Author: Melanie K. Alexander
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 9780738550930
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 132
Book Description
The Mississippi River town of Muscatine produced billions of pearl buttons. By 1905, Muscatine made 37 percent of the world's buttons and earned the title of "Pearl Button Capital of the World." The rise and fall of the pearl button occurred over a period of 75 years. John Frederick Boepple, a German immigrant button maker, launched the industry in 1891. The button and clamming industries started small but quickly overwhelmed the town. Clamming became the Mississippi River's gold rush while large automated factories and shell-cutting shops employed nearly half the local workforce. Entire families--men, women, and children--contributed to the industry, giving weight to the popular local saying "No Muscatine resident can enter Heaven without evidence of previous servitude in the button industry." Although the industry peaked in 1916, several decades passed before the American-made pearl button buckled under the pressure of foreign competition, changing fashion, limited availability of shell, and the development and refinement of plastic buttons.
Muscatine's Pearl Button Industry
Author: Melanie K. Alexander
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 9780738550930
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 132
Book Description
The Mississippi River town of Muscatine produced billions of pearl buttons. By 1905, Muscatine made 37 percent of the world's buttons and earned the title of "Pearl Button Capital of the World." The rise and fall of the pearl button occurred over a period of 75 years. John Frederick Boepple, a German immigrant button maker, launched the industry in 1891. The button and clamming industries started small but quickly overwhelmed the town. Clamming became the Mississippi River's gold rush while large automated factories and shell-cutting shops employed nearly half the local workforce. Entire families--men, women, and children--contributed to the industry, giving weight to the popular local saying "No Muscatine resident can enter Heaven without evidence of previous servitude in the button industry." Although the industry peaked in 1916, several decades passed before the American-made pearl button buckled under the pressure of foreign competition, changing fashion, limited availability of shell, and the development and refinement of plastic buttons.
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 9780738550930
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 132
Book Description
The Mississippi River town of Muscatine produced billions of pearl buttons. By 1905, Muscatine made 37 percent of the world's buttons and earned the title of "Pearl Button Capital of the World." The rise and fall of the pearl button occurred over a period of 75 years. John Frederick Boepple, a German immigrant button maker, launched the industry in 1891. The button and clamming industries started small but quickly overwhelmed the town. Clamming became the Mississippi River's gold rush while large automated factories and shell-cutting shops employed nearly half the local workforce. Entire families--men, women, and children--contributed to the industry, giving weight to the popular local saying "No Muscatine resident can enter Heaven without evidence of previous servitude in the button industry." Although the industry peaked in 1916, several decades passed before the American-made pearl button buckled under the pressure of foreign competition, changing fashion, limited availability of shell, and the development and refinement of plastic buttons.
The Pearl Button Industry in Iowa
Author: O. D. Langstreth
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Buttons
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Holograph manuscript accompanied by illustrations and plates from United States Fish Commission bulletins (1897-1898). Langstreth's manuscript discusses button industry employers and employees; the history of button making; the manufacturing process; types of shells and pearls; manufacturers and inventors of button making machinery; pearl dealers; pearl fishing; and the development of Iowa's pearl button industry.
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Buttons
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Holograph manuscript accompanied by illustrations and plates from United States Fish Commission bulletins (1897-1898). Langstreth's manuscript discusses button industry employers and employees; the history of button making; the manufacturing process; types of shells and pearls; manufacturers and inventors of button making machinery; pearl dealers; pearl fishing; and the development of Iowa's pearl button industry.
The Fresh-water Pearl Button Industry in Muscatine, Iowa
Author: Rebecca Hatfield Meints
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 174
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 174
Book Description
Pearl Buttons. Hearings ... on H.R. 7705 ... Dec. 15, 16, 1919
Author: United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Finance
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 92
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 92
Book Description
Pearl Buttons
Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Ways and Means
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Pearl button industry
Languages : en
Pages : 80
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Pearl button industry
Languages : en
Pages : 80
Book Description
The Button Industry
Author: United States Tariff Commission
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Buttons
Languages : en
Pages : 132
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Buttons
Languages : en
Pages : 132
Book Description
The Searchlight on Congress
Author: Lynn Haines
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 446
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 446
Book Description
Tariff Information Series
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Tariff
Languages : en
Pages : 842
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Tariff
Languages : en
Pages : 842
Book Description
Report of the Commissioner for ...
