From "Cincinnati Enquirer," November 9, 1949
What’s on your gift list this year? If you were a young lady (or, rarely, a young man) in Cincinnati from the 1860s to the mid-1880s, your wish list might have included rare or fancy buttons because you would have been busy assembling a “charm string.” The ancestor of today’s charm bracelets, the venerable charm string is all but forgotten these days but was once ubiquitous and could – even today – be quite valuable. The Cincinnati Commercial-Tribune [August 25, 1907] remembered charm strings as an activity from “thirty and forty years ago”:
“Some of the older folk remember the charm string. They remember how they used to be begging buttons of all their friends and how they importuned the shopkeepers to give them the odd buttons, for there could be no two buttons alike on the charm-string, which was simply a long string of buttons of great variety. There was a good deal of rivalry as to who should have the greatest number of buttons on his or her string, but just why it was called a charm-string is beyond my knowledge.”
If the Commercial-Tribune’s writer had visited the library and reviewed some of the more obscure ethnographic literature of the time, they might have discovered a clue. It seems that anthropologists studying the indigenous peoples of North America observed among several tribes the custom of stringing objects imbued with magical potency onto a leather thong. The ethnologists called these talismans “charm strings.”
The magic a button collector sought was far more domestic. As legend had it, if a young woman collected 999 unique buttons on her charm string, the 1,000th would be added by her fiancée. According to Bernardine Rathmell, quoted in the Cincinnati Times-Star [November 28, 1940], that legend had been passed along for decades:
“Old ladies have told me how belles of the 1880s used to string 999 buttons on a ‘charm string,’ then wait for the right man to supply the thousandth.”
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(Curiously, there was an alternate legend that, if a woman achieved a charm string of 1,000 buttons, she would be condemned to spinsterhood for all her days.)
Throughout their heyday, charm strings were the focus of parties in which young ladies exchanged buttons and regaled their friends and relatives with stories associated with each one. The informal rules dictated it was prohibited to purchase buttons. Each exclusive button could be acquired only through exchange with other collectors or as a gift from suitors, friends or family. The gift of a button was considered lucky and the activity of stringing of the buttons amplified the good luck. Button collectors did not squirrel their charm strings away but displayed them prominently in the family parlor both to brag about their hoard and to advertise that contributions were welcome. Exceptional charm strings could earn ribbons at the Ohio and Indiana state fairs throughout the 1860s and 1870s.
It wasn’t long before “charm string” became a metaphor for any list of accomplishments. When a young woman in Covington announced her engagement, the Cincinnati Enquirer [October 18, 1891] suggested that her personal charm string involved something other than buttons:
“The wedding of Miss Retta Boyd, of Covington, and Mr. Russell C. Johnson takes place November 11. Miss Boyd is a great favorite in society, not only in Covington, but in Cincinnati and suburbs. Any number of hearts have been wrecked with her beauty and hang captured on her charm string.”
And that metaphor wasted no time wandering onto the sports pages. By the 1890s, the assembly of button-laden charm strings had become passé, but reference to that erstwhile pastime served to brighten many a baseball lede, as demonstrated by the Cincinnati Times-Star [September 22, 1894]:
“Thus far Cincinnati has the Louisville, Washington and St. Louis series on its charm string, while Chicago has broken even.”
While the fashion for charm strings waned, interest in unusual specimens persisted. In 1888, Kohl & Middleton’s Dime Museum, a sort of long-running freak show at the corner of Sixth and Vine streets, featured Bully the Wizard (real name possibly Calvin Morris) who had, over many years, assembled a charm string measuring 208 feet long, incorporating some 20,000 buttons.
It appears, as charm strings faded in popularity, the initial button focus diversified to include a variety of objects, with almost anything fair game so long as it offered a hole through which to string it. A writer for the Cincinnati Enquirer [November 9, 1949] found one such miscellaneous string in one of the local antique shops:
“I was wandering about in an antique shop a few years ago and noticed a long loop of buttons, beads, coins and other trinkets hanging from a spinning wheel. The fine old lady running the shop willingly answered my questions as to what it was. She told me that years ago many people collected small articles, strung them and hung them up as charm strings.”
From "The Puritan", August 1900, page 593
By that time, authentic charm strings were rare and mysterious because so many had been cut apart and redistributed, or lost, or eaten by a cow. Really. The Enquirer [July 26, 1887] reported the good luck of Peter Funk, a local butcher, who found a gold coin worth $2.50 in the stomach of a cow he had just butchered. Because the coin had a hole punched in it, and because that cow’s stomach also yielded a small pile of miscellaneous relics, Mr. Funk believed he must have discovered the remains of a charm string that had slipped off into a slop bucket and slurped up by the cow.
It is no surprise the Enquirer writer found a surviving charm string in an antique shop. The classified advertisement pages frequently displayed pleas for old charm strings. In some cases, dealers sought entire assemblages, still hanging from their original strings. In other cases, the strings held buttons worth a lot of money to button collectors. Here’s a typical advertisement from the Enquirer [October 9, 1953]:
“Have you an old button charm string? Why not turn it into Christmas cash? Excellent prices paid for the right kind.”
The Cincinnati chapter of the Early American Glass Club hosted Professor George E. Gould of Purdue University at one of its meetings. Dr. Gould was, by trade, an entomologist known for his dazzling photographs of insects, but he was also a dedicated buttoner who employed the same photographic techniques to illustrate his lectures on buttons. His talk, according to the Enquirer [April 16, 1953] featured a variety of buttons:
“The ‘Charm String Buttons,’ so popular some 75 years ago, will be shown in color radiated, dewdrop and glory specimens.”
Remember the old game: “Button, button, who’s got the button?” Allegedly, that game emerged at charm string parties, back in the day.
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