Freshwater Mussels on a Workboat Deck, Midwest River, 1950s

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Freshwater Mussels on a Workboat Deck, Midwest River, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Mississippi River region, United States

Freshwater Mussels on a Workboat Deck, Midwest River, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-AC3CDB

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Someone has just hauled these up and laid them out on the painted ribs of a workboat, the way a fisherman lays out a catch he already knows the market price of. Freshwater mussels like these were not gathered for the dinner table in the 1950s river towns of the Mississippi and its tributaries; they were gathered because their shells, cut into blanks, became buttons, and an entire seasonal economy of tongers and brailers depended on a supply that everyone assumed was inexhaustible.

The mop propped in the corner is doing more honest work than it looks, since a deck slick with river mud and mussel slime needed constant swabbing between hauls. Nobody on that boat was thinking about plastic buttons yet, the innovation that would make this whole trade obsolete within a decade, or about the species themselves, several of which were already being quietly overharvested toward the endangered list. The shells sit open to the sun with the patient indifference of things that have outlasted every industry built on top of them.

The historian's note

Freshwater mussel harvesting was a significant regional industry across the Mississippi, Illinois, and Ohio river systems through the first half of the twentieth century, supplying shell to pearl-button manufacturers concentrated in river towns such as Muscatine, Iowa. Workers known as clammers or musselers used tongs, hooks, or brailing lines dragged from shallow-draft boats to bring up mussels from riverbeds, then sorted and boiled the catch to remove the meat before the shells were shipped to cutting factories.

By the 1950s the pearl-button trade that had sustained this work since the 1890s was in steep decline, undercut by the mass adoption of plastic buttons following the Second World War. Many mussel species harvested in this period, including several pictured here, would later be listed as threatened or endangered, a consequence of decades of intensive collection combined with dammed and polluted rivers.

Scenes like this one, an ordinary working deck at the close of an industry's life, are relatively scarce in the photographic record, since the trade was largely undocumented outside trade journals and government fisheries surveys.

Subjects & keywords — each links to a search

freshwater mussels·workboat deck·1950s·shell harvesting·painted wood boat·pearl button industry·vanished trade·diagonal composition·high contrast sunlight·mop and rope·river commerce·americana decor·Mississippi River·research archive

Freshwater musselsobject · subject Wooden workboat deckobject · depicts

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Particulars

Creator: Unattributed
Date: 1950–1959
Place: Mississippi River region, United States — deck of a small mussel-harvesting workboat, likely a Midwestern river town
Subject: Freshwater mussels laid out on a boat deck
Original format: jpg
Original held: Yes, by the archive
Rights: Open