa and have been wondering since: can Zebra Mussels be used for buttons? That would create (even more) economic incentive to go after them.
In college, I worked as a lab assistant for a professor studying them. I spent a lot of time counting microscopic young, scraping adults off of traps, measuring and weighing them before cracking them open to scoop out their insides and weighing them.
These little fellows are, in general, small. I guess they can get 50mm (2in), but most aren't that large and they have thin shells.
Further, I'd be somewhat afraid that creating products from them would spread the invasive species even further. The professor I worked for studied them because of their invasiveness - the lakes he set traps on were obviously spread by people. They spread easily by the water in boats - microscopic young means people don't know they spread them.
As noted in the article, plastic buttons displaced buttons made from clamshells long ago. I doubt a market for zebra mussel buttons could make any dent on the population.
Premium shirts still have shell buttons. Zebra mussels are too small to make buttons, however.
I have one shell button shirt. They're annoyingly thin.
Yes, cheaper ones can be very thin, to save on material and produce twice as many buttons.
The trick to identify genuine shell buttons is to to touch one against your upper lip. A shell button will feel cool to the touch, a plastic one won't.
small, or thin? they look wide enough when I pull up some images, but it's hard to gauge how thin they are
An economic incentive to hunt a particular species does not result in a decrease in population. What you have instead is an economic incentive to breed large populations in uncontrolled conditions, likely on public land, which then get abandoned and/or released when you realize the economic incentive has made your invasive species problem far, far worse.
This has happened many times throughout history.
Yes, for instance a bounty on rats leads to pet rats and tailless rats.
There's a simple solution to that. Tax the rat farms.
Now there are blackmarket rat farms
Animals have also been hunted to extinction though so I think it's more fair to say it can go either way.
Probably not as economical as cheap plastic buttons, and harvesting them at low cost would likely disrupt native species too
you can use anything for buttons if you are dedicated enough and have the right tools
The French and German history of the upper Mississippi is full of interesting stuff that's being forgotten.
Mister Lossoff has entered the chat, with his famous collection of Distinguished Buttons:
https://youtu.be/h-QgWOSVKm4?t=724
TLDR: Consequently many freshwater mussel species are now extinct https://www.fws.gov/press-release/2023-10/21-species-deliste...
> TLDR: Consequently many freshwater mussel species are now extinct
The problem with the DR part of TLDR is that you miss a lot of detail. There are more factors than just the button industry.
> To survive past the larvae stage, they must become parasites that attach themselves to fish. If the fish populations are declining, that oftentimes has an indirect effect on mussel abundance
> the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers deepened the rivers and constructed a system of dams, destroying the habitats of mussels that had evolved to live in shallower waters.
> Increasingly polluted waters also took a toll.
Regarding the dams, I recommend the book "Cadillac Desert" to anyone even remotely curious about the background and scale of water projects in the US. It's not boring despite the what the subject matter might suggest.
Yes, it's an outstanding book, well worth reading:
Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, by Marc Reisner, Penguin Books, 1986, 1993.
A recent perspective on this excellent book by Ryan Cooper is also very good. He says that journalists in the 1970s and 80s were infected with Reaganite ideology and made some mistakes. Worth reading:
https://prospect.org/2025/12/12/cadillac-desert-reconsidered...
>Reisner [...] often relies on neoliberal economics
So, correct economics?
>[the] idea that public works projects should each pay for themselves individually is straight out of neoliberal dogma
I mean, not really; it's not an idea unique to neoliberalism. And if it were, that it is characteristic of neoliberalism does not constitute an argument against it.
That's about the US West. It might as well be a different country, with respect to water. East of, say, Omaha, the concern is more getting rid of water than collecting it.
Excellent book, seconded.
Regarding buttons, or rather 'buttony' (which used to mean the craft of making buttons), the UK has many regions that have historical claims to being the former button capital of the world. First it was Dorset, thanks to the sheep, then Yorkshire stole that business, then the Black Country (Birmingham) brought the full weight of the Industrial Revolution to the product.
This American/German story is just one Johnny-come-lately part of the epic story that is button making, albeit without a 'Cadillac Desert' grade book to put the story together for you.
The river I live next to had the same thing happen. The mussel populations aren't what they once were (said to be hundreds per square meter back in the 1800's). There was also button factories along the river, and they briefly tried pearl farming. The big problem was pollution, dams, etc. as you say. The river is better now than it's been since I was born - and more dams are being removed year by year.
I lived right outside of Muscatine as a kid. When I was young the rivers were still muddy as hell all of the time. They passed some laws and the DNR started enforcing laws about runoff and water quality massively improved.
Agreed.
Massachusetts has a nice page about the Eastern Pearlshell.
https://www.mass.gov/info-details/eastern-pearlshell
In the town of Sandisfield MA, I've found live mussels in the Clam River - which was named due mistakenly identity.
DR?
This comment interests me.
Over the 10 years I've frequented HN* regularly (usually multiple times daily), I too have been occasionally confounded by new-to-me abbreviations/acronyms, such that I've Googled them to find their meaning. I can't imagine asking the meaning of an such an unknown in a comment, for two reasons:
1. An answer depends on someone else's effort/time to furnish it. Why expect/hope someone's feeling generous enough to spend theirs since you're not willing to spend yours?
2. You have to revisit your query to see if someone has answered it; if not, you either abandon your quest or repeatedly revisit the unknown.
*Hacker News
The comment was edited, originally it said "The problem with the DR part is that you miss a lot of detail" and I thought it was perhaps some term of art regarding endangered species or conservation.
Anyhow, I believe it always adds value to bring clarifications "in-line" to the original thread so everyone reading it can gain the benefit of knowledge, instead of requiring every reader look up something on their own.
I agree with you. Still, you're required to hope someone has enough good will and energy and time to do a solid for the HN readership if you take this approach. I'm not wired to be passive; for me, hope is not a strategy.
Didn't read
>The problem with the DR part of TLDR is that you miss a lot of detail
But the part that confirms the audiences biases and earns upvotes made it through and that's what matters.
It's basically a more shameless version of most industry reporting if you think about it.
Best not to think about it though. The world is nicer that way.
It's sad, but the entire culture is devolving into requiring a dumbed down summary or tl;dr version of everything.
Those who really understood it need the least words to explain it.
Is the fact that he was of German descent material to how the events transpired? Not sure why it's even mentioned in the headline.
The story starts with a German man, John Boepple, in his button shop in Germany. He immigrates to the US with the resolve to search for more freshwater mussels. So yes, it is relevant if you're interested in telling a story of the events that transpired.
Because the article is about more than just the buttons.
For Boepple, buttons were the family business. At his shop in Germany, he had learned to craft them out of wood, shell, horn and bone. But pearl buttons brought in the biggest profits. When a German tariff put him out of business, Boepple became one of the nearly 1.5 million Germans who immigrated to America in the 1880s. “They each brought their own skills,” Joy says. “Mr. Boepple was a button maker.”
I think it's because it's the Smithsonian magazine. Smithsonian celebrates the origins of people and things that shaped some part of American history.
It's significant that "Boepple immigrated to the United States in the late 1880s, resolving to search for more of these freshwater mussels."
And he was German. Lots of Germans emigrated to the USA, especially around that time. so it's important context of who this man was
My patrilineal ancestor came over somewhere around then (or, at least, between the end of the Civil War and then, records are not clear). It would be nice to trace that back into Germany but records don't seem to be easily available, if they even exist.