MISCELLANEOUS INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTS 249 



United States the marine shells used for buttons are imported, principally 

 from Australia and oriental areas. Fresh water mussel shells for manu- 

 facture of buttons are taken from the Mississippi River and tributory 

 streams. Since the latter industry is an exclusively domestic one, the de- 

 scription here will be largely concerned with the fresh water mussel shell 

 operation, which resembles in many respects that of the marine shells. 



U.S. Mussel Shell Industry. Prior to 1890, most buttons used in the 

 United States were machine-made pearl buttons imported from Austria 

 or Germany, which had a monopoly on automatic methods for button 

 production. In 1890 a former German button maker discovered that 

 mussels, abundant in the Mississippi River, had shells suitable for mak- 

 ing pearl buttons. Within a few years a booming button industry was 

 established at Muscatine, Iowa, which became the leading button manu- 

 facturing center in the country. Although today many types of synthetic 

 button materials have drastically reduced the production of buttons from 

 mussel shell, there are still eight button manufacturing concerns at 

 Mascatine which use, at least for a part of their raw material, mussel 

 shells from the Mississippi and tributary rivers. Since 1957 when changes 

 in tariff regulations gave plastic buttons a favored position, there has 

 been a considerable decline in the use of mussel shells, and factories in 

 the Mississippi Valley area employ both plastic and mussel shell. A con- 

 siderable quantity of mussel shell is now exported to Japan. 



Mussels are obtained by dragging a crowfoot bar from a small, flat- 

 bottomed boat. The crowfoot bar consists of a 14 foot 3^2 inch pipe from 

 which trout lines containing hooks are suspended. The hooks are dragged 

 along the bottom of the river and as they scrape past a mussel, it opens 

 its shell and fastens upon the hook. A mussel shell boat employs two of 

 the crowfoot bars. As one is being dragged, the other is aboard the boat 

 where the mussels are removed. Upon reaching shore, the mussels are 

 cooked to remove meats from the shell. The meats are generally employed 

 as fish bait in river fisheries for catfish, buffalo fish, and other species. 

 While originally all mussels were obtained from the Mississippi, they now 

 come principally from tributaries such as the Tennessee River. 



The first step in manufacture of the buttons is sawing of round ''blanks" 

 from the shell. This may be done at the site where the mussel shell is 

 obtained, which may be a hundred miles or more from the factory; in 

 other cases, the shells are shipped to the factory where all operations take 

 place. The cutting of the blanks is carried out with a tubular saw which is 

 of the same size as the blanks to be cut, and the blanks are then sorted 

 by an automatic machine which separates them according to thickness. 



The blanks are soaked for about a week in water; this makes them less 

 brittle and not so likely to shatter during subsequent operations. A grind- 