Author: United States Fish Commission
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fisheries
Languages : en
Pages : 938
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fisheries
Languages : en
Pages : 938
Book Description
What the River Carries
Author: Lisa Knopp
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826272762
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Book Description
In this informed and lyrical collection of interwoven essays, Lisa Knopp explores the physical and cultural geography of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte, rivers she has come to understand and cherish. At the same time, she contemplates how people experience landscape, identifying three primary roles of environmental perception: the insider, the outsider, and the outsider seeking to become an insider. Viewing the waterways through these approaches, she searches for knowledge and meaning. Because Knopp was born and raised just a few blocks away, she considers the Mississippi from the perspective of a native resident, a “dweller in the land.” She revisits places she has long known: Nauvoo, Illinois, the site of two nineteenth-century utopias, one Mormon, one Icarian; Muscatine, Iowa, once the world’s largest manufacturer of pearl (mussel shell) buttons; and the mysterious prehistoric bird- and bear-shaped effigy mounds of northeastern Iowa. On a downriver trip between the Twin Cities and St. Louis, she meditates on what can be found in Mississippi river water—state lines, dissolved oxygen, smallmouth bass, corpses, family history, wrecked steamboats, mayfly nymphs, toxic perfluorinated chemicals, philosophies. Knopp first encountered the Missouri as a tourist and became acquainted with it through literary and historical documents, as well as stories told by longtime residents. Her journey includes stops at Fort Bellefontaine, where Lewis and Clark first slept on their sojourn to the Pacific; Little Dixie, Missouri’s slaveholding, hemp-growing region, as revealed through the life of Jesse James’s mother; Fort Randall Dam and Lake Francis Case, the construction of which destroyed White Swan on the Yankton Sioux Reservation; and places that produced unique musical responses to the river, including Native American courting flutes, indie rock, Missouri River valley fiddling, Prohibition-era jazz jam sessions, and German folk music. Knopp’s relationship with the Platte is marked by intentionality: she settled nearby and chose to develop deep and lasting connections over twenty years’ residence. On this adventure, she ponders the half-million sandhill cranes that pass through Nebraska each spring, the ancient varieties of Pawnee corn growing at the Great Platte River Road Archway Monument, a never-broken tract of tallgrass prairie, the sugar beet industry, and the changes in the river brought about by the demands of irrigation. In the final essay, Knopp undertakes the science of river meanders, consecutive loops of water moving in opposite directions, which form around obstacles but also develop in the absence of them. What initiates the turning that results in a meander remains a mystery. Such is the subtle and interior process of knowing and loving a place. What the River Carries asks readers to consider their own relationships with landscape and how one can most meaningfully and responsibly dwell on the earth’s surface. Winner of the 2013 Nebraska Book Award for Nonfiction Honorable Mention for the Association for Literature and the Environment's 2013 Environmental Creative Nonfiction Award
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826272762
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Book Description
In this informed and lyrical collection of interwoven essays, Lisa Knopp explores the physical and cultural geography of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte, rivers she has come to understand and cherish. At the same time, she contemplates how people experience landscape, identifying three primary roles of environmental perception: the insider, the outsider, and the outsider seeking to become an insider. Viewing the waterways through these approaches, she searches for knowledge and meaning. Because Knopp was born and raised just a few blocks away, she considers the Mississippi from the perspective of a native resident, a “dweller in the land.” She revisits places she has long known: Nauvoo, Illinois, the site of two nineteenth-century utopias, one Mormon, one Icarian; Muscatine, Iowa, once the world’s largest manufacturer of pearl (mussel shell) buttons; and the mysterious prehistoric bird- and bear-shaped effigy mounds of northeastern Iowa. On a downriver trip between the Twin Cities and St. Louis, she meditates on what can be found in Mississippi river water—state lines, dissolved oxygen, smallmouth bass, corpses, family history, wrecked steamboats, mayfly nymphs, toxic perfluorinated chemicals, philosophies. Knopp first encountered the Missouri as a tourist and became acquainted with it through literary and historical documents, as well as stories told by longtime residents. Her journey includes stops at Fort Bellefontaine, where Lewis and Clark first slept on their sojourn to the Pacific; Little Dixie, Missouri’s slaveholding, hemp-growing region, as revealed through the life of Jesse James’s mother; Fort Randall Dam and Lake Francis Case, the construction of which destroyed White Swan on the Yankton Sioux Reservation; and places that produced unique musical responses to the river, including Native American courting flutes, indie rock, Missouri River valley fiddling, Prohibition-era jazz jam sessions, and German folk music. Knopp’s relationship with the Platte is marked by intentionality: she settled nearby and chose to develop deep and lasting connections over twenty years’ residence. On this adventure, she ponders the half-million sandhill cranes that pass through Nebraska each spring, the ancient varieties of Pawnee corn growing at the Great Platte River Road Archway Monument, a never-broken tract of tallgrass prairie, the sugar beet industry, and the changes in the river brought about by the demands of irrigation. In the final essay, Knopp undertakes the science of river meanders, consecutive loops of water moving in opposite directions, which form around obstacles but also develop in the absence of them. What initiates the turning that results in a meander remains a mystery. Such is the subtle and interior process of knowing and loving a place. What the River Carries asks readers to consider their own relationships with landscape and how one can most meaningfully and responsibly dwell on the earth’s surface. Winner of the 2013 Nebraska Book Award for Nonfiction Honorable Mention for the Association for Literature and the Environment's 2013 Environmental Creative Nonfiction Award