German button maker searched rivers of American Midwest for valuable shells
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
The meal was pretty good. The restaurant closed in 2012.
One block over from the museum, there was recently a partial building collapse. 20 buildings were evacuated and 17 are still not able to be occupied.
I found the restaurant on google street view, the pictures go back to 2008! https://maps.app.goo.gl/UxWzN5bcd4cLG6eH9
Relevant link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crex_Carpet_Company
The buttons are pretty too
The trick to identify genuine shell buttons is to to touch one against your upper lip. A shell button will feel cool to the touch, a plastic one won't.
These little fellows are, in general, small. I guess they can get 50mm (2in), but most aren't that large and they have thin shells.
Further, I'd be somewhat afraid that creating products from them would spread the invasive species even further. The professor I worked for studied them because of their invasiveness - the lakes he set traps on were obviously spread by people. They spread easily by the water in boats - microscopic young means people don't know they spread them.
This has happened many times throughout history.
The problem with the DR part of TLDR is that you miss a lot of detail. There are more factors than just the button industry.
> To survive past the larvae stage, they must become parasites that attach themselves to fish. If the fish populations are declining, that oftentimes has an indirect effect on mussel abundance
> the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers deepened the rivers and constructed a system of dams, destroying the habitats of mussels that had evolved to live in shallower waters.
> Increasingly polluted waters also took a toll.
Massachusetts has a nice page about the Eastern Pearlshell.
https://www.mass.gov/info-details/eastern-pearlshell
In the town of Sandisfield MA, I've found live mussels in the Clam River - which was named due mistakenly identity.
Over the 10 years I've frequented HN* regularly (usually multiple times daily), I too have been occasionally confounded by new-to-me abbreviations/acronyms, such that I've Googled them to find their meaning. I can't imagine asking the meaning of an such an unknown in a comment, for two reasons:
1. An answer depends on someone else's effort/time to furnish it. Why expect/hope someone's feeling generous enough to spend theirs since you're not willing to spend yours?
2. You have to revisit your query to see if someone has answered it; if not, you either abandon your quest or repeatedly revisit the unknown.
*Hacker News
Anyhow, I believe it always adds value to bring clarifications "in-line" to the original thread so everyone reading it can gain the benefit of knowledge, instead of requiring every reader look up something on their own.
Regarding buttons, or rather 'buttony' (which used to mean the craft of making buttons), the UK has many regions that have historical claims to being the former button capital of the world. First it was Dorset, thanks to the sheep, then Yorkshire stole that business, then the Black Country (Birmingham) brought the full weight of the Industrial Revolution to the product.
This American/German story is just one Johnny-come-lately part of the epic story that is button making, albeit without a 'Cadillac Desert' grade book to put the story together for you.
Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, by Marc Reisner, Penguin Books, 1986, 1993.
A recent perspective on this excellent book by Ryan Cooper is also very good. He says that journalists in the 1970s and 80s were infected with Reaganite ideology and made some mistakes. Worth reading:
https://prospect.org/2025/12/12/cadillac-desert-reconsidered...
So, correct economics?
>[the] idea that public works projects should each pay for themselves individually is straight out of neoliberal dogma
I mean, not really; it's not an idea unique to neoliberalism. And if it were, that it is characteristic of neoliberalism does not constitute an argument against it.
But the part that confirms the audiences biases and earns upvotes made it through and that's what matters.
It's basically a more shameless version of most industry reporting if you think about it.
Best not to think about it though. The world is nicer that way.
It's significant that "Boepple immigrated to the United States in the late 1880s, resolving to search for more of these freshwater mussels."
And he was German. Lots of Germans emigrated to the USA, especially around that time. so it's important context of who this man was
She found people who looked exactly like her brothers (my father and my uncle)
To her, it was like a religious experience.
When she returned she said the village kept birth & marriage records to make sure new marriages were 'far enough apart'. I don't know if that's true, or just some color she put on the story.
I just tried looking up my last name on https://www.familysearch.org and got over 1.2M record results. daunting!
For Boepple, buttons were the family business. At his shop in Germany, he had learned to craft them out of wood, shell, horn and bone. But pearl buttons brought in the biggest profits. When a German tariff put him out of business, Boepple became one of the nearly 1.5 million Germans who immigrated to America in the 1880s. “They each brought their own skills,” Joy says. “Mr. Boepple was a button maker.”