BUTTON INDUSTRY. From the late 1890s until WORLD WAR II, the manufacture of buttons from river clam shells was a flourishing enterprise in eastern Iowa.

The industry was brought to this region by John BOEPPLE, a former German button maker, who was accustomed to using animal horn, hooves, bone and seashells. In 1887 while looking for shells that were cheaper than those from the ocean for button production, he found several suitable beds of clams in rivers leading to the Mississippi. In 1891 he established the Boepple Button Company, a pearl-button factory in Muscatine, Iowa.

Clamming was a low cost operation. Using a boat, a clammer would drag a rod with perhaps one hundred hooks along the river bottom. The clams would snap shut on the hook and be caught. The rod would be raised, the clams removed and the process repeated. Once the boat was full, it would be rowed to shore and unloaded. A clammer could earn three dollars for a full boat with the chance of finding a pearl which could bring one hundred dollars or more. The clams were placed in water and boiled. The meat was removed, checked for pearls, and then discarded or sold to farmers for hog feed or to fishermen for bait. The shells were immediately sold to buyers or shipped to button factories. . The industry was not confined to cities along the Mississippi. In 1898 a large pearl button factory was opened in Vinton, Iowa by the Waterbury Button and Electric Company and local investors. Capitalized at $20,000, the company provided employment for between 70 and 100 people. Shells came from the Cedar River.

A history of the button industry