Eva Young Fickle – census taker

Knoxville [TN] News-Sentinel, 2 Feb 1946

Just a short entry in a 1946 newspaper. The names of the Union Station ‘lodgers’ aren’t given. But let me tell you about Eva Fickle.

She was born Eva C. Young in 1882. Her family moved from Indiana to Kansas where they tried farming  in the 1880’s but returned to Indiana for her father’s health and to escape the Kansas summer heat. She told her family stories of Indians, travelling by covered wagon and living in a sod house. 

Eva and Lee Fickle were married in Tippecanoe County, Indiana, in 1901 and raised three daughters. In a newspaper interview when she turned 100 years old, she said the secret to a long life was “Work don’t kill you.” Her life was a testimony to that belief. 

In the 1930’s, with her daughters grown, Eva operated a beauty parlor and sold Avon cosmetics. Later she served as a house mother for a women’s residence at Purdue University. Then she worked until her retirement for the Social Security Office. She lived with and cared for her mother-in-law in the lady’s last years. . 

But her most interesting – and most adventurous job – was surely that of a census taker beginning in the late 1930’s. She travelled all over the country with her dog Ponto, as well as sometimes a small gun for protection. Not everyone was willing to provide information to census workers. When she found someone reluctant to cooperate, she said she would tell them, “Someday you might need something from the government, you should reply.” 

Hard work was evidently good for Eva. She  lived until 1987 and died one month short of her 105th birthday. 

Connection: Eva married Lee Fickle who was my 2nd cousin 3 times removed.

Button Making – Martin County, Indiana

The natural resources of Martin County, Indiana, include farmland, timber, and limestone. In the early 1900’s another industry developed: one using freshwater mussels to make buttons.

It was discovered that the best mussels in the U.S. for button making could be harvested in the tributaries of the Mississippi River. Mussel shell buttons had become big business in Iowa and Arkansas in the 1890’s and when local sources of shells ran out the factories looked farther afield.  Indiana’s White River was an excellent source.  Mussels reproduced in the river and could be found between rocks in the river bottom. The mussel diggers stood on sand bars, worked from boats or dove down eight to ten feet to the bottom and pried the mussels out. Buttons could only be made from live shells. They were then boiled and the meat, though generally considered unpalatable, could be fed to livestock or used as bait. A good digger could make $8.00 a day. It was seasonal work but it could be an important addition to a family’s income. Occasionally, a digger might find a pearl that could be sold for $50.00.

Grace Salmon Holt remembered, “We dug those mussel shells. I did that when I was young and after I was married, too. My husband dug them out with a short fork. The rest of us would just use our hands. That was pretty good money, but hard work. Your fingernails would just be wore off from noodling, that’s fishing around in the ripples and shallows for shells with your hands, noodling. Then we had to cook them. The hogs loved the meat. We’d sack up the shells and sell them. If the river was low you could get a lot of them. My husband had three button machines at one time. One of my boys, Robert, he helped cut.” – from Voices from the Hills by Bill Whorrall.

The shells were then sold to a button plant. Martin County had several such plants. It was important that the plant was near the mussel source since 70-80% of the shell was lost in cutting. The process involved cutting ‘blanks’ out of a shell using a lathe-like machine. It was a skilled job, getting the maximum number of blanks with the minimum waste. It was also dangerous work. Pneumonia, tuberculosis and other lung infections from the dust and loss of fingers or eye injuries from the lathes were reported. Most plants were small, employing perhaps up to a dozen cutters.  The blanks were sent to Muscatine, Iowa, ‘the Button Capital of the World’ for finishing. The scrap shells were generally used for roads.

By the 1930’s the industry employed around 600 people in Martin County and had an important impact on the local economy. But it didn’t last. Styles changed as did materials. First zippers, then elastic, and plastic meant the decline of popularity of shell buttons. But the shell banks were already becoming exhausted through the Midwest. Today freshwater mussels are among the most endangered species in the country. 

Connection: Knofel Holt was married to Grace Salmon, my husband’s 3rd cousin 2x removed.They had a shell factory on their land. Other relatives that were mussel diggers or button cutters were Everett Holt, Howard Holt, Columbus Holt, Ernest Holt, Cecil and Clifford Holt.

James Wilfred Acton, my 4th cousin 2x removed, was a shell buyer.

Lester J. Acton, my 4th cousin 2x removed, worked in a shell factory