Time Period: Early Twentieth Century (1901 - 1940) - Starting with B

Festus Orestes Butt was an Arkansas politician, attorney, judge, and banker who served in a variety of elected offices throughout his career but was probably most well known for his involvement in a bribery scandal surrounding the construction of the Arkansas State Capitol. Festus O. Butt was born to William Alvin Butt and Anne Maria Weaver Butt near Lovington, Illinois, on February 3, 1875. His father was a farmer and Civil War veteran of the Union army, and his mother was a homemaker. The family moved to Carroll County, Arkansas, in 1886. Butt attended high school in Harrison (Boone County) and, at age seventeen, began teaching and reading the law under W. F. Pace. In 1896, Butt was admitted to …

America’s mother-of-pearl button industry boomed in the late 1800s due to a seemingly inexhaustible supply of freshwater mussels, the bounty of Mississippi River Valley tributaries. Long made from saltwater marine shells, pearl buttons could now be made from freshwater shells due to new engineering techniques. In addition, the 1890s McKinley tariff on imported goods protected the market for American button makers, allowing mother-of-pearl button manufacturing to explode. Button finishing plants in Iowa and New York were supplied by tons of button blanks—a circular piece punched out of a shell before the smaller thread holes were added, similar in shape and size to a coin—that came from small factories lining the northeastern Arkansas rivers, which teemed with the freshwater mollusks that …