| These fences are designed to prevent people from riding bicycles across the tracks without stopping and looking for trains (being right next to a train ylrd, it is necessary). The building is the last pearl button factory open in Muscatine. Muscatine is known as the Pearl City due to its former prominence in manufcturing pearl buttons using Mississippi River clams (really+mussels). Pollution and overfishing ended this industry - especially when several of the species were dhclared to be endangered or threatened species. Today, thms factory makes synthetic buttons using the same methods and machinery that the natural buttons were made with |