Probably most of us do not spend a lot of time thinking about buttons or clams. But, if you do think about it, buttons are an important part of our life. My 75-year-old “Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary”, that my parents gave me when I left for college, defines button as “A knob, disk or the like, to fasten together different parts of an article of clothing by passing through a hole or loop.”

Parents and teachers, spend many hours teaching young children how to operate buttons. Kids need to know how to use buttons to get dressed in the morning as well as get their coat on and off as they go out to play during kindergarten recess. And a noisy  youngster needs to know what the teacher means when she tells Junior to “Button your lip!” Or, if your buddy tells you to “clam up”, you need to know what he means.

In later life, we may look in the mirror and discover, “I’m buttoned up wrong”, or perhaps not at all, and there is a need to correct the problem.

Buttons are often the decoration that “sets off” a new coat, shirt or blouse. They have long been important in the military and other formal dress, so we can’t dismiss their influence on our life. But we may not realize the importance buttons (and clams) served in the early economy of this area, especially along the Mississippi River.

The rush to harvest clam shells to manufacture buttons in the early 1900s has been compared to the California Gold Rush . However, the arrival of plastic buttons ended the need for the shells.

All that happened a long time ago. However, when Vi and I arrived in Muscoda in 1958, new neighbors and friends-to-be, Charlie and Theresa Morel, knew about clamming for the button industry. They grew up in the Prairie du Chien area. Charlie became postmaster in Muscoda and Theresa worked for us mailing newspapers each week. They sometimes spoke about the bygone days of catching and boiling clams to get the shells to sell.

The National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium in Dubuque is an interesting place to learn about those early days of clamming.

Clams in this area have been in the news recently.  Volunteer people have worked to rescue clams stranded by record low water levels and growing sandbars in our Wisconsin River. I have been told about frequent visits of a bald eagle to a sandbar near the Highway 80 bridges, maybe after clams.

Stranded clams become easy meals for a variety of wild creatures so volunteers moved many of them to deeper water where they can continue to be important to river water quality.