Hello, CALS,
Happy Monday. A short note this week. I hope things are going well for each of you as the summer unfolds.
Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the ribbon cutting of the new headquarters for the consumer products division of KENT Worldwide in Muscatine. That would have been a great event all by itself, given the extraordinary Iowa company that KENT is, and the terrific partnership they have with our college, even if the new facility was nothing special. But it is! KENT Worldwide purchased the old McKee Button Company building in Muscatine a few years ago and painstakingly restored it into their new facility. From there, they will continue to innovate and make a difference.
This has intrigued me to do some more research on button making as a natural resource-based industry in Iowa.
Sometimes Muscatine was/is known as the Pearl of the Mississippi because of the tremendous freshwater clam/mussel beds there that were harvested to yield mother-of-pearl buttons for many decades. At one time, Muscatine boasted something like 33 button factories and was the world’s largest producer of buttons, drawing shells from all over the U.S. The need for shells from many places was due to local over-harvesting of this renewable natural resource.
I have to wonder, during the heyday of shell-based button manufacturing, if anyone in our college did work/study on the ecology of these clams/mussels to improve the sustainability of their management and harvest? If not, we should have. Populations of these creatures have recovered with the demise of the shell-button industry and general conservation improvements to our rivers, but there are still species of significant conservation concern, and no doubt that the ecology of the river has changed over time.
Lots of good resources to check out on this topic:
- The Pearl Button Story - An Immigrant with an Idea
- The Pearl Button Industry of Muscatine, Iowa
- Mussels and Us - The Button Trade
- McKee Button Company
- National Pearl Button Museum - The Gold Rush of the Midwest
- Freshwater Mussels of the Mississippi River
- Freshwater Mussels of Iowa
My best for a great week - Dan
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