What can you learn from an old button? A lot

[September 22, 2015]  LINCOLN - When Cheryl Baker’s grandmother decided that she wanted to collect something, she went all in. One of her many passions was collecting buttons. When she passed on, her only relative who wanted the collection was her granddaughter. Baker, from Emden, brought part of her grandmother’s collection to the monthly meeting of the Logan County Genealogical and Historical Society Monday evening.

Cheryl Baker’s grandmother stored her button collection under her bed. When Cheryl inherited it, she did likewise because the collection just did not interest her. One day she got it out and went through the collection and was hooked.

Each button had a history and represented part of American history. Baker was fascinated. Her grandmother had hand sewn each button onto a tea towel, disregarding the color of the towel as it impacted the colors of the buttons affixed to it or the type of button. Each towel was a jumble of colors and button types. “The colors of the towels and the buttons were terrible,” said Baker.

Baker went about joining the National Button Society and researched the proper way to present the collection. She soon learned that buttons are displayed by composition. This meant removing the hand sewn buttons from the towels and gathering them onto display boards with those of a like composition.

Baker remarked that buttons have been around since 4,000 B.C. Over the centuries, they were made from all sorts of hard objects that were at hand. Bone, antler, gold, and earthen ware were some of the early materials used. Later they were made of pewter, brass, scrimshaw, wood, and cork. Modern buttons, at least those from the past century, were made of some manmade materials such as celluloid, Bakelite, and Lucite. Now, buttons are mostly plastic.

“Collecting buttons made from unusual materials ended many years ago when plastic became the material of choice. Now there is nothing to collect,” said Cheryl Baker.

While we take buttons sewn to our clothes with thread for granted, button holes did not appear until the 13th century. The earlier ones were looped onto the material. Once holes appeared, all buttons were affixed to the left side of men’s and women’s clothing.

It was not until the 16th century that men’s buttons were moved to the right side of shirts. The reason is another history lesson. Men carried their swords on their left hip, so for quick access to a weapon buttons were moved to the right so that they could be quickly unfastened with the left hand leaving the right hand free for a quick grab of the sword. Women’s buttons remained on the left. Nothing has changed in the past five centuries.

The most prolific era of button construction was the mid-19th century. Styles and materials abounded. Many were used as decoration for fancy dresses and suits, while others were placed for practical purposes.

Bathing wasn’t a daily practice during the 19th and early 20th century, so one can imagine the body odor issues. Cloth buttons were developed so that a dab of perfume could be placed on them to cover an unpleasant smell.

Spats were used to cover the bottom of pants legs and shoes to keep them clean in the 19th century because most streets and sidewalks were dirt. The spats were held in place with buttons and a button hook was invented to easily stretch the buttons across the material of the spat.

When a man was dressed in tails for that very special fancy event, two buttons were placed on the rear of the trousers so that the tails could be attached to keep them from getting dirty while the man rode his horse to the ball. Those two buttons are still a fixture on tail coats, although riding in the limo to a fancy event is no longer problematic for cleanliness.

And the three buttons on the underside of the sleeve of a man’s suit or sport jacket? Those are purely decorative and have been around for centuries.

Cheryl Baker’s personal passions are brass and glass buttons. She passed around samples of black glass buttons that were developed in England in the 19th century.

One entire display was brass buttons that had come from uniforms. The person wearing the clothing had to keep those buttons bright with lots of elbow grease. Military uniforms, police, and the trolley conductor all wanted to look good.

Illinois had several button factories, Peoria and Pekin were two large ones. Mother-of-Pearl was very popular as a button material at these factories. They were made from mussels that were dredged by the millions from the Illinois River. This practice decimated the mussel population in the river, an ecological disaster. The practice was banned in 1974.

Cheryl Baker continues her passion for button collecting that was passed down from her grandmother. “I’m a member of several central Illinois button clubs as well as the National Button Society. The local clubs get together several times a year to buy and sell and discuss buttons.

It’s difficult to find valuable buttons at every day swap meets and antique stores. Those have mostly been found by serious collectors,” she said. Buttons may seem like a mundane part of our everyday lives, but they can tell a fascinating part of history.

The Logan County Genealogical and Historical Society meets the third Monday of every month at 6:30 p.m. at their research facility on Chicago Street in Lincoln. They always have an interesting guest speaker, and the meetings are open to the public.

[Curt Fox]