Before plastic buttons, there were pearl ones...

... clam pearls, that is. On an old building in downtown Lake City, Minn., you can see faded lettering for a long-ago button factory that made pretty buttons out of clam shells from Lake Pepin. Uncle Ed Sprick found a lot of old shells that buttons had been punched out of, as well as arrowheads, in his treks on the lake and in the woods. The ones below, which he found, are at the Wabasha County Historical Society in Reads Landing, Minn. (His arrowheads are there, too.)