Riches From River Clams 

Quincy has always profited from the Mississippi, but never so
directly as around 1900. And it all started with the lowly freshwater mussel or
clam. In 1897 pearls and things made
from pearl shell had once again become fashionable.

Then, one lucky St. Louis fisherman visiting a lake in
Arkansas, about a hundred miles west of Memphis, found in the muddy shoreline a
“white stone” which he sent to a jeweler in Memphis. The jeweler determined it
was a high-quality pearl, and promptly visited the lake. There, he spent three
days and picked up 49 pearls from the surface mud, whereupon he promptly leased
all the land around two lakes and hired security guards to protect his claim.
And the craze was on.

At first the hunt was for lakeshore deposits of these “river
stones” as the locals called the pearls. They had long known of them but
thought the worthless curiosities. Then the search spread to the riverbanks.

About this same time the pearl button industry developed,
thanks to a tariff instituted by President McKinley in 1892. Before the
invention of modern plastics, buttons were mostly made from wood or shell. Europe produced the shells, shipping the
blanks to Australia where convict labor made them into buttons. McKinley’s tariff
meant that imported buttons became expensive and suddenly the demand for
American made fasteners boomed. By August of 1899, there were fifty button
factories on the Mississippi river between Clinton, Iowa and La Grange, Mo. The
buttons they produced were as good or better as those made from European
shells.

The biggest clamshell bed or ‘nursery’ located was near New
Boston, Illinois north of here. The bed there was two miles long and a third of
a mile wide and produced before it was depleted after four years of harvesting,
over $200,000 in shells in 1899 dollars. Shell gathering was a booming, labor
intensive industry. Tools called ‘dragrake, ‘scissors rake’, ‘shoulder rake’
and the ‘crowfoot’ were used from any type of river craft available. Shell hunting
could be done in anything from a small scow manned by twelve-year-old kids to a
large craft with a cabin and an engine to power a dragrake.

Shanty villages sprang up along the riverbank. Houseboats
were towed from place to place, and docking spots were at a premium. Local
landowners began charging high rents for bank space near the larger beds of
shellfish. The villages were described by the Quincy Daily Whig in July of 1899
as “a mass of shanties in which the clammers dwelt, boiling vats in which they
scalded the unhappy clams out of their shells, and piles and ricks and cribs of
clamshells to make no mention of odors that were so think that they could be
felt.”

Quincy was a bit late to the party. It was 1899 before talk
of a button factory began, after the two at La Grange, Mo. proved highly
successful. The first button factory in Missouri had opened in La Grange in the
spring. The Missouri Pearl Button Company featured ten saws, and one ‘assorter’
and produced button blanks rather than finished buttons. These blanks were then
shipped east to be polished and fitted with holes to allow attachment to a
garment, which was called being ‘eyed’. The factory included a shell room where
shells were soaked and prepared for sorting, the engine room, and the saw room
where the blanks were cut and sorted. When it opened the factory employed
twelve people, not including those dredging for shells. It planned to hire more
as demand increased. By June of 1899, a second button factory was in the works
for La Grange. This one would produce finished buttons on site rather than
sending them east as blanks.

In April of 1900, the Quincy Button Factory opened, employing
fifteen people, and producing button blanks until the button finishing
machinery could arrive. Quincy became one of seven Illinois cities, six Iowa
cities and two Missouri towns manufacturing buttons.

It was in the midst of the button boom that large individual
pearls began to be found. In September
of 1899, Henry Shepherd, foreman of a diggers’ gang working near the Menke
Stone Company’s office found a pea size pearl, which a local jewelry offered to
purchase for $75. Average wages for a hard-working button cutter could be about
$4 per day, so this was equivalent to two weeks wages. The shells themselves
brought between $10 and $20 per ton.

It was inevitable that the “Pearl Rush” would happen. It was
also inevitable that without some regulation or conservation the mussel beds
would be depleted. It takes about ten years to grow a shell to a size suitable
to harvest for buttons. The pearl hunters searched without regard to size or season
or spawning times for the bivalves. The huge beds that gave their names to
localities like “Mussel Shoals” disappeared.

In July of 1900, it was reported in the Quincy Daily Whig that
a buyer from a Parisian firm was in the area. He said that the Mississippi
pearls were the rage in Paris. An average pearl weighted two to five grains,
but some large pearls were found. The Allen Pearl at Prairie du Chien weighed
100 grains. Another weighed in at 102 grains, and was a perfect pear shape,
three-quarters of an inch long and half an inch wide in a lustrous pink hue.

In 1900 there were about 1500 men fishing for shells. By 1901
that number dwindled to 200. The rest were looking for pearls. By 1902 the
Quincy button factories were importing shells from Arkansas as the local supply
had been depleted. And by the time fire claimed the building on Hampshire
between Front and Second streets of the Illinois Button and Specialty Co, it
had sat idle for over a year. The introduction of cultivated pearls and
alternate materials for buttons ensured the demise of the button factories.

Sources

“A New
Factory,” Quincy Daily Whig, 21 April, 1900.

“A Pearl
Button Factory for La Grange,” Quincy Daily Journal, 22 June, 1897.

“As to Pearl
Buttons,” Quincy Daily Whig, 29 May, 1900.

“Button
Industry is Shy on Shells,” Quincy Daily Whig, 11 November, 1902.

“Clam Pearls
in Iowa River,” Quincy Daily Journal, 18 August, 1897.

“Deposits of
Pearls,” Quincy Daily Journal, 25 August, 1897.

“Fire
Destroys the Local Button Plant,”

Quincy Daily Journal

, 31 March, 1905.

“Fishing for
Pearls,”

Quincy Daily Journal

, 30 September, 1897.

“For the
Button Factory,”

Quincy Daily Journal

, 21 April, 1900.

“La Grange
Boasting,”

Quincy Daily Journal

, 20 April, 1897.

“La Grange
News,”

Quincy Daily Journal

, 13 April, 1899.

“Pearls and
Pearl Shell,”

Quincy Daily Journal

, 20 August, 1897.

“Pearl
Hunters in Arkansas,”

Quincy Daily Journal

, 25 August, 1897.

“Pearl
Hunting on the River”

Quincy Daily Whig

, 15 July, 1900.

“Precious
Pearls,”

Quincy Daily Journal

, 1 September, 1899.

“Shells for
Pearl Buttons,”

Quincy Daily Whig

, 8 July, 1899.

“The Button
Factories,”

Quincy Daily Whig

, 4 August, 1899.

“The Fishers
Dig for Pearls,”

Quincy Daily Whig

, 21 May, 1901.