I once saw a button field in the making.
Abby H. Turner
A myth can sometimes sound like a fact. Down in our Button Field at South Hadley we have a fact that sounds like a myth.
Among the tall tales that are told to freshmen, the existence of the Button Field is the most difficult saga to put across. Even when freshmen are taken out to the field and allowed to pick up specimens, they still suspect the upperclassmen of sowing the buttons there.
The prevailing incredulity is like that of the landlubber who said he could believe in the sea-serpents and the islands where gingerbread-nuts grew on the trees, but he couldn't believe in the flying fish. Similarly, Mount Holyoke freshmen can believe in the Crocheted Slippers, but they draw the line at the Button Field.
And yet, the buttons are there. Ever since the eighteen-eighties, if you needed a button you could run down to the button field and pick one up, selecting your favorite size. So many conflicting explanations have been current that it is time to sift the facts.
I am not going to tell exactly how to find the Button Field. The buttons should be reserved for freshmen; and upperclassmen should be their guides. It is safe, however, to say that the property, now owned by the college, was originally what one of the early inhabitants of South Hadley called 'a sand-blow field.'
At present the field is mostly grown over with scrubby turf, and some of it has been cut up into house-lots; but there still are open sandy patches where buttons are most easily found. If they should ever be exterminated from the open sand, one would have to dig only a few inches under the sod in any part of the field to unearth more buttons. Even as near civilization as some of the houses within sight of College Street, there are occasional buttons in the gardens.
The frost brings them to the surface, the wind blows the sand, and although buttons have been picked up for going on fifty years, there are many of them gleaming white and fair on the face of the land today. Miss Caroline Boardman Greene, of the class of '89, our former Registrar, tells me that when she was a student the Button Field was fresh enough so that everybody knew its secret. And Miss Turner says she and a party of walking companions once caught another field in the very act of becoming enriched with buttons. Miss Green, Miss Turner, and Mr. Asa Kinney all gave me the same explanation of the field; and Mr. Kinney introduced me to the daughter of the former owner, whose story of her father's cultivation of the field confirms that of my other authorities.
In the first place, we must regretfully 'debunk' the most popular explanation - the button factory idea. We used to be told that a button factory burned down, spilling its buttons over the field. We used to wonder why we found no trace of the factory's underpinning, and why the buttons never looked as if they had been charred. Also we wondered how the buttons happened to be scattered over so broad a tract.
There never was a factory on that field. Therefore no factory in the field ever burned down. Yet the factory story is the one most generally believed today. Of late years you do sometimes run across a charred button - charred in the bonfires and corn-roasts that were popular in the sandy field at the time of the Spanish influenza quarantine during the war. Corn-roasts and bacon-bats were held in the field almost every evening, to make up for the fact that it was not safe to have guests or go to town for fear of importing the 'flu.'
No. There have been plenty of button factories in the region - witness Pearl City - but never one in the Button Field. The buttons came from a paper mill where they made paper from rags in Holyoke.
The rags had many buttons on them when they reached the mill. These had to be removed. The buttons, with a certain residue of shredded rag-material, were all mixed up together in great wads of waste. The owner of the field believed that the waste would make good fertilizer. Therefore he was notified whenever the mill had accumulated enough waste to make a big cartload. Down to the mill in Holyoke would go his two-horse cart to collect the waste. In each cartload would be a great wealth of buttons. It was the waste material that was desired as fertilizer, but the buttons came along too. Several times a year for a good many years the cartloads would be brought up and spread on the fields.
Just how efficient the mixture was is a debatable question. The owner of the field approved of it and raised fine crops of corn and beds of strawberries on portions of his land. The children of the town approved heartily, and so did the college girls. It used to be a favorite game of little nineteenth-century South Hadley children to go down to the Button Field when there had been a new crop of buttons, and see who could pick up the most and the prettiest in a given length of time. Perhaps this is one reason why ornamental buttons are now extremely scarce in the field.There used to be plenty of little brass ones, and some nub-shaped dress buttons of decorative design. Nowadays most of the buttons are very plain affairs, white flat ones of all sizes, some with two holes, some with four, some broken; but most of them look as fresh and clean as if they had just been unthreaded from a card. Why shouldn't they look clean? During all these years they have been packed and polished in sand. It is now more than thirty years since any new ones have been put on.
The pristine new look of the buttons is the thing that shatters the faith of the freshmen. Therefore, in the interest of all Button Field guides I have a piece of counsel.
After you have found some good white buttons, and have been hooted at for a button-planter who must have framed the field, just wander off into the stubble and make an intensive search along the ground. That is the place to find buttons that have decided at last to 'be their age.' The stubble has grown over them, but here and there the frost has brought one to the surface, as it does with Indian arrow heads. The finding of a battered old earthy button is a great method of vindicating your probity with the freshmen.
This matter is vivid in my imagination, because recently, in the spring of 1936, a classmate of mine took her freshman daughter to view the Button Field. I was invited to go along. My friend's daughter's reaction was ideal. Those buttons never had been there over night. Her mother and I were capable of anything.We might have fooled the romantic freshman of an earlier age, but not the realistic freshman of today.
Greatly pleased to have her run so true to form, we strolled on in search of flowers and forgot the Button Field. I was looking at a blossom of painted cup not far from a flowering patch of sheep laurel, when in the roots of the laurel patch was a big old button confronting me, head on. Casually I called our freshman. Instructively I pointed out the sheep laurel; the painted cup. Then I asked her if she saw anything peculiar in the moss under the laurel bushes. Even while I was speaking she spied it, independently, the big discolored button standing like a miniature target in the sunset light.
'Button, button, who's got the -' and she snatched it up as a souvenir, really convinced at last. She saw that her mother and I could hardly have planted that button. Only the years would have threaded it with moss and wedged its rim against a laurel root in just that way.
Sunset is a good time to visit the Button Field. Beyond that tract of land, at the top of a ravine, a mountain view opens toward the Berkshires and Beulah Land in the West. Credulity and incredulity, traditions true and false, the way a legend grows from nothing to be faithfully believed, and the way a fact becomes discredited because it sounds too fanciful: all these phases of story-telling and history-telling may be studied in this field.
The story of the burning factory has no foundation. Yet it is very much more credible sounding, and more dramatic, and therefore will always be more popular than the story that has just been told.
My story has only one tiny advantage over all the others. It happens - bless its buttons - to be true.