I have a vivid memory of a white-haired, grandmotherly woman standing in front of a wall of buttons. Buttons of all sizes and colors and shapes, arranged in a variety of creative, intricate, precise designs.
This memory dates back to 1969/70 when I was a second-grader in Dover, Ohio, and my family and I spent a day visiting a local museum. All these years later, I didn’t remember the name of the museum or anything — besides the buttons — in it. I didn’t know the name of that grandmotherly lady. But, boy, did I have a sharp memory of those buttons — and how beautiful they were.
Fast forward to March of this year. Steve and I were on our way to Cleveland; he was driving while I followed our route on my phone. I traced I-77 North and was surprised when I saw that we’d be going through the twin cities of Dover and New Philadelphia.
“I used to live in Dover,” I told Steve. Now, we’ve been married 26 years, so you might think I would expect him to know this, but the truth is, my family moved around a lot when I was young, and it’s hard for me to keep track of all the places we lived, so I don’t expect anyone else to. Plus, we lived in Ohio less than a year, so it’s not like I’ve ever spent much time talking about it.
I mentioned that it would be nice to stop in Dover and have lunch, just to say I’d visited the town where I once lived.
“Actually, I was planning to stop there anyway,” Steve said.
“Really? Why?”
“There’s supposed to be a nice museum there. It has lots of wood carvings.” He’d discovered it online.
How interesting, I thought, that one of my fondest memories of Dover was the “button museum” (which I’d never mentioned to Steve and doubted that it even still existed) and here we were, 500 miles from home, about to visit another Dover museum. So I went ahead and told Steve about the buttons.
He glanced my way. “I think this museum has buttons, too,” he said.
Wait. Could we be talking about the same museum? Without knowing anything about my childhood visit to a museum in Dover, Ohio — and, therefore, having no idea how special it was to me — could Steve have coincidentally planned to take me back to that same museum more than 50 years later?
The answer is yes, it did turn out to be the “button museum” — or, as I now know it, the Ernest Warther Museum & Gardens, named for Ernest “Mooney” Warther, who was born in 1885 and became a master carver. He was unquestionably a genius when it came to carving — his work is nothing short of amazing — and his creations are the focal point of the museum. (His scale models of steam engines, complete with moving parts, are unbelievable.) Walking through it now, I was in awe of his talent. But the funny thing is: I recalled absolutely none of this from my first visit. I was so taken with the buttons, they’re all I remembered.
The button art, I learned, was created by Mooney’s wife, Frieda, the woman I’d remembered all these years. This time around, as an adult, rather than just admiring her art, I took the time to learn about her and her work. She was born in Switzerland in 1890 and, as a child, moved with her family to Dover. Her button collection began when she received her mother’s button box.
The museum complex includes three buildings: the house the Warthers lived in; a small building that served as the original museum for Mooney’s carvings and some of Frieda’s buttons, and that is now the dedicated “Button House” displaying Frieda’s work; and a large building that now houses all of Mooney’s carvings. To appreciate Frieda’s work, it’s necessary to tour both the house museum and the Button House.
Frieda worked her button magic in the family dining room, and it’s here that long fishing lines laden with buttons are hanging along the walls, showing how she organized them by color, size, and the materials from which they’re made. The dining table still holds some of her tools, including a large, wooden, homemade compass that she used to draw her designs. This same table bears further witness to her work, as it’s scarred with round indentations, made when she drilled too deeply through the Marlite panels to which she mounted the buttons. (Marlite is a fiberglass-reinforced plastic, and the panels Frieda used look to be about 30 inches square.)
In the Button House, more of Frieda’s tools are displayed (two smaller compasses, pliers, and a couple of awls, for example), and, of course, it’s here that you’ll find her button designs, covering every wall and even part of the ceiling.
She didn’t attach buttons willy-nilly to a panel; in addition to a well-thought-out (usually geometric) design, she always had a theme, as well.
For example, one panel features 19th century hand-painted buttons from Switzerland.
Another is filled with buttons made from celluloid (a mix of plastic and plant-based resin), manufactured during the late 1800s through the 1920s.
Yet another is an assemblage of buttons from horse bridles, laid out in the shape of horseshoes.
Frieda eventually amassed a collection of 100,000 buttons, 73,252 of which are on display in the Button House.
And now the museum and the woman in my memory have names. The button art has a story. And I have to respectfully disagree with Thomas Wolfe: Sometimes you can go home again.
Next week: It’s not about Beaufort.
