Do you remember playing in your mother's sewing basket? Check out the new exhibit at the Laurens Library to see an assortment of interesting sewing notions.
There is a basket of pearl
buttons that reminds us that Iowa was once known as the button capital of
the world. The buttons were made from the shells of mussels caught in the
Mississippi River. In 1889, a button maker named Johann Bopple emigrated from
Germany and designed a machine to punch what were called pearl buttons
out of the mussel shells. Within 10 years there
were sixty button factories located in the Mississippi River valley.
Muscatine became known as the the "Pearl City." In 1898 Iowa turned out
138 million mother of pearl buttons. The story doesn't end well. By
1900, the mussels were almost gone around Muscatine. Mussels shells were
then imported to the Iowa factories from the Arkansas, Ohio, and
Tennessee Rivers until plastic buttons took over.
A flat iron, a
Coleman kerosene iron, and an early electric iron make us thankful for
"wash and wear" fabrics.The electric iron was first invented in the
1880's, but the early models were were too dangerous to use. It took
until the 1900's to design a safe electric iron. In Iowa, rural farms
didn't get electricity until the 1930's so flat irons heated on a cook
stove or kerosene irons were used.
