When JoAnn Johnson, 86, of Bangor joined the Bangor Button Club in 1946, she was its youngest member. “When it disbanded,” she said, “I was the oldest member.” That was circa 1960. With or without the club, she collected buttons for more than 50 years. She said she favored buttons bearing profiles, flowers and little gardens. A friend got her started in button collecting.

“I can’t estimate how many [buttons] I had,” she said. “At one time, I had a trunk full of just pearl buttons.” She had everything from overalls buttons to shoe buttons. But over the years she has sold, or otherwise disposed of, much of her collection. Johnson, a past president of the Maine State Button Society, which has been inactive now for 20 years, is a member of the Tri-County Button Club, which meets in Belfast.

“I’d like to see the Bangor Button Club start up again,” Johnson said.

No one knows precisely why button clubs sprang into popularity in the years immediately after World War II.

“Maine was a hotbed of button clubs after the war,” said Ernest “Bev” Bevilacqua of Brunswick, a retired businessman, who has collected buttons for 10 years. He specializes in collecting military buttons from the Revolutionary and Civil wars. He has a particular interest in “GWs” – buttons that were made and given out at George Washington’s inauguration in 1789. Only 350 GWs were made and Bevilacqua has three in his collection. He also is spearheading the effort to reactivate the Maine State Button Society.

“People have always been interested in buttons,” Bevilacqua said. Part of the fascination with buttons, he said, is that some are very rare, many are very beautiful – “miniature works of art” – and to learn about old buttons is to learn about history. His wife, Louise, also collects buttons. Both are members of the Tri-County Button Club and they see no end to their passion.

Copies of the Bangor Button Club’s annual reports from 1946 to 1958 are available at Bangor Public Library and reveal that the club began in 1946 with as few as six members and grew to as many as 30 members in the late 1950s.

Miss Marion Quinn, a Bangor Button Club member, according to the reports, organized a Junior Button Club of third-graders at Abraham Lincoln School, where she was a teacher, in 1947. The club had 30 members.

Miss Quinn used the club as an adjunct to classroom lessons. School button-club members were allowed to choose buttons from her collection, then gave oral reports about the materials the buttons were made of – shell, glass, rubber, metal, etc. Junior Button Club members put together and presented a little play, “Our Christmas Buttons,” and Miss Quinn used buttons as part of a social studies course to help pupils learn Bangor history.

Button collecting was such a passion in the 1950s that Mrs. Charles Rodrigue of Waterville, a textile factory worker, according to a button-club report, boasted 25,000 buttons in her collection. She had traveled to 18 states and several Canadian provinces to acquire buttons.

In the late 1940s, author Elinor Graham wrote and published “The Maine Charm String,” a book about her adventures as a button collector, which is available in some local libraries and still a good read.

Maine has four button clubs that continue to be active: Tri-County Button Club, the Oakland-Waterville Button Club, the York County Button Club and the Friendship Button Club, based in Bridgton. Sixty Mainers are members of the National Button Society, which was organized in the 1940s.

The Tri-County Button Club, now in its 53rd year, was organized in 1951, and includes members from Knox, Lincoln and Waldo counties. Eula Kelly, the daughter of the lighthouse keeper at Marshall Point at Port Clyde, is credited with starting the club. At its zenith in the 1960s, more than 125 members belonged to the club, making it one of the largest in the United States, said club member Mary Jane Boggs of Warren.

Button collecting is rooted in the Great Depression when people collected buttons for entertainment, Boggs said.

The Tri-County Button Club meets at 10 a.m. the last Wednesday of each month, March-October at Emmanuel Baptist Church in Belfast. Call club president Ruth Worcester at 382-6396 to learn more about the club and how to join.

Until the late 1980s, a button factory, housed in a historic mill in Waldoboro, was owned and operated by S.N.S. Plastics. The factory was one of a series of companies that manufactured buttons in the mill.

In an earlier incarnation of the factory, the Paragon Button Corp. produced buttons made from shells. Paragon began making buttons of plastic in the late 1950s when that material was just becoming widely available and shells were becoming difficult to get.

To learn more about the Maine State Button Society, visit www.mainebuttons.com.

Ardeana Hamlin welcomes suggestions. Call 990-8153, or e-mail ahamlin@bangordailynews.net.